buy back the secrets - sundiscus - Batman (2024)

Chapter 1: the bunker

Chapter Text

The first time, Tim actually calls for help on purpose.

It just doesn’t work.

◆

It starts with Tim’s phone fritzing and going dead halfway through a highway tunnel. He’s right in the middle of catching up on the Titans group chat, which is probably taking up more of his attention than necessary considering the topic—

zoomies haver
guys :((( we never put the leftover pizza in the fridge this weekend :(((
[rip_pizza.jpg]
it’s been out for like four days do you think it’s salvageable

superb boy
no

girlwonder
no

zoomies haver
:(((
if i like went back in time a few days and snagged the pizza from sunday night do you think that’d save it or would it just create a pizza-shaped timeloop

girlwonder
none pizza left paradox

superb boy
nah the only way to salvage this is another pizza party to reset the balance
rob’s buying

—and Tim is putting the finishing touches on his homemade meme (crying shiba inu captioned “throwing away gross leftovers (admitting defeat, weak)” vs. buff shiba inu captioned “doing a time travel so u can eat days-old pepperoni pizza without dying (taking initiative, hot girl sh*t)”) when the screen flickers off.

He doesn’t clock it as trouble at first, just presses the power button, frowning. Then the bus swerves and squeals to a stop, students shrieking near the front. Tim manages to catch himself before his shoulder slams against the window, which means he’s looking outside right in time to see three figures tear open the bus doors.

His first thought is: Oh, Bruce is not going to be happy.

Immediately his mind kicks into gear, assessing the situation. There are two dozen students and three chaperones on the bus, plus the driver. Three figures boarding, from what Tim can see from his window. It looks like the bus is almost right in the middle of the tunnel, the exit about a hundred yards away. There’s a truck parked diagonally ahead, ready to stop any oncoming traffic, and Tim bets if he were able to look behind them he’d see one blocking the other end of the tunnel as well. So this was premeditated. For whatever reason, the people boarding up front went through a moderate amount of trouble to stop a bus full of GCHS students on a field trip.

In the split second between Tim taking stock and the rest of the bus realizing they’ve been boarded, Tim hears Sebastian in the seat behind him say, “Wait, my phone also died. You think it’s because we’re underground?”

So the hijackers have some sort of tech disruptor, too. Tim revises his assessment from a moderate amount of trouble to a medium amount of trouble.

The students up front are just starting to actually scream when the first hijacker reaches the aisle, raises a gun, and blasts a hole through the roof of the bus. “I want everyone’s hands up, now.”

Yeah, Tim thinks. Bruce really isn’t going to be happy.

The ironic thing is, Bruce hadn’t even protested when Tim told him about the field trip. Well, told as in the permission slip fell out of Tim’s bio notebook on the sitting room table last week, and Bruce found it. He was scanning it when Tim came back from the kitchen (holding a cup of decaf tea because Alfred, the traitor, had started moving everything caffeinated to the top pantry shelf after 5pm and calmly informed Tim that he was welcome to all the coffee and tea he wanted once he was either eighteen or tall enough to reach it himself without climbing the counters). Tim froze for a moment, thinking Bruce’s frown was about the mess of papers left out, but Bruce just said, “Field trip?”

“Uhh,” Tim said. “Yeah, just, this lab tour my science teacher set up. In Metropolis. I think we’re also getting dinner? But we’ll be back in Gotham the same night.”

“Hmm,” Bruce said, still reading the form.

“It’ll probably be late, I think around ten or eleven, but I can still patrol after,” Tim said. The mug was hot where his fingers curled around the handle, but he didn’t move to set it down yet. “Or I can just go right to my house, you don’t have to worry about me getting in or anything.”

Bruce finally looked up. Tim braced himself, but Bruce just carefully set the permission slip on top of Tim’s notes. He didn’t ask how Tim managed to get Janet Drake’s signature on the bottom left despite the fact that Janet was currently in Albania and would be for another two months, though there’s no way the World’s Greatest Detective missed that detail.

“One of us will pick you up,” was all Bruce said.

Tim had slumped into his chair once Bruce disappeared down the hall, trying to decide if he felt relieved or not. It wasn’t like he would’ve been that disappointed if Bruce told him not to go. Tim hadn’t even banked on making the honors cut for this field trip—his work as Robin absolutely rounded out his science education with plenty of, ah, practical applications, but it also cut drastically into his homework time. He’s pretty sure he kept his A in bio solely due to his extra credit project on Mendelian genetics last week. (Poison Ivy had helped him talk through some creative ways to propagate pea sprouts, Tim dangling upside-down wrapped in vines while they waited for Batman to go intimidate some new cosmetic executive who was letting his factory dump chemical waste behind Gotham Park. Tim thought the whole thing was pretty fair, honestly.)

About the field trip, though, he just…hadn’t known how Bruce was going to react. Which was silly, because Bruce wasn’t even Tim’s parent, but he was Tim’s boss-slash-crime-fighting-partner and also an adult who took it personally when kids around him got hurt, and this would be the first time Tim went out of town on his own since getting tossed around the Tower by his surprise undead predecessor. So Tim was sort of expecting pushback. But he was overthinking it, apparently, and everything was fine.

It was probably because he just wasn’t used to having to navigate this kind of thing at all. It wasn’t like his parents wanted to be bothered about stuff like field trips. But he’d been unofficially staying at Wayne Manor for almost the whole summer, and now a few weeks of the school semester as well, though that was out of practicality more than anything. First he had been healing from the Tower attack—three months before his leg was considered fully functional again, and Alfred wouldn’t let him cheat—and on top of that, Bruce had become considerably more paranoid about keeping tabs on Tim while they were working things out on the Red Hood front. Which was, in fact, working out—Tim and Jason had been in the same room without incident a few times now, and Bruce’s shoulders were about 5% less tense these days, which was a statistically significant number when it came to Bruce and shoulder tension.

So it seemed Tim had just been uncertain over nothing and this was probably a good indication that things would go back to pre-attack normal sooner rather than later. Plus, it had to help that the field trip was to Metropolis, of all places. If Superman was in the city, Bruce probably considered that as good as sending Tim off with a chaperone.

For a moment Tim had considered messaging Kon to see if he would be in town—maybe Tim could sneak off and stay overnight as Robin, they could patrol together, something fun and low-key that would also prove Robin was back in action and didn’t need to be handled with kid gloves re: the aforementioned undead predecessor incident—but he quickly tossed that idea. What, was he going to bring his Robin suit in his backpack? Was he going to wave goodbye to Kon at sunup and get changed in the bus station bathroom before heading home? Ask Kon to fly him to some random dropoff point in Gotham real quick? Bruce might have an issue with that, and for good reason. It would be an unnecessary risk to his identity just to swing around another city with his friend.

Besides, he’d get to see Kon more often anyway, once things really went back to normal. That was good. That was fine.

He’d just…miss doing homework in the Wayne Manor sitting room when he had to start going back to his own house, was all.

Now, listening to another bullet punch through the bus roof, Tim is pretty sure homework just dropped to the bottom of his immediate concerns.

The initial chaos and confusion has crested, and the noise is starting to die down to a terrified silence other than a weird, high-pitched whirring coming from the front. Tim’s still hunched behind his seat where he slid against the window. They haven’t seen him yet, and he makes himself move slowly, carefully, reaching for his backpack and slipping one hand inside the main pocket. There’s an emergency button hidden in his keychain, if he can get to it, and whatever tech disruptor the hijackers are using probably isn’t strong enough to scramble Bat tech. It still might not do much—Tim isn’t sure if Batman can turn up at a random bus-jacking in Metropolis, for not-compromising-their-identities reasons, but Tim is also pretty sure Bruce would want to know, at least, that something went sideways in a way that involves guns. At the very least Bruce can then call Clark, or know to monitor the situation, even if it’s better to not get involved.

He’d want to know. Even if Bruce is getting over his guilt about the Tower incident, Tim is still 95% sure he would want to know.

Unfortunately, Tim’s not going to get a chance to test this theory. Just as his fingers brush his keychain—a plastic Wonder Woman logo, because Dick had picked it out—something presses against his temple. He hears a click by his ear.

“I said, hands where we can see them,” the man holding the gun says.

Technically, you said ‘hands up,’ the Robin part of Tim wants to quip, but he holds his tongue and just slowly raises his empty hands.

The man—gray fleece jacket, black balaclava, jeans, Amertek revolver—shuffles back a step, but keeps the gun aimed at Tim’s forehead. Tim can think of two different ways to duck forward and grapple the gun away, even without any gear, but it’s not a lifeless wall of crates behind him or an open space for people to scramble. It’s a cramped bus seat, with his untrained classmates, and any bullet that misses Tim has a good chance of hitting someone else.

Tim grinds his teeth, and stays still.

“All right,” calls one of the other hijackers near the front of the bus. He has a gun trained on Tim’s bio teacher, Mrs. Yardley, and the chaperone next to her. “Teacher’s going to do a little roll call. When I say a name, point out that student, please and thank you. First up: Carmichael Creedy.”

Mrs. Yardley doesn’t say anything.

The hijacker co*cks his head. “Carmichael Creedy.”

Think, Tim tells himself. It’s pretty bold, pulling a stunt like this in Superman’s city. That must be what the high-pitched whirring is for—some device not just scrambling the electronics, but literally scrambling their voices, in case someone with super hearing happens to be listening. Not a long-term solution, but enough cover for the chaos to give these guys a head start. So shouting Superman, help! isn’t going to cut it, not yet at least. Maybe if he—?

The hijacker fires through the ceiling again and aims at the chaperone instead. “Your turn.”

—No, the window would take too long to open. Unless he found a distraction—

“B-back there,” the chaperone says, pointing at Carmichael in the seventh row.

“Shelley Mandeville,” the hijacker says next. “Brian Harrow. And Timothy Drake.”

The chaperone’s shaking finger comes to a stop, pointing right at Tim.

Tim’s mind races for an entirely new reason now. Do they know? Do they suspect some connection between him and Batman? Is that why they’re doing this in Metropolis, away from Batman’s home turf? If so, why ask for three other kids? The only thing Tim has in common with Carmichael and Shelley and Brian is their last names popping up on annual Fortune 500 listings—

Oh. Oh, duh. He’s overthinking, yet again, when the answer is in fact simple and boring.

“This is a ransom situation,” he says out loud.

“Bingo,” one of the hijackers says, slinging a respirator over his face. Another one pops the pin out of a canister, the hiss of gas being released following a moment later. Tim tips sideways, holding his breath as he tries to reach for his backpack once again, but darkness claims him before he makes it.

◆

For the first twelve hours after waking up, Tim thinks this will be pretty straightforward—he just has to ride it out, wait for the ransoms to get paid, and walk away with his secret identity still intact. The kidnappers are standard, if a bit high-tech, and genuinely seem to be after the contents of a bunch of rich parents’ bank accounts and not something actually worrisome, like using their hostages as lab rats or bartering for some world-ending alien tech. As far as they know Tim is just one of four students with a fancy last name who had the misfortune of being on a school field trip with minimal security. Honestly, if Tim were home, something like this would be practically a non-event. He figures he’ll be back in Gotham by the weekend.

(Well. His parents still haven’t picked up the kidnappers’ calls, so maybe they won’t let Tim go yet. The other kids, though, will probably be on their way home soon. Tim will just have to wait until the kidnappers get fed up, or until Bruce finds him.)

That’s until halfway through the second day, when the kidnappers climb into the cellar and Tim realizes they haven’t bothered putting on masks this time.

The cellar is fairly bare, cinderblock walls and ceiling, no furniture except assorted plastic barrels (full of grain or something similar, by the sound of it when Tim had kicked one experimentally) and empty wire shelves bolted to the wall. The kidnappers kick down a folding set of stairs and descend, and Tim can—

Tim can see their faces.

Okay. That’s not good.

The two who come in first are redheads, matching hair and ruddy cheeks telling Tim they’re probably brothers, somewhere in their forties. They sweep the cellar, not that there’s much to sweep, and then say, “All clear, boss.” Hired muscle, then.

The third kidnapper climbs down. He has brown hair and pasty skin, wearing a checkered button-down and holding a revolver casually in one gloved hand. Even in the cellar’s dim track lighting, Tim would be able to describe him pretty dang accurately to a sketch artist, which puts the likelihood that this guy is actually letting them go post-ransom down to about .05%.

(Tim won’t rule it out entirely. Some people are just not very smart.)

With those odds, Tim needs to shift his strategy, and fast.

“Excuse me,” Carmichael Creedy demands, shaking his bangs out of his eyes. “Excuse me. I demand that you provide us with water and food, not to mention better accommodations. We have been nothing but cooperative, and there’s simply no need for these theatrics.”

Tim doesn’t know Carmichael all that well, and based on the last twelve hours, he doesn’t think he’s missing out.

“Of course,” the checkered shirt kidnapper says, sounding a bit amused. Not ideal, Tim thinks, though Carmichael seems to settle at the lack of aggression. “Go ahead,” Checkered Shirt tells the redheads, who uncap bottles of water and move toward where Carmichael, Shelley, and Brian are huddled by the far wall. Tim is on his own wall, because he had been scooting around trying to explore for a few hours and that had apparently annoyed the three of them into giving him some very clear you can’t sit with us vibes. All four of them are bound, wrists behind their backs and ankles lashed together. The kidnappers left their jackets on—luckily, because it’s chilly enough down here that Tim’s nose is numb at the tip—but had emptied their pockets of everything from Kleenex to phones. No watches or jewelry left, either, from what Tim gathered from Carmichael’s furious exclamation upon waking up and finding his Rolex gone.

Checkered Shirt turns to face Tim. “Timothy,” he says. “It’s been a little while now, and I still haven’t gotten through to your parents.”

“Um,” Tim says. “Sorry.” He sits up a bit straighter, not wincing even though his shoulder hurts from spending the night curled up against one of the grain barrels. His wrists and ankles hurt more from the zip-ties, which he could’ve worked free in under an hour—they’d at least had the sense to snip the ends, but still—but he hadn’t wanted to give them reason to think about Tim Drake any more than they already were. Being a regular schoolkid, he’d reasoned, was the best defense he and the other students had, at the time.

He’s regretting that now, because he needs to get the ties off ASAP, and the ASAP method sucks.

Checkered Shirt studies him. “Any thoughts on why that might be? Did you give us a fake number, perhaps?”

“No,” Tim says. “You reached Dad’s voicemail, remember?” It had played on speaker in the basem*nt yesterday as the kidnappers made their initial calls, which told Tim that there was no signal disruptor down here. At least, nothing blocking outgoing calls—if no one had traced the initial ransom calls, then there must be some sort of scrambler, but it wasn’t a total dead zone.

Which meant, if he could get his hands on a phone—

“And you don’t have a special phone number, perhaps, that you call to alert your parents of an incoming ransom demand?”

Tim feels one eyebrow shoot up. That’s Batman-level thinking, not Drake protocol. Drake protocol is: Tim calls, and maybe his parents answer. They wouldn’t set up a whole other line dedicated to Tim being hypothetically in trouble.

Ah, Tim realizes. This guy is also an overthinker. Which means the likelihood of him letting them go after seeing his face is now at a solid 0%.

“No,” Tim says again. “There’s no other line. They’re just busy. And also six time zones ahead.”

Checkered Shirt taps his gun against his thigh. “Then how do I get their attention?”

“You could launch a multimillion-dollar company and propose a joint research venture in Badhnisia, that might get you a call back.” There’s a thought, actually. “Or—their, uh, associate? Of sorts? Bruce Wayne? He’s in the states. He’d probably answer, and he could try my parents. They’d take his call.”

A scoff. “You’re banking on a business associate caring about what happens to you, when your own parents won’t even pick up the phone?”

Tim shrugs and, using the movement as cover, swiftly dislocates his own thumb.

It hurts. He’s so focused on not flinching that he misses the next few words. “—stalling,” Checkered Shirt is saying. Behind his own back, Tim painstakingly works the zip tie over his broken hand. “We’ll call one more time. If we don’t reach them, we’ll have to try another strategy.”

Tim has a feeling he won’t like that strategy, whatever it is.

That’s fine. He doesn’t plan to stick around long enough to find out. It’s not just him at stake; Carmichael and Shelley and Brian are in real danger, too, and it’s Tim’s job to get them out. He watches as Checkered Shirt pivots to face the other wall, where the redheads have finished giving the others some water.

“As for the rest of you, your parents have been given a clear deadline. So long as their payments are processed into my account by sundown today, you will be free to go.”

“My parents will pay,” Carmichael declares. “They probably already have.”

“Mine will, too,” Shelley adds. “I told you, they have a reserve fund just for situations like this.” Brian nods next to her.

“In fact,” Carmichael continues, emboldened, “if you check your accounts right now, perhaps we can even clear up this little unpleasantness before—Drake, what are you doing?”

Tim is fast, but he isn’t fast enough to sit back down and hide both his unbound hands and the phone he just slipped out of Checkered Shirt’s pocket. Checkered Shirt whips around and catches Tim kneeling, phone in hand, already grimacing.

“Cute,” Checkered Shirt says, and backhands Tim across the face.

Tim rolls with it, jamming his still-bound legs into Checkered Shirt’s knees as he’s knocked to the floor. Checkered Shirt grunts, going down, but Tim catches his own weight on his injured hand and in his split-second of oh sh*t, bad idea hesitation the redheads are on him. One aims a vicious kick at his ribs while the other tears the phone out of his hand. His Robin suit would’ve redistributed the force behind the kick and downgraded it to bruising, but like this, as Tim, he takes the full hit. He rolls again, surging up to meet the next hand that reaches for him, grabbing it and twisting until something pops. Redhead 1 howls in fury and Tim gets another kick from Redhead 2 for his trouble. He feels a distinct crack in his ribcage, and for a moment all he can think is how that’ll be at least another month of Alfred’s hawk-eyed medical probation.

He manages to curl up and catch the third kick with his shin—also ow—and has just retaliated by driving his heels into the side of Redhead 2’s knee when Checkered Shirt says “That’s enough” and fires a bullet into the concrete floor by Tim’s head.

It hits with enough force to chip the concrete, a stray piece slicing across Tim’s cheek. He freezes, ears ringing.

“Well,” Checkered Shirt says, “I hope that makes my feelings on both thievery and unsanctioned phone calls very clear.”

“Crystal,” Carmichael’s voice says after a slightly stunned silence. Tim shifts his arms to see Checkered Shirt facing away from him, gun lowered but finger testing on the trigger. The redheads are still watching Tim, scowling. “If we could circle back to your account, though—”

“As I said,” Checkered Shirt replies, clearly annoyed, “we will check in at sundown. Aaron, re-secure this one, if you would.” One of the redheads yanks Tim up, the other one fastening two whole zip ties—Tim’s been upgraded to special treatment, it seems—extra tight around his wrists. Tim learns that while breaking his own thumb to get out of zipties is no fun, having zipties put back on with the thumb pre-broken is even less fun. The part where they drop him back on the floor when they’re done is also not fun. This whole thing, Tim decides as Checkered Shirts and the redheads finally leave, is really and truly not fun.

“Thanks,” Tim says once the cellar door is in place and latched again, slowly pushing himself upright. “Thanks for that.”

“Well, what were you thinking?” Carmichael says. “I was negotiating. We were about to clear everything up, and you ruined it.”

If your negotiation had worked, they only would’ve killed us sooner, Tim doesn’t say solely by the grace of his training, in which “not panicking the victims” is a core tenant.

The other three watch him with some combination of wariness and annoyance. Tim takes a deep breath, determines that to be a mistake, and carefully shuffles back against one of the plastic barrels.

He feels, all in all, like a pretty sh*tty Robin right now.

Dick would’ve had this handled, he thinks. Dick would’ve been able to get his classmates on the same page. They would’ve liked him, they would’ve followed his lead, even not knowing he was Robin. Tim imagines Jason would’ve known how much trouble they were in from the jump—he wouldn’t have been naïve enough to try waiting it out. Both are ways in which Tim has failed, and neither are things he can exactly fix now.

Also, the kidnappers would’ve called Bruce Wayne for both Dick and Jason right away, and Bruce would’ve picked up.

All right. Reassess. Trying to trick the kidnappers into calling Bruce: didn’t work, and he probably won’t have another chance before this new sundown deadline. Stealing a phone to get out a message of his own: not only didn’t work, but earned him a few broken bones and upgraded restraints. Which means any potential plan involving trying to break through the trapdoor or jury-rigging some sort of weapon to surprise their captors also just got a lot harder. Maybe even as hard as trying to convince his classmates to go along with that hypothetical plan in the first place.

But Tim needs to do something, because he’s very, very sure that once they get their money, the kidnappers’ only release plan involves releasing them into a shallow grave.

So. Time to try another strategy.

Tim shifts, jaw clenched against the jolts of pain radiating from his cracked ribs and broken thumb, and turns his head so he’s facing the wall. “Superman,” he says quietly. “It’s Tim. I’m with some—kids from school, and I think we’re in some real trouble. If you’re not busy.”

He tries to keep quiet, but the other students hear him anyway; it’s not exactly a roomy cellar. “What are you doing? You’re going to get us in trouble. Again,” Shelley hisses.

“Besides, we already tried that last night,” Carmichael adds. “My father’s surely all over the local news stations, even in Metropolis. What makes you think that will work for you when it didn’t for me?”

You’re not me, Tim doesn’t say. Tim Drake might not be anyone special as himself, but Superman is one of the only heroes who knows Robin’s real name outside the Bats themselves. Tim’s voice could be familiar enough to catch his attention. Even if it’s a bit of a risk to Tim’s identity—they’ll have to come up with some reason Superman responded to Tim, if Superman does respond—Tim thinks Bruce would agree it’s worth the risk, at this point. There are civilian lives at stake. Bruce would be coming himself, if he knew that. And Tim really wants to think Bruce is coming. Or Clark is coming. Or that, if they’re not coming, they at least know what happened and are waiting for some reason, probably a very good reason. Bruce said, and even reiterated, that someone would be there when the buses got back to school last night, so he must know about the kidnapping. Unless something came up, in which case he at least would have heard it from the news today. Or Barbara would have. Someone cares that Tim is missing. He has to believe that; he can list so many ways his—his team would find out he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

He also knows, in the course of vigilante work, how many things slip through the cracks. How many people they don’t even know to save until it’s too late.

And, as much as it pains Tim to admit, Carmichael does have at least half a point—other than having a somewhat recognizable voice, it’s not like Tim is more special than any other missing kid. If Clark is listening at all, he probably would be listening for Carmichael Creedy and Shelley Mandeville and Brian Harrow, too. So maybe he isn’t listening. Tim tries to remember if the League had some off-planet mission this week, but his brain is kind of fuzzy. That’d be the dehydration, probably. And the pain.

There’s another option, though. Someone else with super hearing who might come if Tim asks.

Tim’s mind slips, not for the first time, to his other team. It’s far less likely they would have noticed anything wrong at this point. A small-time kidnapping isn’t the kind of thing that crosses their radar, and even if it were, they don’t know the name Tim Drake. Not yet. Tim hasn’t told them, not even Superboy and Wonder Girl and Impulse. Mostly because that’s strict Bat protocol—revealing one identity will more than likely lead to revealing all of the Bats’ identities, as Tim himself knows very well. And it’s a tiny little bit because, well. Tim Drake isn’t really all that exciting. Certainly not as exciting or interesting as Robin. He doesn’t have something that makes him unquestionably special, like super strength or being from the future or having a god for a grandparent, and he doesn’t have anything that really compensates for that in his personal life, either. The closest thing he has is a high credit card limit and access to Bat tech, and none of those things are about him.

It’s a silly thing, but it still makes the hard-line Bat protocol on secret identities a bit easier to follow. Not that that’s stopped Tim from figuring out his teammates’ identities. Knowing Impulse’s family history/future made it pretty easy to track him backwards to a kid named Bart Allen living in the present. Cassie outright told them after she was nearly forced to reveal herself in front of news cameras anyway. And Superboy—Tim knows Kon’s Kryptonian name because Kon told him. He also knows Kon is Conner Kent, because Tim is, well, Tim. When you know Superman’s real name, it isn’t a Dick Grayson-level leap to connect the dots from Clark Kent to the teenage boy who recently moved to the Kent farm and doesn’t have any social media accounts over a few years old.

Also, Kon doesn’t wear a mask, and Tim has spent a lot of time looking at Kon’s face. Professionally. At work. As teammates.

Point being, Tim knows who Superboy is, but Kon, as far as Tim is aware—and he is rarely wrong about stuff like this—still does not know who Robin is under the mask. Tim can’t go Hey, it’s Robin calling in a rescue in front of his classmates. He can’t go Hey, it’s Tim, and expect that to mean anything to Kon. He’ll have to aim somewhere in the middle. And if it works, if Kon shows up, then Kon will know his secret identity, but Tim tosses his anxiety aside due to extenuating circ*mstances. Kon knowing Robin is some kid named Tim is no longer the worst possibility here.

And besides, other than Bruce being disappointed about it, Tim isn’t worried about Kon figuring out the rest of their identities along with his. They’ve only been working together on and off for a year, but Tim trusts Kon. He thinks Kon might be his best friend, which is not something Tim has ever had before, and he thinks that might be worth something.

He takes a long, slow breath. Ignores the glares from the other students. “Superboy,” he murmurs. “It’s me. If you’re listening, I could use some help.”

“Did you say Superboy?” Carmichael says. “I don’t want some knockoff rescue operation.”

“I don’t know,” Brian says. “A rescue is a rescue.”

Carmichael sniffs. “If someone shows up it better be the Metropolis PD or Superman himself. See if I visit this city again otherwise.”

Tim momentarily fantasizes about hacking Carmichael’s school web portal and replacing his final paper with the Bee Movie script, or maybe blackmailing Mr. and Mrs. Creedy into donating Carmichael’s Rolex budget to Poison Ivy’s next clean water initiative. It’s not very Robin of him, but it is very Tim of him. “Shut up,” he says, instead of what he wants to, which is You would be lucky if Superboy so much as glanced at you. His skull feels like it’s stuffed with dryer lint. “Just—shut up.”

“You first, Drake. If those goons catch you shouting for every random cape on the Eastern seaboard I will make sure they know you did it despite our protests. It will be you facing the consequences, not any of us.”

“Superboy doesn’t wear a cape,” Tim says.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was talking to a fan.”

Tim doesn’t answer, tipping his head back to stare at the cinderblock ceiling. He’s looked over it already—he’s looked over every inch of this place. He’ll look over it for a fifteenth time in a minute, just a minute, just as soon as he’s sure Carmichael isn’t going to say anything else.

It doesn’t end up mattering, anyway. An hour passes, then another, and another, time bleeding away until the kidnappers shove the hatch open again, and neither Superman nor Superboy have arrived to save them.

“Good news,” one of the redheads says as he reaches the cellar floor. Checkered Shirt is nowhere to be seen. “Well, for three of you, at least. Your parents came through.” He glances at Tim. “You, not so much. Boss says we can find some other use for you, though.”

“I’m pretty good at photography,” Tim says. His mouth is so dry. “If you wanted a group picture to commemorate the occasion. Just have to—untie my hands first, et cetera. But seriously, I think it would make more sense to wait until you have all our ransoms, I’m sure mine will be coming—”

The redheads ignore him, both keeping an eye on their phones. As some message comes through, they wordlessly start cutting Shelley and Brian and Carmichael’s ankles free. And, sh*t, okay, this is happening. Right now. Tim tries to shove himself to his feet as the redheads lead the other three to the trapdoor.

“Don’t,” Tim tells them as they pass. “Don’t go—listen. They’re keeping me, right? You think they’re really going to let you go if you can possibly lead them back here? Please, you have to at least try to—”

“It’s fine, Drake,” Carmichael says. “They’ll honor the agreement.”

“We’ll try to have someone contact your parents, okay?” Shelley adds, reaching the flimsy staircase.

Nothing for it, then. Tim fights. He’s managed to loosen the zip tie around his ankles over the last few hours, so he has enough element of surprise to take down one of the redheads, but his hands are still stuck and the other one wastes no time nailing him in his already-broken ribs.

By the time the resulting black spots fade from Tim’s vision, he’s completely alone.

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Kon hears about the kidnapping on Friday afternoon, about an hour after he gets home from school.

Or, gets back to the farm. Which is his home on paper, at least, in a somewhat recent development, so he’s trying to think of it that way because it makes it easier to act normal at school. Hello, I’m a normal boy with the normal name Conner and a normal home on a normal farm. That kind of stuff.

He’s expecting Clark to be there, because Clark usually comes by early on Fridays to help Mr. Kent with assorted extra chores (even though Kon has tried to insist he can do anything they need, they just insist back that what he needs is a few afternoons off to do homework or hang out with friends, though honestly Kon would prefer the chores). But 5pm comes and goes and all Kon can hear from his homework spot on the farmhouse roof is the low groan of Mr. Kent’s tractor, the murmur of Mrs. Kent on the phone with Lois (sounds like Jon’s going to get all As this quarter, which is kind of whatever for a second grader, but okay), the shuffle of chickens rooting around behind the herb garden again, and the dry whisper of wind in the long grass between their farm and the mill road.

Well, it’s not all he can hear, but it’s everything notable. The hearing is one of the more recent powers to come in, and he still has to focus pretty carefully to pinpoint stuff or keep from getting overwhelmed. Point being, 5:30 rolls around and Kon is done with his homework, there are still only three human heartbeats on the property, and Kon has nothing to do. Also, Robin isn’t answering his messages. This has happened plenty of times before, and means he’s probably either taking a 24-hour crash nap or he’s distracted by some new rogue running around Gotham and in a day or so Kon will be treated to a rant about The Prankster or The Goofball or whatever ridiculous name this one has chosen, but that doesn’t change the fact that right now Kon is bored.

Downstairs, Lois gets around to telling Mrs. Kent that she doesn’t think everyone will be over for dinner tonight after all. “Clark is still…working,” her voice says over the phone.

That gets Kon’s attention.

It takes him just under a minute to expand his hearing and figure out Clark is still in Metropolis. It sounds like he’s outside somewhere, and he’s using his Superman voice. Working, indeed. There’s no fighting, but whatever’s going on still sounds way more interesting than sitting on a roof not even doing chores. Kon has his jacket and gloves and suit on a minute later.

“Mrs. Kent,” he says, popping into the den.

“Ma, dear,” she says, glancing over. Kon’s still impressed at how she never startles, even when he forgets to enter a room at normal speed.

“Right, um. I’m just going out for a bit.” He’s supposed to tell someone when he leaves, which is one of the weirder parts about living on the farm.

“Will you be back for dinner?” Mrs. Kent says.

“Is that Conner?” Lois says over the phone. “Tell Conner I say hi.”

“Lois says hi,” Mrs. Kent says, though she surely knows Kon heard it.

Kon scrubs a hand over the back of his head. “Hi, Lois.”

“Actually,” Lois says. “Actually, Conner, if you don’t have plans, maybe you could come keep Jon company for a bit? I’m staring down a deadline, and—”

“Oh, whoops, the time,” Kon says quickly, glancing at his watchless wrist. “I’ll try to be back for dinner! Okay. See ya.”

He’s off the farm and touching down in Metropolis before that can get any more awkward. They don’t really need him to watch Jon, is the thing. No one will actually leave him alone with the kid. Well, Mr. Kent did once, for an hour on the farm while he picked up something in town, and Clark didn’t do a good enough job making sure Kon missed the tense conversation they had about it later. So Lois asking him to come over is either her taking pity on him, or a not very subtle way of trying to distract him from whatever Clark’s got going on here.

The first thing he notices, taking in the immediate scene as he lands, is that a lot of drivers in the vicinity are angrier than usual. Kon is on a stretch of two-lane highway on the west edge of the city, empty for half a mile and cordoned off in both directions, which explains all the irritated commuters. There’s a tunnel under a hill smack in the middle of the sectioned-off road, half a dozen police officers milling around, an ambulance with the engine off, and a white tent that Kon recognizes as a media staging area, complete with journalists and camera crews and a police perimeter. In the tent two of the journalists are on the phone asking their producers for updates, three are typing on their laptops in a way that sounds more idle than frantic, and one camerawoman is calling in a pizza delivery. Huh. So whatever’s going on here has been happening for a while.

Clark is outside of the tent in full Superman getup, hovering next to a man in an extremely expensive-looking suit. It takes Kon a split second to place him: Bruce Wayne, mega gazillionaire and businessman of some sort, famous in the way that means Kon’s had to see his face memed on Twitter more than once but not famous in a paparazzi sort of way. Kon wonders what he’s doing here, and then wonders if it’s hard for Clark to keep his eye from twitching, having to act all Superman-nice around someone who could probably give Lex Luthor a literal run for his money in a Rich CEO faceoff.

“—Sent a message that they would call me back,” Wayne is saying, almost under his breath, but Kon can hear it from across the road. “It’s possible they haven’t even checked their voicemail, and if I let myself think about that I’m going to start planning a hostile takeover of Drake Industries before Tim even—”

“Do you want to know what they’re doing right now?” Clark asks with the same grim voice he used to tell Mr. Kent the barn was going to need a new roof.

“Is it calling the police, booking a flight, or arranging a wire transfer?”

“...No.”

“Then I’d better not, no.” Wayne’s expression spasms. “I’ll talk to the parents who are here again. And you still can’t—you’re still trying—?”

“Of course.” And that was his Superman voice again, keeping someone calm, giving them hope. “As we speak. Still nothing, but—”

Clark’s head snaps up. A moment later he’s across the street, right in front of Kon.

“What are you doing here?” Clark demands.

“Nice to see you, too,” Kon says mildly.

Clark doesn’t look annoyed or perfectly Superman-calm, like Kon expected. If Kon had to guess, he’d say Clark looks slightly unsettled. “Did someone send you here? Did you hear from—anyone?”

“Like…Lois?” Kon says, trying to figure out who might’ve sent him to find Clark. As far as he can tell, Lois tried to do the exact opposite. “She said hi by proxy a minute ago, but that was it.” He shrugs. “I just heard something going on, thought I’d pop by. What is going on, anyway?”

Clark still looks troubled. Across the road, a reporter rounds the tent and zeroes in on Bruce Wayne. “Mr. Wayne! My producer said you were on site—if you have a moment to comment on your recent jet skiing incident in Saint Lucia—?”

“Seriously,” Kon says to Clark, who had twitched his head back toward the tent when the reporter spoke. “I know I just got here, but it looks like a lot of standing around. Not your usual, which kind of tells me you’re either as bored as I am or there’s something else going on here. And if that’s the case, hey, I finished my homework early.” Kon co*cks his head, listening inside the tent again, then casting his range wider, catching some news broadcasts on the nearby car radios. “There was a kidnapping, is that what this is about?”

Another moment of hesitation—too short for anyone non-Kryptonian or non-speedster to notice, but still there—and then Clark says, “You should go home, Superboy.”

“Okay,” Kon says. “Or, counterpoint, I could stay and help.”

Clark’s expression tightens. “There’s not much more to do that we’re not already doing. It has been nearly twenty-four hours. I haven’t been able to locate or hear the victims, which means either they’re shielded somehow, or…”

Or. Another reason someone might not make any noise, yeah. “I’ve seen bad sh*t before,” Kon says, even if his stomach tightens at the thought. “Plenty of it.”

“Not this,” Clark says, weirdly intent. “Not if this goes badly. I wouldn’t forgive myself if you had to see—please, go home.”

Man, Clark really can’t decide whether he wants to treat Kon like a kid or not, can he. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were confusing me with Jon,” Kon says, too low for anyone else to hear. “You know, the one with an actual childhood to protect.”

Clark blanches, but something across the street distracts him before he can answer, so Kon takes off.

Whatever. Whatever! It’s not like he really, desperately wants to hang out with Clark. He’s just got nothing better to do.

He doesn’t go back to the farm, obviously. Instead he flies in an arc around Metropolis, catching glimpses of news reports to piece together what Clark wouldn’t tell him. There was, indeed, a kidnapping last night. A few high school students from Gotham are missing after someone stole them off a field trip bus. A ransom demand has been sent, but there’s no other information about the kidnappers or their motives. All in all it’s…kind of bland, for a thing that has Clark so rattled. Not that Clark would care more about kids in peril if there were obvious aliens or supervillains or cyborgs involved, but, well. Usually there are, in fact, aliens or supervillains or cyborgs involved. And they aren’t usually subtle about it.

Maybe Bruce Wayne is a secret supervillain…? He had looked pretty murderous for a second when the reporter cornered him by the tent.

Well, whatever. If Clark wants to send Kon away in favor of babysitting a maybe-supervillain CEO, fine, but that doesn’t mean Kon is just going to sit around.

He stops briefly, perched on top of the Daily Planet globe—take that, Clark—and fires off a text to Rob. quick q—any bat info on this gotham field trip kidnapping? superman’s in some sort of mood about it, trying to help out. Clark has surely been in touch with Batman already, because that guy is so possessive over all things Gotham, but Robin always knows more than he lets on about things.

There’s no answer after a few minutes, so Kon takes off again. He lets the sounds of the city at large filter through as he flies. Clark had probably been listening for specific things, scared kids or certain names, so Kon just—listens. He hears a hundred overlapping arguments, three minor fender benders, a flash mob proposal happening in a park, and two different middle schoolers named Brent getting dumped over the phone. He circles past Lois and Clark’s apartment and hears Jon singing a made-up song about his dinosaur chicken nuggets, which is definitely not adorable, and a lot of typing from Lois, so maybe she was at least being honest about the deadline thing. After that he ends up saving a cat from a tree, which is a total cliché, but the cat is cute and its grateful Met U student owner is also cute and insists on taking a selfie, so Kon figures it’s pretty good PR.

(He can almost hear Robin lecturing him about at least trying to keep HQ full-face selfies off the internet—Seriously, aren’t you even a little worried about current facial recognition software, and also people who can see things? Like your face?—but Kon figures if it were that easy, Clark “My Disguise Is A Pair of Glasses and Ugly Khakis” Kent would’ve been toast ages ago. Robin just has that Bat paranoia. It’s really funny to point out Superman and Wonder Woman don’t hide their faces and no one knows their civilian names, just to watch Rob’s teeth grind together.

Still, he uses his TTK to make the selfie just a bit blurry, if only to be a good friend and dial back Robin’s future stress levels.)

It’s when he lets his attention roam even wider that he hears it. Twenty miles north of the city, the sound of two dairy cows in distress.

It’s not a blaring neon sign pointing to a kidnapper or anything. But Kon has spent enough time on a farm now—and surrounded by farms—that he can immediately tell something’s wrong. And hey, he already saved a cat from a tree today, so saving two cows will be leveling up.

He can tell no one’s home as soon as he touches down. It looks like a small family farm, similar to the Kents’ except the surrounding land is hillier and greener, more trees and less endless golden wheat. There’s no whir of machinery or movement on the grounds other than the faint hum of a generator somewhere, and the closest human heartbeat is a quarter mile away and getting further, someone in a car flooring it down the country road. Not only that, but the two cows in the barn have clearly not been milked all day, shuffling uncomfortably in their stalls.

“Superboy to the rescue,” Kon mutters, and goes looking for a bucket.

He milks them both after giving them a minute to see him and adjust to his presence. Normally he wouldn’t rush, but normally he’s not milking cows who are in literal pain because their humans f*cked off for whatever reason, so he gets this done in record time. The whole thing is irresponsible, Kon thinks. It’s uncomfortable, and avoidable. Dairy cows are genetically engineered to produce milk every single day, to serve a purpose. Cows don’t just naturally hurt when humans forget about them; humans made them this way. So humans should take responsibility.

When he’s finished he ducks around back to toss some feed out to the chickens and then flies to the farmhouse. He’ll leave a note or something. He seriously hopes it’s just that these people got their vacation schedule mixed up with their farmhand’s day off, because Kon will be popping back in to check—

The front door swings open when he touches it.

He’s not using super strength. It just wasn’t locked, or even latched, and it’s that part that catches Kon’s attention. The Kents sometimes leave their back door unlocked, much to Clark’s consternation, but never just cracked open when they’re not home.

So, he’s not entirely surprised when he steps inside and there’s a tang of iron in the stale air.

There are two of them, and they’re both dead—a man and a woman, the man slumped over the kitchen table, the woman facedown by the stove, her hand still curled around the handle of a wooden spoon. There’s twin sprays of blood, dark and dry, and a long-congealed casserole on the counter.

Kon wasn’t lying when he told Clark he’s seen some sh*t. Still, his stomach feels like a block of ice and his thoughts jam up for a second, an embarrassingly long time for him. It’s just that this couple looks like they could be in their fifties or sixties, and they have quilted potholders hanging on the wall like in the Kents’ kitchen, and of course Kon would think of them, even though it’s not them at all. Of course he would be jarred. When his thoughts can form sentences again, the first one is: I don’t want Clark to have to see this.

That’s probably why he doesn’t call for Clark right away. That’s why he hesitates. And in that moment of hesitation, he hears something else—people nearby, a sudden bloom of heartbeats and footsteps where there was only silence before. Five people, exiting the equipment shed.

If Kon were a betting kind of guy, he’d bet at least one of those people is responsible for the dead couple in the farmhouse and the unhappy cows in the barn. Which means it’s about to be someone’s very unlucky day.

He reaches the shed just in time to see a redhead man point a gun at the back of a teenage girl’s head and pull the trigger. Kon catches the bullet in his palm, says, “I’d say don’t shoot, but that ship has sailed, hasn’t it,” and crushes the guy’s gun in his fist.

The kids shriek behind him. There’s another man who yelps and shoots at Kon’s chest, clearly missing the S-shield there. Kon hears the crumpled bullet hit the floor as he confiscates gun #2 and cracks both men’s skulls together. Not hard enough to actually break anything, probably, but hard enough to stun them while he grabs the wad of zip-ties from one of their belts and ties them up. He has them bound and dumped on the grass outside and all three kids relocated to the driveway before he asks, “Is anyone hurt?”

“No,” the girl says dazedly. “Oh, wow. You’re Superboy.”

“That’s me.” Kon looks them over to double check. It’s the girl and two boys, all rumpled and exhausted but otherwise in one piece. They look, if Kon had to guess, like high school students who very conceivably were on a field trip yesterday. “Let me guess,” he says. “You three were recently kidnapped?”

“Yes,” one of the boys says, and Kon doesn’t make a habit of disliking kidnapping victims, but he immediately hates this guy’s voice. It’s very I have a trust fund the size of a small country’s GDP. “And we were supposed to be released momentarily, so your timing is abysmal.”

“Those guys were about to shoot you,” Kon points out.

Trust fund kid mutters something about poor business practices that Kon decides to ignore. “I suppose this will give Dad the right to recoup the transaction, in any case.”

“Look,” Kon says, “I think I know where your parents are. I can probably take all three of you at once, so if you’re ready, we can get to it.” He likes the idea of flying into the media tent with all three rescued kids in tow more than he probably should. Hopefully Clark is still around to see it.

“You mean—fly?” the second boy says.

“Well, yeah. I think a taxi might take a while out here.”

“Holy sh*t,” the boy says. “No, sorry, I’m just processing. You actually came. Damn, Drake is going to be so smug about—”

He cuts off, cringing. The girl catches it and also makes a guilty face. “Oh, sh*t.”

“What?” Kon demands.

“What?” the first boy echoes, then, “Oh, come on, that’s not our fault.”

“There are actually four of us,” the girl tells Kon. “Drake’s still back there.”

“Still where?”

The girl points to the equipment shed. “In the cellar.”

Kon hesitates again for a fraction of a second, because…he doesn’t hear another heartbeat over there. “Okay,” he says, not letting himself think about the bodies in the farmhouse. “Uh, just stay here a sec.”

The shed is dim inside, the windows old enough to be warped and filmy, and something immediately feels off to Kon. It takes him a moment to pinpoint it: the generator he heard earlier is in here, out in the open with a tangle of cables like someone recently tried to move it. It’s old and boxy and the engine is clearly straining, letting out a low whine, and the moment Kon steps through the door it’s almost all he can hear. And—

It’s stupid, because what’s an old generator compared to the dead bodies he literally just saw, but Kon has to stop a moment and suppress a shiver. It sounds like—Cadmus had something, some sort of machine that hummed constantly in the labs. They switched it on and off a few times, testing, and Kon only figured out later that they built it to cover voices in the lab. That they experimented on the failed clones trying to fine-tune a frequency that was white noise to super hearing. Kon didn’t even have super hearing back then, but he remembers the ever-present whine beyond the glass. It took weeks to shake the ringing in his ears, after he broke out.

He hasn’t thought about that noise in ages. Nice one, Superboy, he thinks, shaking himself out of it. The evil kidnappers stumbled upon your real weakness—not kryptonite, but a machine that makes a mildly unpleasant noise.

He maybe uses a bit more strength than necessary powering it down, breaking the ignition key off in his hand, but it’s not like its owners will be needing it again.

And as soon as he shuts it off, he hears something else—a faint heartbeat, right below him.

If not for his super strength and the regular old adrenaline pounding through him his knees would absolutely buckle with relief. As it is, he holds steady and finds a trapdoor behind the now-silent generator, easily yanking off the padlock and pulling it open. He can see a square of dimly lit concrete floor below him and not much else. And, oh—everything but the square directly under him shows up as a big, rectangular void when he tries to scan with his x-ray vision. A classic lead-lined bunker. Between that and the faulty generator, no wonder Clark couldn’t find the kids, if they were tucked away in here the whole time.

Kon lowers himself down, staying directly under the trapdoor and ready to bolt in case it’s some sort of trap. But it’s not—it’s just a concrete room full of grain barrels and empty shelves. Nothing but a personal, paranoid bug-out shelter. There are a lot of these in the midwest, mostly Cold War-era constructions that had a resurgence when a superpowered alien started flying around in a cape and tights. Most importantly, the shelter has just one other person in it, and he is very much alive.

The boy is braced against one of the barrels, his arms bound awkwardly behind his back, shoving the barrel across the concrete in the direction of the trapdoor. His head jerks up the moment Kon drops into the cellar and he stares, wide-eyed.

“You came,” the boy says hoarsely.

“Hey,” Kon says. “Yeah, that’s what the other guy said, too. I take it you’re Drake?”

A strange expression flickers across the boy’s face. “Oh,” he says, and the expression smooths out like it was never there. “Yeah, um, that’s me.”

“Great. That’s all four of you, then.”

“The others—the others are okay?”

“They’re just fine,” Kon assures him, and watches some of the tension bleed out of Drake’s shoulders. There’s dried blood smeared across his cheek and harsh purple bruising around his left eye. Kon makes sure to move forward slowly, trying not to startle him. “A bit surprised to see me, I think. I’m guessing you guys were calling for me?”

Drake looks at him carefully. “You didn’t hear anything?”

Maybe Drake’s embarrassed, though Kon thinks it’s kind of cool that someone would call for him specifically. Still, probably better not to get into Kon’s suspicions about the generator. There might be a specific frequency that counters super-hearing, which I remember from the lab that made me isn’t exactly something to talk about with random civilians. “Not a peep, sorry.”

“Oh,” Drake says again.

“Yeah, tough luck.” Kon is crouching in front of him now. “Or maybe not, because I still heard the cows and found you.”

“The…cows?”

“Anyway, it’s all good now,” Kon says. “Hey, let’s get these off you real quick.” He beckons Drake to scoot forward so Kon can reach his wrists. They’re secured with two zip ties, the skin around them chafed and bleeding. Kon tries to be extra careful as he snaps the plastic, not quite trusting his heat vision to be precise enough yet for something like this. “There,” Kon says as Drake hisses and rubs his hands. Even in the dim lights Kon can track the stiff way he moves his torso. Kon dips into a bit of x-ray vision and, yep, there are like four cracked ribs in there, not to mention a broken thumb. He lets out a low whistle. “You sure got the sh*t end of the deal, huh? No one else is this banged up.”

Drake gives him a flat look. “Thanks,” he says. “Very comforting.”

“You brave, brave soul,” Kon says, and he’s mostly matching Drake’s tone, but he also kind of means it. The kid is very calm for someone who was kidnapped, roughed up, and recently abandoned in the world’s most depressing bunker. Something tells him Drake is too on edge to really be babied, though. And for good reason—even aside from the injuries he really doesn’t look great, his face pale, his lips dry and cracked, his hair limp against his forehead. Kon resolves to make sure he gets a water bottle as soon as possible. “Hey, before I move you, did you hit your head at all? Other than, you know.” He taps the side of his own face.

“I’m fine,” Drake says, and starts to push to his feet.

“Whoa, whoa.” Kon catches him, holding him steady and, more importantly, still. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“You’re making a peace sign.”

“Do you know how old you are?”

“Fifteen. Do you know how old I am?”

“Who’s your favorite superhero?”

“Batgirl,” Drake says. “I don’t think you’re doing concussion protocol right.”

He isn’t. Kon is mostly keeping Drake busy while he scans for head and neck wounds, which is a somewhat more delicate process. But other than a few things that look like long-healed fractures—which could be a bit concerning but are not immediately pressing—Drake’s skull and spine do appear to be in good shape. “All clear,” Kon announces.

“I said I was fine,” Drake says. Then he frowns and reaches out with his not-broken hand, fingertip skimming the little singed hole in Kon’s shirt. His eyes snap up to meet Kon’s. “They shot you.”

“I’m bulletproof,” Kon tells him.

“Still.” Drake looks unsettled.

“Really, I have plenty of other shirts,” Kon says. “Drake. Hey. Are you ready to get out of here or what?”

“Yeah,” Drake says, and lets Kon scoop him into a princess carry. Kon tries not to jostle his ribs too much, but he can tell Drake is covering a wince. “And you, uh, you can call me Tim.”

“Okay, Tim,” Kon says, and flies them out of the cellar.

They touch down in the driveway by the other kids, who haven’t moved. Drake—Tim, apparently—blinks hard against the waning sun, his eyes instantly starting to water. They’re very blue, Kon notes. They probably hurt after being in that dim cellar for so long. “Here,” Kon says, plucking his sunglasses from his jacket pocket and sliding them onto Tim’s face, careful of the bruise.

“Hngh,” Tim says, startled, which Kon takes as Thank you so much, Superboy!

“Oh good, you found him,” the girl says.

“Hello, Shelley,” Tim says, still in Kon’s arms. Kon is a bit worried about jostling his ribs if he tries to put him down, and Tim doesn’t seem in a hurry to move, so it’s fine. “Just curious, was I right about the not-letting-us-go thing?”

The girl looks away. “Not like you did anything about it,” she mutters.

“Are we going now?” says the boy with the audible trust fund. “I need to call my parents, and at least three lawyers.”

“Uh.” Kon quickly re-assesses the situation. He could carry all four of them in a pinch, but definitely not without hurting Tim more. Also, he should probably do something about the tied-up kidnappers and the…bodies in the farmhouse. Quick change of plans, then. “Superboy to Superman,” Kon says, tipping his face to the sky. “I found them! But I could use a hand over here.”

Kon feels Tim tense slightly against his chest, and then Clark is landing in front of them in a swirl of blue and red. Clark scans the scene, the wariness on his face giving way to abject relief when his gaze sweeps over the rescued students, settling on Tim. “Oh, thank god.”

“...Hi, Superman,” Tim says while the other kids are still getting over their shock at Superman’s sudden appearance.

“Are you hurt?” Clark says, using his Mission Report voice, which Kon thinks might be a bit overboard for a traumatized civilian. He feels a bit better about his own patchy bedside manner in the cellar.

Tim grimaces, so Kon jumps in. “This is Tim Drake, he has a couple broken ribs and a pretty good shiner on one eye. The others—uh, sorry, I didn’t catch your names—are dehydrated, but not hurt. Oh, I’m guessing Tim is also dehydrated.”

Clark’s eyes flicker over Tim again, then the others, and Kon can tell he’s scanning for injuries anyway. Kon tries not to feel offended about that.

“Oh, yeah, Tim has a broken thumb, too,” Kon adds, because he doesn’t want Clark to think he missed that.

“K—” Tim breaks off in a strange little cough. “Superboy, it’s not a big deal.” To Clark he adds, “Really, I’m okay.”

Clark nods, and touches his ear. Kon hears a burst of comm static. “O, Superboy found them,” Clark reports. “All of them. They’re safe.”

“Oh, thank f*ck,” a voice that must be Oracle says faintly. Kon supposes it makes sense that Oracle would be patched in due to the Gotham connection. “I’ll tell B.”

“Please do.” Clark drops his hand and looks to Kon. “Is the scene secure?”

“Got both kidnappers tied up by the shed. The kids were being held in a lead bunker, which is also cleared.”

“Not both,” Tim says.

“What?”

“There are three kidnappers.” Tim glances at his classmates. “Two men who seemed like, uh, hired muscle, and another man who was running the operation. White man, early thirties, green eyes. He had on a checkered shirt earlier today.”

“That guy definitely wasn’t around by the time I got here,” Kon says. Then he remembers— “I did hear a car speeding away when I touched down, maybe five or six minutes ago, but it could’ve been someone passing by.”

Clark’s eyes narrow. “We’ll find him. You saw his full face, Tim?”

Kon answers the unspoken question. “Yeah, they, ah, weren’t planning to give the kids back.”

Clark full-body twitches. This seems to be the final straw for Shelley, who lets out a strangled little noise and says, “I want to go home.”

“Yeah,” Clark says, his voice softening. “Yeah, we’ll get you back to your parents.” To Kon he says, “I can take Tim.”

“What?” Kon says. “Get your own, there are like three other kids right there.” He’s already holding Tim; it would be unfair to shift his broken ribs around more than necessary.

Tim gives Clark a thumbs up with his good hand. Clark looks at the two of them for a split second, then seems to let it go. “All right. I’ll take the others, and then I’ll come right back to deal with the remaining kidnappers. Superboy, you stay at the tent until I get back just in case.”

Kon nods. “Wait—Superman.” He lowers his voice. “Don’t go inside the house. Let the police handle that part, okay?”

Clark blinks. Kon doesn’t know if he’ll actually listen, but at least Kon tried.

Before takeoff Kon glances down at Tim, who is looking back, the sunglasses slipping down his nose. His expression looks like some strange cross-section between sad and fond, but that doesn’t quite track, so maybe Tim is just out of it. “All right for a quick flight?” Kon asks.

“Just don’t do any flips,” Tim says, and they’re off.

Almost as soon as his feet hit the asphalt outside the media tent in Metropolis, someone appears right in front of Kon. “Tim,” Bruce Wayne says.

“Bruce?” Tim says, sounding bewildered. “What are you doing here?”

“You’re hurt,” Wayne says. Behind him Kon can see Clark with the other kids, passing them off to what must be the gaggle of parents ringed by police. “Where are you hurt?”

“It’s not that bad, I promise.”

“Yeah, it is,” Kon says, and it’s nuts that he’s had to explain this more than once. “He has broken ribs. Definitely hospital time.”

Tim glares at him, which Kon finds fully unfair.

“I’ll take him now,” Wayne tells Kon, and unlike Clark, his tone brooks no argument. Tim is already shifting, angling himself to be transferred, so Kon lets Wayne gently gather Tim into his arms. Wayne holds Tim like Kon does—that is, like Tim weighs nothing—and despite Tim’s glaring and the insistence on being fine, Kon watches him curl into Wayne’s chest, the last of the tension shuddering out of him.

“Water,” Kon adds. He feels odd, almost like he’s forgetting something. “He should definitely also have some water ASAP.”

“Mm,” Tim mumbles. “Yeah, agree with that one.”

Wayne nods and meets Kon’s eyes. “Thank you,” he says, with so much sincerity that Kon finds himself struck speechless for a moment as Wayne turns and heads for the ambulance stationed on the other side of the tent.

When Kon gets himself together again he shuffles through the various conversations happening around him—the kids reuniting with their parents, the media crews scrambling to get set up to capture it, the police contacting dispatch to update them. A reporter tries to approach, but Kon waves her away and flags down an officer unlocking a police car.

“Hey, are you heading up to the farm?” he says.

The officer blinks at him. “Superman gave us the address, yeah.”

“There are two cows there,” Kon tells him. “Also some chickens. Someone needs to take care of them. So, just—do something about that, okay?”

The officer nods, looking at Kon like he’s trying to puzzle out some coded message in that. Kon sighs and lets him go. He has no reason to trust police competence anyway, so he’ll swing by the farm again tomorrow to make sure.

He needs another moment before talking to reporters. They’ll have questions, and Kon’s going to have to explain the cow thing without sounding silly, and also dance around the part about the dead bodies because he doesn’t want that news breaking before the couple’s family can be contacted. He isn’t sure if he’s happy Clark trusted him to deal with this until he gets back, or annoyed that Clark gets to skip out on the initial media frenzy. Kon pushes off the ground, flying to hover a few stories above everything, and gives himself another moment to just listen. On the street under him a few cars and news vans are peeling out to make the drive to the crime scene. Miles and miles away he can hear Clark touching down at the little farm again, a whole police car in tow. Any minute now they’ll find the bodies and the bunker, and the story of the last 24 hours will start to take shape.

Yeah, Kon decides, he’s probably glad he’s here and not back there. Mostly, thinking about the dead couple in the kitchen and the four very alive students here with their families, he’s glad there are only two bodies on that farm. Even if one of the kidnappers got his ransom money and bolted, four kids going home is still a better outcome than it could’ve been.

Down below three of the kids are wrapped in blankets and drinking water and talking to their parents, most of whom are simultaneously on the phone with banks or lawyers or other reporters. One of the dads is sobbing, harsh and ugly, and the annoying boy is trying to explain how he knew the kidnappers would double cross them all along. Up where no one can hear him, Kon lets out an undignified snort.

Tim is the odd one out. Kon does one sweep, then another, and he can’t identify anyone in the gaggle of parents who could belong to Tim, and the only person over at the ambulance other than paramedics is Bruce Wayne. They’re talking in low voices as the paramedics take Tim’s vitals.

“...use any weapons?” Wayne is saying as he holds up a water bottle.

“No, no,” Tim says. His voice is still raspy, despite pausing to take a sip. “Just kicked in the ribs, they got a lucky shot. Um. A few lucky shots. Shin too, but that’s just bruised. The thumb I did myself.”

“Yourself?” one of the paramedics asks, alarmed.

“Um,” Tim says. “To try to slip out of the ziptie. I read that in a book, I think.”

“Well,” the paramedic says, and doesn’t seem to know what else to add.

“Your eye?” Wayne murmurs.

“Regular backhand.” This is followed by a sharp inhale. Kon guesses Tim just tried to shrug and forgot about the ribs.

“Easy,” Wayne says.

“I tried to get a phone,” Tim tells him. There’s a small note of urgency in it, like this is more important than the broken bones. “I almost did. Sorry. I also tried—right away, on the bus, I tried to, um, call for help. I wasn’t fast enough.”

Kon’s jaw clenches. So. That would explain why Tim was more injured than everyone else, if he was the only one who tried to get away.

“It’s okay,” Wayne is saying. “You’re okay.”

“I couldn’t—when I saw their faces I knew it was bad, but I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t find a way out. I’m really sorry.”

“You did what you could.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“Tim,” Wayne starts. He lifts his hand toward Tim’s shoulder only to falter halfway through. From up here Kon can only see the top of Tim’s head, angled away. “You did good.”

Tim draws in a shaky breath. A second later the paramedic checking Tim’s pulse straightens up and clears their throat. “We’re ready to transfer you to Met General.” They glance at Wayne. “Are you Mr. Drake’s guardian?”

“A family friend,” Wayne says smoothly. “Tim’s parents are unavoidably detained.”

“You want him to come with you?” the paramedic asks Tim.

“You don’t have to,” Tim says quietly to Wayne. “If you have—other things to do, Bruce, I’ll be okay.”

“Tim,” Wayne says again, and has to clear his throat. “I can call Alfred if you’d prefer, but I would like to at least ride with you until then.”

“Okay. Then yes, please, Bruce can come.”

They load up. Kon feels a small wave of relief wash through him—so Tim does have someone, then. He’s going to be fine. All of the students are okay now, and Kon will get to go home tonight and know that is, in some part, because he was here. Because he existed and showed up and helped them.

There’s still plenty to do. Making sure the cows are okay. Start tracking the kidnapper who got away. Kon will also have to tell Clark about the generator thing so they can work on finding a way to circumvent stuff like that, which means talking about Cadmus again, which won’t be fun for either of them. Maybe he’ll tell Robin about it first—Robin can probably isolate the problem frequency and figure out a countermeasure in a week flat. Five days if he has enough caffeine. Kon would trust Robin, with something like this.

Before all of that, though, Kon has a media circus to deal with. He floats down and finds the reporter from a few minutes ago. “Okay,” he says, “fire away.”

◇

Server: teen titans redux

[Friday, 11:54pm ET]
parkour!
hey guys sorry for the radio silence. had a bit of a Gotham Situation
might not be able to meet up for a week or two
here’s a belated meme to make up for it
[pizza_inu.jpg]

Direct message: sb & robin

[Friday, 6:42pm ET]
sb
quick q—any bat info on this gotham field trip kidnapping? superman’s in some sort of mood about it, trying to help out

[Friday, 11:56pm ET]
robin
hey sorry i didn’t see this until now
just mentioned to the group but i was dealing with a thing

sb
oh yeah no problem
everything okay? need backup?

robin
no, no, all fine now
and i hear you’ve already saved the day today
thank you, kon

sb
yeah of course
wait what exactly are you thanking me for

robin
for helping those students
especially when i couldn’t

sb
oh yeah
solo rescue op, not bad for a friday afternoon 😎💪
i’m sure if you were on the case it would’ve been over way quicker though. probably would’ve caught the guy that got away too

robin
i wouldn’t count on it
i’m glad you were there

sb
i’m mostly glad the kids are okay
is it weird to call them kids when they’re like simultaneously younger and older than me
been going back and forth on that

robin
hmm. if you define “kid” by an objective metric like “not old enough to vote” then your relative age doesn’t really make a difference
that just means you are also a kid who is calling other kids kids
though batman still calls nightwing and the og titans kids so relativity does come into play sometimes

sb
i don’t think a superhero with multiple twitter accounts dedicated to his ass in tights still counts as a kid

robin
: /
let’s not

sb
sorry i forgot you’re a nightwing ass anti
why is that anyway

robin
not doing this rn

sb
is it because he’s the og
and has such a big…

robin
finish that sentence and i’ll break batman’s #1 rule ❤️

sb
…SUIT to fill?

robin
better start watching your back alien boy

sb
😘😎
also just out of curiosity
do you know them?

robin
nightwing and friends?
kon they made us do that whole team bonding retreat in march. you were there

sb
no no
the kids from gotham. the ones that got kidnapped
not that you know everyone from gotham etc etc but i got the impression they were like, pretty connected

[robin is typing…]
[robin is typing…]
[robin is typing…]

sb
rob?

robin
sorry hang on
i know of them
peripherally
not friends or anything

sb
oh okay
you’re not exactly missing out
i mean no offense to gotham, i know not everyone can be as cool as the bats
they just seemed kinda
uhh
spoiled
but i guess that’s what happens when your parents are that rich

robin
haha yeah

sb
i just asked though because one of them got pretty banged up and i wanted to know if he’s doing okay

[robin is typing…]

robin
last i heard everyone was doing fine
i’ll keep an ear out though

sb
oh good
thank you
and hey

[sb is typing…]

sb
you’ll let me know if there ever is anything i can do to help you, right?
like i know bat business is on lock but just, if there ever is. you know i would.

robin
i do know

sb
okay well, good

robin
and thank you
again

sb
what are friends for?

◇

When Kon gets back from checking on the cows the next morning—it looks like they did, in fact, arrange for someone to see to the farm, despite the caution tape still ringing the house and shed—he finds his sunglasses folded neatly on his desk. There’s a blue sticky note under them in Clark’s handwriting. Good work.

Kon doesn’t keep the sticky note, because that would be silly. But if he happens to have a photographic memory, well. He was just engineered this way, after all.

Chapter 2: the harbor

Chapter Text

The second time is an accident.

◆

As a rule, Tim tries to avoid the harbor. It is officially his least favorite body of water to get tossed into, because 1) the smell and 2) he always has to go to the clinic after to get checked for exposure to various diseases and chemicals because holy pollution, Batman. The surface practically glows neon green when the light hits it wrong. Gotham Harbor is 100% exhibit A in the “Poison Ivy is right, actually” legal argument.

Usually when he’s by the harbor he’s in his Robin suit and about to fight the latest rogue to conduct business on the docks. Tonight he’s in jeans and sneakers and out on a yacht, surrounded by a hundred of his least favorite classmates, and everything is swaying. People shout to each other over the music, the deck thrumming in time with the bass of an indecipherable song. There’s an empty solo cup in his hand. The people around him laugh, so Tim laughs, too, hand tightening on the cup like it might ground him. It doesn’t—he still can’t tell if the swaying is the ship or just his own mind, loose and off balance.

He feels kind of good. No, not good. But better than he felt earlier, and he probably just solved a whole case, which isn’t bad for one night. Successful on purpose and drunk on accident; overall not the worst birthday he’s ever had, even if he really should leave soon before anyone else below deck comes looking.

Tim turns to the person to his left, a girl he doesn’t know in an Ivy U sweatshirt. “Where’s the door?” he asks, and then has to repeat it louder, because of the music.

She squints at him. “The what?”

“The door,” he says, then realizes, no, that’s not the right word. The exit. It’s a boat—technically the exits are on all sides, but he means the ramp way, the normal way. Because he’s pretending to be normal right now. This is, perhaps, the most normal Tim has ever looked, because what kind of normal teenager doesn’t go to parties on a Friday and get drunk because apparently their stacked exposure to various gasses, pollens, and toxins doesn’t somehow translate to increased alcohol tolerance? That’s very normal. So he should exit via the ramp thing, if he can just remember the word for it, and not scuttle over the side like he did that one time Falcone’s lackeys thought it’d be easier to hold Robin on a boat for some reason. Pssh.

Though, Tim doesn’t have his grippy Robin gloves on right now. He has an emergency grapple line under his belt, obviously, but it might take a minute to get to the scuttling if he left that way. Which he definitely isn’t going to do, no matter how much he needs to slip away before someone notices the off-book security guard stuck in a bathroom downstairs. But it’s hard to see through the crush of people on deck, and every time Tim tries to move he gets buffeted back, and his cup is empty, and this would be so much easier if he knew where the ramp was. If he didn’t have to be normal. Why didn’t he bring his gloves, again?

Because he’s not supposed to be here, technically. Because he came directly from the hospital. Right. Bruce is off on an urgent, far-away mission, has been for a week, and Alfred is on his annual trip back to England, and Tim didn’t want anyone to fret over nothing so he said he was going to spend the evening with his comatose dad and an uncle that didn’t technically exist. And Tim didn’t lie! Except about the uncle thing. He did go to the hospital. He sat in his dad’s room listening to the steady beeping of monitors until the walls started closing in, and Tim’s stomach was rumbling and his dad was silent and Tim’s phone was silent and it suddenly felt like—like nothing had changed. Like Tim might as well be eight, nine, ten, eleven again, sitting in a cold room waiting for something to happen to make this day a bit different from any other.

It wasn’t like he’d been deliberately forgotten. Bruce knows his birthday, or at least has it on a calendar, but Bruce isn’t checking that in outer space. Alfred knows, and called from London early that morning, which didn’t make Tim tear up or anything. Dick and Steph and Cass are busy covering Gotham while Bruce is away. Jason is covering his own part of the city and Tim is under no illusion he’d do anything even if he did know it was Tim’s birthday. He’s sure if Bart and Cassie and Kon knew they’d have planned some horribly over-the-top surprise that would involve kidnapping across multiple state lines, so that one’s on Tim and the Bats for being so cagey with personal information.

And beyond that…no one has a reason to remember. It wasn’t as if Tim’s fourteenth birthday was any sort of occasion after he started as Robin, what with Bruce and Dick and Alfred’s still-fresh grief—what was he going to do? Casually mention his birthday on patrol and hope Bruce would stop for milkshakes? That wasn’t a thing for Tim. And then when his fifteenth rolled around his parents were in town and Tim’s leg was newly broken from his quote-unquote “skateboarding accident” and Bruce was barely sleeping trying to chase down Jason and everyone had this strained, guilty expression every time they saw Tim’s cast, so he dodged the whole thing and said he had a family dinner even though his parents actually went to the opera with the Fremonts that night. Point being. Tim didn’t expect anything this year, because he’s the one who set no expectations in the first place. And it should’ve been fine. It really should’ve. It was just, something about this year—

About sitting in the hospital, his dad right there but still as out of reach as ever—

As desperately as he wanted to escape the hospital and do something productive, there was also no point in trying to sneak down to the Cave to work on a case, or fiddle with that generator he snagged from the Delaware farmhouse last year, or even just train on the mats. Someone would definitely notice he’d been there, and not only would that be an embarrassing way to be caught having no birthday plans, Robin is also supposed to be benched while Bruce is away. I can patrol with Dick, Tim had tried to argue. I can run comms with Babs. I can do something. But Bruce just got this slightly constipated look on his face and said something about Tim dealing with a lot right now. That Robin shouldn’t patrol without Batman for the time being. Tim wonders if Bruce is waiting for him to snap, to channel his grief and frustration into his nighttime activities the way Bruce himself did, the way Dick did, but Tim…doesn’t know how to explain that he’s fine. It’s probably f*cked up that he’s fine. It’s not even that he doesn’t feel it. He thinks about his mom every day, he feels the dread clawing at his throat every time he steps into the hospital to see if there’s any change on his dad’s monitors. But it’s been months since his dad fell into a coma, and months since his mom was buried in the same cemetery as Jason’s now-empty grave, and Tim just—holds it all behind a glass wall in his head. He feels it, and then he puts it away. Could a non-functioning person make up a whole fake uncle and keep himself out of the foster system? Not that Bruce knows about that, but still, it’s pretty good proof that Tim can focus past everything. It’s better if he can focus past everything. But he can’t exactly tell Bruce, Look, I promise I’m handling the whole dead parent thing better than you, so: Robin got benched for the week, and Tim started his sixteenth birthday evening in a quiet hospital ward with nothing to do.

He had his phone open, checking Kon and Bart’s instagrams with one of his burner accounts to see what they were up to. Cassie was on a training retreat with Diana, he knew, but if Bart and Kon were busy he could maybe get a commercial flight to San Francisco under one of his aliases for the weekend and look at old case files at the Tower—

On autopilot he’d switched to his own account, the one he kept regularly stocked with generic landscape photography and skate park and dice set pics in case he ever needed to reverse-engineer a cover story. He stared blankly at the first picture on his feed for a moment, thumb already moving to swipe out of the app, and then he paused.

It was a post from Carmichael Creedy. Usually that would be reason enough to finish closing the app, but something about the picture tugged at Tim’s attention. It was an overexposed selfie of Carmichael in front of a group of people, the light harsh and purple, with a caption boasting about his back-from-Antigua bash on his dad’s yacht. Tim recognized three faces in the picture from school.

He recognized the fourth from an open case file.

The man was in the background of the shot, in profile only, but Tim had seen a similar picture of him from security cam footage just last week. Henry Hammond, island-hopping tax evader extraordinaire with connections to a new smuggling group moving alien tech through Gotham. It was Jason’s case, but Tim, being Tim, had gone through the files anyway one night when he couldn’t sleep. From what he found, Jason still didn’t know how the smugglers were getting the tech into the city, despite staking out every commercial and private shipping operation for weeks.

Staring at Henry Hammond leaning against a yacht railing in the background of Carmichael’s selfie, Tim was pretty sure he just figured out how.

And, like, Tim very conceivably could go to a party on a Friday hosted by his classmate. That wouldn’t violate Robin being benched because this would be Tim going. And if Tim, at a completely innocent civilian party, happened to stumble across evidence in an active smuggling case—

He was out of the hospital a minute later.

Getting onto the yacht was easy enough—he just flashed the Instagram post to the hired bouncer on the dock, who waved him through along with two college students and stern instructions to stay on the upper deck only. From there slipping downstairs and breaking into the hold was child’s play, as was disabling the clip-on security cameras and distracting the two guards long enough to take pictures of a stack of metal storage boxes under a tarp and a folder of shipping labels. He managed to unlock one box—and yep, twisted scraps of the same unidentified, possibly alien material Jason had been tracking through the city—before his time ran out and he had to jet.

He ended up having to barricade one of the security guards in the tiny bathroom on the way up, but he didn’t get seen until he was climbing the last staircase back to the main deck—close enough and cramped enough to forestall any sneaking—and the upper door swung open before he could reach the handle.

There wasn’t time to run back down without looking suspicious, and the stairwell was too small to pull himself up to the ceiling, so in the split second between the door opening and the person on the other side seeing him, Tim loosened his posture and leaned his shoulder against the wall.

“And get me through to—what the hell are you doing here?”

It was Henry Hammond himself, squinting down into the stairwell. Bingo, Tim thought. He loved being right.

“Looking for the…the bathroom,” Tim said, letting his voice slur a little, tipping more heavily against the wall. It vibrated with music from the party above. “The, what’s it called on a boat, the mess? The head?”

Hammond’s lip curled. “There are bathrooms on the main deck.”

“It should be called the mess,” Tim said, stumbling forward. Hammond was startled enough to jerk back, letting Tim slip out of the stairwell. The earsplitting music folded around him as he re-emerged on deck. “That just makes sense. Head, what’s a head, even.”

“Don’t come back here,” Hammond said, but he must not have been entirely sold on Tim’s performance—though it was a pretty good performance, Tim thinks now, now that he’s actually drunk, he did pretty good—because instead of going downstairs Hammond turned and trailed Tim back through the crowd.

Okay. Tim just had to act normal for a bit and shake him off, which was only annoying because it meant Tim couldn’t leave right away, not if he didn’t want to look suspicious. He drifted through the crowd, vaguely in the direction of the open bar, and distracted himself trying to imagine Jason’s face when he handed over the new evidence. Jason would probably be irritated, because he was usually irritated by Tim these days and usually Tim didn’t even mind because it was funny and also irritated was better than murderous, but this time Jason might be a bit impressed, too, which Tim wouldn’t mind either.

Hammond was still trailing him. Tim was officially nearing the limit of how long he could linger alone without being outright suspicious, so he veered toward a cluster of people he recognized. He didn’t try to fade into the background; he let himself be jostled, be seen, exchange greetings with people from math and APUSH and tennis until he had a few layers of crowd between him and Hammond.

Unfortunately, at the center of the cluster was Carmichael Creedy, midway through setting up a game of beer pong. Tim took a moment to be amused at the absolute dissonance between the sleek, glittering deck of the yacht and the folding table full of solo cups, and then Carmichael turned to the side, saying, “I need, like, three more cups,” and ended up looking right at Tim. “Drake?” he said. “No way.”

About half the group—some GCHS classmates, some older kids who looked like they might be college students—shifted their attention to Tim, who fought down a sigh. “You know I’d never miss a back-from-Antigua party, Car, they’re my favorite.”

Carmichael frowned, like he wasn’t sure if Tim was messing with him or not. “We don’t have any of your nerd games here,” is what he said, because Carmichael was about as original as a knockoff rogue. “This is a real party.”

“Is that Drake?” Brian Harrow called from the other end of the table. Brian had actually decided Tim was sort of cool in the wake of last year’s kidnapping, which mostly meant Brian would sometimes go Drake! in the hall and punch his shoulder and Tim would have to stop himself from dodging on instinct. “Drake, come here, we’re doing 2v2 and Melissa bailed.”

“I hate beer,” a girl, presumably Melissa, shouted.

“It’s beer pong,” Brian said. He was definitely drunk, Tim noted, tracking the clumsy way he waved a hand, but he seemed happy. “Not cosmopolitan pong. You like beer, right, Drake? Come on.”

“No way is Drake actually playing,” Carmichael said, even as someone pushed Tim in Brian’s direction, saying Is this game ever going to start, seriously. As he went Tim glanced up and saw Hammond had worked his way into the crowd, watching.

Tim let his gaze slip past Hammond and track back to Brian. “You know what,” he said, “why not.”

Which was how he ended up playing his first-ever drinking game, and actually drinking about it. The thing was, Brucie Wayne could get away with nursing the same drink all night at a gala, but Tim was pretty sure that trick wasn’t going to work with a dozen classmates and one contracted smuggler staring him down across a beer pong table. He’d already all but cracked the case, though, and Hammond couldn’t prove anything. All Tim had to do now was be normal. Besides, what could it hurt?

(Turned out Tim was wildly good at beer pong, even as his mind got blurrier with each cup. It was just physics with made-up rules. “Holy sh*t, dude,” Brian said at one point before Carmichael insisted on a rematch, and for the first time all night Tim found himself actually grinning.)

(He also found himself wondering if Kon, who was so obviously cool and popular and fun even when he was being normal, had ever played beer pong. If he might think it was cool that Tim was good at it.)

He played until Melissa insisted on having a turn after all, and then someone pressed another cup into his hand as he floated through the crowd and slowly remembered he was in the middle of something, actually, and Hammond had left sometime during game two so he asked the girl next to him if she knew where he could find the—

“Gangplank,” Tim says now. That’s it. That’s the word he’s been looking for, the exit. “Hey, where’s the gangplank?”

He turns to the Ivy University girl, but she’s gone, two different people in her place. They’re jumping up and down with the music, which is somehow even louder. Hammond is still gone—Tim scans again, because someone bumped him and he lost his place the first time—so Tim can go, now, he really can. He just has to get out of the crowd without, like, climbing a wall or something. He finds a break between bodies and pushes forward, and there’s cool, open air on his face for a moment before he’s forced to a stop. Oh—the deck railing, digging into his waist. Okay. That’s good, actually, he can just follow that around until he finds the gangplank. It obviously will be somewhere on the railing, and it’s a closed loop, so logically if he just starts moving along—

A chorus of shouts behind him. Tim turns his head in time to see a ping pong ball fly up from the middle of the crowd, arcing up high, and the crowd ripples back, cheering as someone lunges to catch it. Someone else lurches into Tim, their back hitting him dead-on, and Tim reflexively flips over the railing rather than letting it slam into his hipbone because he’s had enough time on the bench, thank you, no need for another bone fracture on top of things, and—

And he’s falling.

Damn it, he thinks, I should’ve worn my gloves after all, and then it’s pure, wild instinct, a gut response to finding himself in sudden freefall without a grapple, without a Bat swinging down to catch him—before he can stop himself, he calls out.

“Superboy—!” he shouts, his voice lost in the pounding music and the slap of water against the side of the yacht, and then water closes over his head and everything goes dark.

◇

Kon is training his hearing range when he hears a panicked, cut-off call for him.

The fact that he’s focusing on Gotham at the time is pure coincidence. He’d started out focusing on smaller and smaller areas of Gateway City and Keystone City, idly listening for Cassie and Bart as he went. It was one of Clark’s exercises to hone his senses, a practice dubbed Find a Friend by Clark. Kon does not call it that. But Clark’s reasoning is, if you’re trying to listen for—or see or smell or echolocate or whatever else Kryptonian biology can do—someone you like, you’ll pay more attention. Clark does not seem to think this is as weird as it clearly is, but the exercises seem to actually help, so here Kon is on his Kent-mandated night off, sprawled on the roof of Clark and Lois’s apartment building and creeping on his friends.

He didn’t find Cassie—still off with Wonder Woman, probably. Bart was at home eating popcorn and mumbling about math homework fast enough that even Kon could hardly follow. That done, Kon had scanned through a few other cities before circling around to Gotham.

He isn’t listening for anyone in particular in Gotham, though. Seriously. He’s stopped trying to search for Robin, partially because he feels like Batman will somehow know, and mostly because, for all the ribbing, Kon actually wants to respect Robin’s privacy. Or, that’s not exactly it—as much as he is dying to know who Robin is under the mask, he wants Robin to tell him more than he wants to find out by snooping. It’s kind of ridiculous, because there’s no way Robin hasn’t already figured out Kon’s civilian name and probably hacked his class schedule and usual order at Pizzaville to boot. Robin’s a freak like that. But still, using super hearing or x-ray vision to figure out more than Robin’s willing to share just feels bad, so Kon’s stuck waiting for the world’s most paranoid teenage bird to decide to trust him with a name.

Still, he lets his hearing skate past Gotham because it’s not like anyone can stop him from just listening, and that’s when he hears it.

Not many people call for Superboy, is the thing. And even if there were thousands of people crying for his attention, something about this makes him jerk up, concentrating entirely on the voice.

There’s nothing else, though, just the cut-off Superboy! and a crash of water over an erratic heartbeat. Kon swings back through the guest room window and pulls on his suit in a rush, taking an extra second to catch the bedside table before it topples over from burst of movement—Clark is off-world, but no need to make a racket and alert Lois and Jon—and scribble out a note that says Went out for a minute, back soon!! before leaping into the night.

Kon pulls to a stop above the dark water of Gotham Harbor seconds later. There’s a yacht to his right, all lights and music and obvious partying, and for a moment it seems like there’s nothing below him, the surface of the water choppy and undisturbed—but Kon focuses past the music and finds a heartbeat a few yards down. Oh, wonderful.

He has just enough time to make a face and clamp his mouth firmly shut before plunging in. Luckily he doesn’t need to open his eyes, his hearing guiding him enough to hook his arms under someone’s shoulders. The person is just starting to move, shocked out of their shock, so Kon makes sure he’s got them secured before launching out of the water. Between the general gloom of Gotham and the fact that Kon’s jacket—which is soaking wet now, great—blends in with the darkness he’s hopeful no one sees them, but he still touches down somewhere deserted, a concrete strip behind a lattice of docks that appear to be under construction.

The person in his arms starts squirming in earnest, so Kon drops them. They land on the concrete, surprisingly graceful, and spin to face Kon.

“Oh,” Kon says, “it’s you.”

Tim Drake, former kidnappee, stares back at him and then immediately doubles over, coughing up water. Kon winces. He’s heard enough stories about Gotham pollution to be grateful he kept his own mouth shut when he dove in. He debates whacking Tim on the back, but he doesn’t know if that actually helps, so instead he flies a few quick loops around the abandoned docks just to make sure no one noticed them and touches back down next to Tim.

“What,” Tim wheezes when he’s done hacking up half the marina. He twists to sit heavily on the wet concrete, looking up at Kon and blinking hard. “What—what are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be in Gotham.”

“‘Thank you, Superboy,’” Kon says. “‘It was so nice of you to save me from drowning in the harbor, Superboy.’”

Tim’s eyebrows pinch together. He’s shivering, rolling tremors with each shifting breeze. It’s late July, and Gotham is muggy and hot even at night, but Tim is soaked in maybe-radioactive water, so. Kon feels at least a tiny bit bad for him. “But you aren’t, um,” Tim says, and seems to think very hard. His words are a bit slurred, and oh, he’s drunk. Kon isn’t sure if he should be annoyed at apparently being treated as a superpowered Uber right now or not. “You’ll get in trouble, is what I mean,” Tim finishes. “For being here. And also thank you. How…?”

“You called for me.”

Tim’s eyes widen. “You heard that?”

“Yeah,” Kon says. “You can’t just do that, by the way. I'm not your personal rescue service. You’re lucky I was even listening, or you’d be out there doggy paddling right now.”

”I can swim,” Tim says, even though that’s so not the point. “I can swim free stroke and backstroke, one of my nannies was a, a coach. You really heard me?”

“It's not like I'm here sightseeing.” Kon waves at the harbor, the glittering skyline that somehow manages to look pretty and overwhelmingly menacing all at once.

“What did I say? When I…called?”

“You said, ‘Superboghlghdgh,’” Kon tells him. “I assume that’s when you hit the water.”

Tim keeps staring, eyes so round Kon has to resist the urge to knock on his forehead and ask if anyone’s home. “Oh,” Tim finally says. “Well. Whoops.”

Whoops. Kon arches an eyebrow. “Seriously, how much did you have to drink?”

“Just, like…” Tim trails off and starts counting on his fingers, which pretty much answers Kon’s question.

Kon resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose—a habit he can feel himself picking up from Robin, who probably picked it up from Batman—and does his due diligence, rummaging through the sounds from the party yacht across the harbor. No one seems to be missing Tim or calling his name, or scheming to throw more unsuspecting kids into the water, so it was probably just an accident. Okay. All right. The good news: The boy Kon rescued from that Delaware bunker last year is doing just fine, it seems, other than currently resembling a miserable wet cat. And Kon has technically just performed a rescue and used his super hearing to do it, so tonight’s training exercise could be considered a success.

The bad news: It was a very un-glamorous rescue, and now Kon is stuck with the aftermath.

For a moment he really wants to call Robin, partially so Rob can tell him what to do and partially because Kon hasn’t seen him in a minute—he has the sense that something happened recently in Rob’s life, his missions with the team more sporadic than usual, and there was the time last month that Kon found Rob sitting in the Tower rec room, the whites of his domino unblinking in the dark, and he hadn’t noticed Kon for four whole seconds which was, like, a record. He hadn’t said what was up, but he’d let Kon sit with him for a bit, and then Kon let him win at Mario Kart, so it was kind of like they’d talked about it except not at all. So Kon isn’t 100% sure how Rob would react to Kon showing up in Gotham unannounced, and also Nightwing had contacted the team at the top of the week saying Robin was on some sort of vacation and appointed himself the temporary contact for all things Bat-related. All in all, probably better to just handle this thing quietly and be done with it.

“Okay,” Kon says. “You need to get home. I’d offer you another lift, but as you pointed out I’m not exactly on a scheduled visit so I should probably keep the flying to a minimum.”

“Right.” Tim nods, then shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it. “You can go, I can home—I can get home myself.”

This would be a pretty sh*tty rescue if Kon left a shivering, tipsy kid all alone on some shady dock. In Gotham. “Yeah, I don’t think so. Can you get a ride?”

“No, no,” Tim says. He pushes to his feet, again with more grace than Kon would’ve expected. His eyes catch a strip of light, making them look startlingly blue in the dark. “I’ll just find a. You know. A tunnel. They’re all in…under…they’re all over. Perfectly safe.”

“Doesn’t your city have, like, a giant crocodile in the sewers.”

Tim makes a dismissive noise, waving his hand. “Not really a crocodile.”

It’s been a few months, but Kon is pretty sure Tim wasn’t this annoying last time Kon rescued him. “Well, it’s still not happening. Just call someone. Call a cab.”

“A cab? Here? I’d have better odds with Killer Croc.”

“Oh my god,” Kon says. “Then call your parents, if you’re so picky.”

Tim blanches, a minute twitch around his eyes. Kon sighs. Okay, yeah, he probably wouldn’t want to call his—well, whatever the Kents are to him, either, in a world where he could get drunk and get caught partying.

“Or a friend,” Kon says. “A distant relative. A teacher. A mortal enemy. Surely there’s someone who can come get you, or I guess we’re sitting here until sunup.”

“No,” Tim says. “No, I can…I’ll just.” He seems to count on his fingers again and grimaces. “There’s…someone.”

“Okay,” Kon says pointedly.

With another face Tim reaches into his pocket, struggling to free his phone from his waterlogged pants.

“Here,” Kon says. “Just use mine.”

It’s probably a stupid idea to hand over his own phone, but he can always get Robin to wipe it or change the number or get him a new one later if it gets compromised. It used to make Kon uncomfortable, when Robin would just—get them stuff, him and Bart and Cassie and anyone else on the team, casually gifting gadgets and tech and mundane things like phones that people like the Kents would have to actually save for. But Kon started to relax after the third phone replacement, because it is an unfortunate hazard of the job and it’s not like he wants the Kents to have to pay for it, and after he noticed the quiet way Rob’s shoulders loosened when he watched his teammates eat pizza he bought, enough for Bart and Kon and Cassie’s metabolism. It reminded Kon of Mrs. Kent, weirdly, but not in a bad way. Just in a way.

Tim frowns down at Kon’s phone for a few seconds. Then, with a resigned sigh, he dials a number.

Someone on the other end picks up with a curt, “Who the hell is this.”

“It’s, uh, it’s Tim. Sorry.”

A pause. “You in trouble?”

“No.” Tim shakes his head. “My phone is…wet.”

“What?”

“But it’s okay, it’s waterproof up to ten meters, so it should be—all the data should be fine, you’ll still get to be annoyed about it.”

“Kid, what the hell are you talking about.”

Kon waves to get Tim’s attention. He points at the harbor, then himself, then makes a circle with his hand to encompass the whole situation. Get to the point.

“Oh,” Tim says into the phone. “Yeah, um. Could you. Pick me up.”

“I thought you were out of commission this week,” the person on the other end says.

“It’s a personal pickup.” Tim sways a little, and Kon has to stop himself from reaching out to—brace him, or something. “I need to be picked up, personally. Because I’m not allowed to go in any tunnels due to a misconception about crocodiles, and there are no cabs around this end of the marina, because they never fixed it after the frozen…the freeze thing. Not the last one. The one before that.”

“If you’re trying not to sound like you’re luring me into a trap, it’s not working.”

Tim presses his free palm to his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. “Never mind,” he says. “Never mind, I’ll call someone else.”

“The hell you will,” the person says. “I'll be there in five.”

The call disconnects. Tim hands the phone back to Kon. “He totally thinks I got mugged. That’s so…that’s so embarrassing.”

“More embarrassing than falling off a yacht?” Kon asks.

“Yes,” Tim says.

Kon is starting to think everyone in Gotham might be more than a little off their rocker. “What were you doing on the yacht anyway? Other than flagrant underage drinking.”

“Oh, you know,” Tim says, and suddenly looks shifty, or as shifty as it’s possible to look while also looking half-drowned and pathetic.

Kon narrows his eyes. “Did you get kidnapped again?”

“No,” Tim says. “No way. I haven’t been kidnapped in, like. Like a month.”

“What.”

“Months,” Tim says quickly. “Definitely months. Not a regular thing. I’m very normal.”

“That has not been my experience,” Kon tells him.

“No, I am,” Tim insists. He’s squeezing at his hair, trying to wring out the ends, which only causes bits of his hair to stick up and doesn’t help Kon take him more seriously. “I was at a party. It’s normal, to go to parties on your birthday. Ask anyone.”

Kon blinks. “It’s your birthday?”

“Yes,” Tim says, “see,” like he’s just won the argument.

“sh*t, dude,” Kon says, putting his hands on his hips and glancing between soaking-wet Tim and the vague direction of the party yacht. “That’s some bad birthday luck.”

Tim shrugs. “Could be worse.”

“Yeah, you could get eaten by a giant crocodile.”

“I told you, he’s not actually a crocodile,” Tim mutters.

“At what point in the process of eating you does the distinction stop mattering?”

Tim huffs what might be a laugh but doesn’t reply, now focusing on wringing out the bottom of his shirt, and Kon is suddenly glad it’s dark and he’s facing away from the inland lights. It’s just—Kon has very good night vision, and when Tim sort of laughed he also sort of looked at Kon through his wet eyelashes and his eyes are. Blue, as previously noted. Kon has complicated feelings about the color blue, but Tim’s eyes are a nice blue, and they are suddenly reminding Kon of last time, of Tim looking at Kon with that sad-fond expression as Kon held him in his arms.

Get it together, he tells himself, cursing the Clark Kent half of his genes that blushes at the drop of a hat. You’ve carried plenty of people before, and aliens, and, like, kittens, and most of them also had eyes. Maybe it’s that he just doesn’t usually get to talk this much with the people he rescues. There’s something kind of fun about it, beyond his annoyance, and it’s crossing wires in his brain.

Still, his crossed wires want to offer Tim his jacket, even though his jacket is just as drenched as the rest of their clothes, and Kon is just pondering if he can somehow use super speed to dry it (maybe if he shakes it fast enough to separate the water droplets from the jacket material?) when he hears an engine approaching. It’s a motorcycle, expertly weaving across the abandoned dockyard and stopping at the bottom of their ramp.

“All right, we’re gonna make this quick,” the driver says as Kon turns, and—

“You,” Kon snarls, lunging forward.

Tim makes a sound in the back of his throat, a choked off khh, and then says, “Superboy, wait—!” and jumps right onto Kon’s back.

That’s enough to jolt Kon into stopping. People don’t—he’s not—this crazed piggyback is the kind of harebrained thing Impulse or Robin would do during a battle, but Tim is a civilian and civilians tend to be skittish around Kon, around the half-alien clone who hasn’t yet earned the same trust as his blueprint, especially when he is so clearly angry. His shoulders are rigid under Tim's arms, wound up, and it would be so easy to throw Tim halfway across the harbor with a twitch of his hand.

“It's okay,” Tim is babbling in Kon’s ear, “he’s okay, he’s cool—well, not cool, I wouldn’t say cool, he only thinks he’s cool, but it’s fine. We’re all fine, all good, everyone’s all—fine.”

Kon stays where he is, frozen and still glaring at freaking Red Hood, who has the grace to look a bit startled. His helmet is off, tucked under one arm, and he has one leg planted on the ground and the other slung over the idling motorbike as he blinks at them through a domino.

“Tim,” Red Hood says slowly, “you didn’t mention you had a friend with you.”

It clicks into place. Kon turns his head, feeling Tim's icy-wet hair against his cheek. “He's your ride?”

“Uhh,” Tim says, sounding oddly dazed. “Uhh. Yeah. Sorry. He was closest.”

“Careful, now,” Red Hood drawls. “You’ll hurt my feelings.”

“That won’t be all that gets hurt, if you don’t stay where you are,” Kon warns.

“I'm shaking in my boots,” Red Hood says flatly. “The hell are you even doing here, anyway?”

“None of your business.”

“Whatever,” Red Hood says. “As long as you’re leaving. Yo, Tim. You coming or not? I was in the middle of something.”

A moment ago Tim was the one clinging to Kon; now Kon shifts, looping his arms under Tim's knees as Tim tries to climb down. “Hey,” Tim protests.

“You’re not going with him.”

Red Hood sighs. “Look, I don’t know what kind of mess you two got into here, but just let me take the kid home and you can call it a night, okay?”

“I didn't pull him out of the water just to hand him over to a violent crime lord,” Kon hisses.

Tim is patting Kon’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I'm still technically a minor, only—only sixteen. Hood doesn’t hurt kids.”

“You’re fifteen,” Red Hood says.

“No,” Tim says. “Nope. Wrong. Your deductive—your deducing—your detectiving, you should work on that.”

“Holy sh*t,” Red Hood says, “are you drunk?”

“I am not drunk. I am tipsy.”

Red Hood looks gleeful even through his domino. “Oh my god. You-know-who is going to be pissed. Hey, don’t let him find out until I’m around, okay, I want to record his reaction.”

“You suck,” Tim says. “I regret you. I regret this. I’m taking the tunnels home.”

“Absolutely not,” Kon and Hood say at the same time, except Hood punctuates his with the f*ck. Kon has to tighten his hold again, because Tim somehow manages to wriggle halfway out of his grip while he’s talking. “Just—listen,” Kon says. “No tunnels, and no Red Hood. It doesn’t matter what he says and it doesn’t matter how old you are, because the not hurting kids thing, it’s a lie.”

“Uh, no, it’s not,” Red Hood says. “It’s like my whole deal, actually.”

“You hurt my friend,” Kon says.

Red Hood goes still. On Kon’s back, so does Tim.

“You broke into”—our home, Kon almost says, except that’s not really true, it just feels like it sometimes when Bart and Cassie and Robin are there, when there’s pizza in the fridge and their gear scattered around the common area and his favorite people all in one room, his first family before Clark decided he was worth bringing back to the farm, a place that had been empty and off-balance without Robin for months after Red Hood’s attack—“a safe place, and you found my friend and you hurt him. You just hurt him for no reason. The ‘I don’t hurt kids’ thing might get you a pass with everyone else, but it doesn’t work on me. Not when I’m the one who cleaned up the blood.”

Tim makes a noise by his ear, small and upset, and okay, Kon probably shouldn’t have unloaded that all in front of a civilian, but Tim called Hood and this is the closest Kon has been since it happened. Kon knows there’s more to the Tower story, more to the Red Hood story as a whole—Robin said as much, even if he wouldn’t say exactly what, just that they had worked things out and Red Hood was more ally than enemy to the Bats now, that the Tower attack was an anomaly and wouldn’t be an issue in the future. Robin had explained all of this over video, from his base in Gotham, where he was still healing from more than one broken bone. As if that was that.

Kon trusts Robin. He does. But he also hasn’t been face to face with Red Hood since last year’s attack—and Kon wasn’t even face to face with him then, Kon was useless while Robin was hurt—and it turns out trusting Robin’s word that things were smoothed over with Red Hood hasn’t, in fact, smoothed over any of Kon’s own fury.

“Okay,” Red Hood is saying in front of him. He has the hand not holding the helmet up, fingers splayed, somewhere between taking an oath and calming a frightened animal. “Look. You’re not wrong. That—I did do that. And I’m sorry. But we’ve worked it out, me and your…friend.” The whites of his domino shift minutely to Tim, and Kon resists the urge to do something stupid, like bare his teeth.

“So you’re saying you just filled your quota on beating up teenagers,” Kon says instead of doing that.

“Well, pretty much,” Red Hood says, and oh, Kon wants to punch him at full strength. Kon wants to—let Hood get his life ground to a halt while he waits for his injuries to heal, except it wouldn’t even be a decent parallel because Hood would actually deserve it—

“Superboy,” Tim murmurs in his ear.

Kon shudders and reins himself in. There’s a civilian here. This isn’t about Kon. He levels a new glare at Red Hood and keeps his voice steady. “And I’m just supposed to trust you.”

Red Hood sort of shrugs, which doesn’t cover the sudden tension in his shoulders. “No, but you can trust the kid clinging to you like a koala right now. He called me, didn’t he?”

“And that makes it okay?”

“Yes,” Red Hood says, frustration twining into his voice. “It does. Right, Tim? Tell him.”

“I can’t,” Tim says miserably.

“So it’s not okay?” Kon says, shifting. Maybe he can’t get away with attacking Hood in the middle of Gotham, but he could make an argument for snapping that motorcycle in half.

Tim throws one hand over his face, the other arm still looped around Kon’s neck. “It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s very fine, everything’s fine, everything is great, other than me because I probably ingested some horrible experimental chemicals and am going to develop actual superpowers now, except they’ll probably be something gross and swamp-themed and I’ll have to go eke out a miserable lonely swamp existence as a disgusting swamp creature, but you guys, you guys are fine, and don’t need to fight each other.”

There’s a pause while Kon, and presumably Red Hood, process that.

“You fell in a harbor, not a swamp,” Red Hood finally says. “Your powers will be ocean-themed.”

Tim shoots him a sour look. “That’s not the point.”

“That’s fidelity to genre.”

“You’re fidelity to—whatever,” Tim says. “See if I go take pictures for you again.”

“Yet again, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hood says.

Tim drops his forehead to Kon’s shoulder. “You will,” he says. “Look. Look, can we just, can I go get stabbed by Doc’s needles now so I can get some dry clothes and not die of swamp poisoning?”

And, right, Tim really does need to get checked over. Kon meets Hood’s masked gaze and can see that, for the moment, they’re at least in agreement about that.

“Listen,” Kon says. “I don’t trust you. And I’m not just letting you take off with him. Not alone, at least.”

“Well, you’re not fitting on my bike,” Hood says. “But I can give you the address of Tim’s clinic if you want to meet us there.”

Kon weighs his options for a moment. Flying with someone in his arms runs the risk of being seen, in a city of Bat surveillance. But by himself he could move a bit faster, stick to the shadows, and probably get somewhere unnoticed again. “How far away is it?”

“Twenty minutes by bike.”

“Make it fifteen,” Kon says, “or I’ll come looking for you.”

Red Hood visibly rolls his eyes. “Fine. Hand over the Creature from the Black Lagoon and let’s get going.”

This time when Tim wriggles out of Kon’s hold, Kon doesn’t stop him. But he does—gently, with human strength only—catch Tim’s elbow as he starts forward.

“Look,” Kon says, low enough that Hood shouldn’t hear him. “If there’s any trouble—if you need anything before you get to the clinic, just, shout for me again. Okay?”

Tim blinks up at him, then gives him a small, bleary smile. “I’ll be fine. Really. But…thanks.”

Kon nods and drops his hand.

“Park Row,” Hood says as Tim clambers onto the bike behind him, “intersection of Fourth and Barrows. Start your timer.”

The bike revs and wheels around. Kon pulls up a map, orients himself, and lets Gotham blur away as he takes off into the city.

◇

Hood and Tim pull up to the clinic at the twelve-minute mark. The nurse at the front desk desk doesn’t even blink as Red Hood walks into the thankfully empty lobby with a waterlogged teenager and a decidedly non-Gotham superhero, just raises her eyebrows and picks up the desk phone. “Dr. Thompkins, it’s your favorite patient,” she says dryly into the receiver.

“Hey,” Hood protests. “I’m not even here for me. I’m being a good samaritan.”

“That’s nice,” the nurse says. “Are you going to make my life easy and fill out an intake form tonight?”

“Sorry, Patty. This one’s better off the books.”

Kon sees Tim shoot Hood a grateful look. Tim’s shivering, his hair spiky and half-dried from the wind, but it appears somewhere between the docks and the clinic Hood gave Tim his jacket, which Kon grudgingly admits was a good move. The sleeves nearly reach Tim’s fingertips and it looks comically bulky on his frame, but it also looks warm. Kon knows the value of a good leather jacket, so. It’s good that someone had a non-soaked one to give to Tim, he supposes.

A shuffle from the hall, and a doctor with graying hair slips into the lobby. “I hear we have guests.”

“Hi, Leslie,” Tim says glumly. “I fell in the harbor again.”

“He’s also drunk,” Hood adds.

“Tipsy.”

“For the record, I had no hand in either condition,” Hood tells the doctor. “I’m just the chauffeur.”

“Suck-up,” Tim says under his breath, and dodges when Hood elbows him.

“I see,” the doctor says, her sharp eyes flickering over Kon and Hood before settling back on Tim. “I suppose you’d better come on back.”

Tim disappears into the clinic as Hood exchanges a few more back-and-forths with the nurse about forms, and Kon…Kon could leave, probably. Hood kept his end of the deal, and this does seem like an actual clinic. Most rescues end here—handing someone off to friends or family or medical professionals. This was where Kon left Tim last time, in the back of an ambulance.

He makes his way to a plastic chair and sits.

A minute later Hood joins him, scrolling through his phone. “Okay, spill,” he says to Kon without looking at him. “I got some of it from Tim, and believe me when I say I won’t ever let him live this down, but what were you really doing out there? So I can keep my story straight when I have to lie to the Big Bad Bat later.”

“Nothing,” Kon says. At Hood’s disbelieving eyebrow: “Seriously, nothing. I got there maybe ten minutes before you did. He yelled for me as he hit the water, and I just happened to hear.”

“Just happened, huh.”

“Yeah,” Kon insists, irritated, because Hood is clearly insinuating something and—obviously nothing else happened. “I’ve only met him once. I just wanted him to get a ride home because I didn’t trust him to make it anywhere himself, especially when he started talking about tunnels.”

Hood stares at him for another moment, then breaks out laughing. He hunches forward with it, one hand pressed to his knee, and it’s like he suddenly looks years younger, something almost childlike in the curve of his cheek. “Huh,” he says, still laughing. “Huh. Well, I’m officially claiming it as my right to laugh at you again later. Make a note somewhere.”

“No,” Kon says, just to be contrary.

Hood shrugs, still grinning, and goes back to his phone as it buzzes. Kon takes a moment to check his own messages. Nothing—Lois hasn’t noticed his absence yet, which is good.

“Well, sh*t,” Hood says next to him, peering at his screen. “The kid really did take pictures.”

“What?”

Hood shakes his head. “Nothing. Just that our Timmy’s just been busy tonight, apparently.” Something about the way he says it sounds almost impressed. “I should’ve guessed he’d be up to something.”

I fell in the harbor again, Tim had said, and the doctor hadn’t questioned it. “He does this a lot?” Kon asks.

“Hm?” Hood grunts, typing on his phone one-handed. Kon can’t make out the screen and doesn’t want to crane his neck too obviously.

“Tim,” Kon says. “He gets into trouble a lot?”

Hood makes a noise somewhere between a snort and another laugh. “You could say that.” He glances at Kon. “He’s a good kid, though. Let’s just say, he made some real stupid choices tonight, but he probably had a reason. Maybe even a halfway decent one.”

“I mean, I guess,” Kon says. “The fact that it’s his birthday is probably enough.”

Hood goes still again. It’s a very Bat and Bat-adjacent thing to do, Kon has noticed. “It’s Tim’s birthday?”

“Apparently.”

“Was he with anyone?” Hood asks. “Earlier?”

“I don’t know,” Kon says. “Maybe at the party?”

“No, his friends wouldn’t have been there.” Hood sounds distracted. “And his dad is…and Alfie is…sh*t.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I’m going to guess this was a pretty sh*tty birthday.”

“That’s what I said.”

Hood starts typing on his phone again. Kon fights the urge to let his hearing wander back through the clinic, because that would definitely be crossing a line, but he’s itching to know if Tim is okay. And also just itching in general, because his suit is reaching that prickly stage of half-damp that makes him want to do a few laps around the globe just to dry off.

“Look,” Hood says abruptly, putting his phone face-down on his thigh. “About Robin.”

Kon’s shoulders tense. “What.”

“I meant it back there, when I said I was sorry. I am.” Hood drums his fingers on the back of his phone, then seems to realize what he’s doing and stops. “I won’t try to make excuses for what happened, but. You should know it won’t happen again. He’s like—sort of—a brother to me, now.”

“People can hurt their brothers,” Kon says.

Hood grimaces. “Yeah. Well. I won’t. You don’t have to believe me, but I won’t.” He clears his throat. “And I won’t hurt Tim, either.”

Kon considers this. Hood’s heartbeat is steady, if a bit elevated, but he looks uncomfortable enough to warrant that. “How do you know Tim?” Kon says, instead of offering any sort of absolution for what happened to Robin. That’s not his to give. Or withhold, he supposes. He still doesn’t have to like Hood, though.

“Mutual friend,” Hood says. “Kid needs someone to look out for him. I didn’t think that someone should be me, but I’m kind of re-evaluating that right now if this is what he’s getting up to in his spare time.”

Before Kon can follow up on what kind of mutual friend a trust fund teenager can have with a crime lord, his own phone buzzes.

[Saturday, 12:03am]
robin
hey hood texted
yuo can trust him 👍

sb
okay. if you say so

robin
👍👍

sb
hey since the cat’s apparently out of the bag
any chance you’re in gotham and back from your no-capes vacation?

He sees Rob’s typing bubble appear and disappear for a brief second, but no reply comes. Robin still hasn’t messaged by the time Tim emerges from the back with the gray-haired doctor.

Tim sees them in the lobby and does a double take. “You’re—still here? Both of you?”

Kon feels himself flush again for no good reason. Luckily Hood responds, saying, “And waiting with bated breath, yes. What’s the verdict?”

“Oh.” Tim looks pale, but he’s no longer shivering, which is good. “Uh, I’m all clear. Still one hundred percent human.”

“Debatable,” Hood says.

“And you’re not in the clear yet,” the doctor says sternly. “You’re in the observation period for another week, and then if you take all your medicine, you’ll be in the clear.”

“I know, I know,” Tim says. “Thanks, Leslie.”

The doctor points at Hood. “It’s a five-day course of pills. Make sure he follows it. And make sure he drinks plenty of water if he doesn’t want to learn about hangovers the hard way. And I better not see him drunk in my clinic again, or I will be informing the proper channels.” Tim cringes. “And you,” the doctor adds, shifting her focus to Kon. “You better not have had anything to do with this.”

“I swear,” Kon says, feeling more intimidated than when he was facing down Red Hood.

“Drink responsibly in a safe environment or not at all,” the doctor continues. “Understand? The world’s dangerous enough without you kids being stupid on top of it. Hood, that goes for you too. I swear to god.”

“Totally,” Kon says.

“Aye aye, Doc.” Hood salutes, standing. “Come on,” he says to Tim, and for a moment his voice drops the hard edges it’s carried all evening. “Let’s get you home.”

◇

Kon figures meeting Tim at his house and seeing him through the front door will officially appease the anxious, unsettled thing inside his chest, but when Tim and Hood arrive and unlock the door the place is dark and silent. Tim apparently lives in a penthouse apartment in an upscale neighborhood, and Kon’s footsteps echo off the linoleum entryway like he’s just walked into an empty classroom or office building.

Tim flicks on a hall light and squints, kicking off his shoes. “Okay, I’m here. You’re free to go.” He sounds weary. His eyes keep flicking to Kon in the entryway, blinking each time like he’s startled to find Kon still there, or there at all. “Thank you for, you know.” He waves a hand. “Seriously.”

“Yeah,” Kon says, still feeling distinctly uncomfortable for some reason. “Uh, don’t forget to drink water.”

“You’ll let your uncle know about the pills?” Hood says suddenly, rifling through a pile of junk mail on the entryway table.

Tim yawns. “Yeah, of course.”

“Your uncle is staying here, right? He moved in, I’m remembering that correctly? You know I have those memory issues sometimes.”

“Yes,” Tim says slowly.

Hood hums, pacing deeper into the penthouse. “Maybe I should talk to him. Make sure you got Doc’s instructions in order, considering your brain is all fermented right now.”

“Uh. No, that’s not necessary.” Tim glances at Kon, then back at Hood. “I’m pretty sure I’m not even tipsy anymore.”

“That’s good. We don’t have to tell him about that part, just the toxic sludge part.” It sounds like Hood is being nice, but Tim’s expression keeps tightening.

“What is it,” Kon says. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing,” Tim says, too quickly. “Hood, cut it out.”

“Right,” Hood says. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s nothing. There’s probably a really good reason your Uncle Ed couldn’t come pick you up tonight.”

“I didn’t want to get in trouble,” Tim says. “Obviously.”

“Obviously.” Hood turns back to face Tim. “But then you also didn’t bother sneaking back in.”

At that, Tim winces.

“Tim-o-thee,” Hood says, voice chillingly pleasant. “Where is Sir Edward?”

Tim won’t meet Hood’s eyes, or Kon’s, when Kon tries. Huh. Kon does a quick scan of the apartment. “There’s…no one else here,” he confirms. Is Tim’s uncle some sort of bad guy? Is that how he knows Hood? Does it have something to do with why Kon’s gut is telling him something’s not right about this picture, this echoey penthouse?

“So I’ll ask again,” Hood says. “Or, if you don’t want to tell me, maybe I should call Babs and see if she knows. Surely she could find out quickly enough, right? Unless you want to avoid all that and just share with the class.”

Kon expects Tim to snap back, the way he has been doing all evening, but instead his face flickers through multiple tiny expressions before settling on straight-up exhaustion. He buries his face in his hands and makes a quiet, miserable sound. “…It's his day off.”

Kon has no idea what that means, but Hood does. “f*cking knew it,” Hood says.

“You did not,” Tim says, somehow sounding indignant through his hands.

“I absolutely did. I stalked you real good before—” An uneasy glance at Kon. “I did my research, kid, there was never any uncle.”

“Sure there was,” Tim says, muffled but even. “He was simply away at a meditation retreat the last five years. He came back when I called after the accident. He doesn’t really want to take care of me, but he’s perfectly adequate at it while pursuing his real goal of re-acquiring DI stock in my father’s absence and putting together a nice retirement package for himself. Meanwhile I get to stay out of the system and we don’t bother each other.”

As Tim talks Hood looks at Kon with a Can you believe this sh*t face. Kon responds with something in the neighborhood of No, because I literally don’t know what’s going on, and also we are not close enough to be communicating like this so knock it off.

Hood turns back to Tim. “That bullsh*t what you told our mutual friend?”

Tim lifts his head. His expression is blank now, like he’d taken a whiteboard eraser to it; for some reason it sends a new frisson of unease down Kon’s spine. “It’s a good story.”

“Tim, why,” Hood says, sounding exasperated. “He would’ve chucked some lawyers at it and you could’ve stayed at the manor.”

“No,” Tim says.

“No, because what, you didn’t think your allowance would be big enough? Because there aren’t enough guest rooms over there? Or because you just have to make things difficult?”

“No, because I’m not you.”

A beat. Hood throws another glance at Kon, but this time it only mirrors Kon’s bewilderment.

“I was never—that was never the deal,” Tim continues. “I don’t need him. I’m not his—” He cuts off. “I’m not you.”

Hood twitches. “The hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” Tim fists his hands around the cuffs of Hood’s jacket, which he hasn’t taken off. Hood should look smaller without it, and Tim should look bigger, more solid with it on, but Hood still looms and Tim still looks like he could be toppled with a feather. Kon desperately wants to be anywhere but here, but there’s no way he’s walking—or flying—out the door until he gets some answers. “It’s not like, an insult or whatever you’re thinking,” Tim says. “I just mean that the situation is different. I’m not family. I’m not anyone’s responsibility. This was my problem, so I fixed it. There. Mystery solved. You can go now. I’ll have your coat dry-cleaned and returned later.”

Hood opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything. For the first time tonight, he seems utterly lost.

Well, join the club. “Hold on,” Kon says. “And back up. Tim’s uncle was never here?”

“His—Tim’s uncle never existed,” Hood says, sounding off-kilter.

Kon blinks. “At all?” And his dad is… Hood had said earlier, in the kind of tone that told Kon his follow-up question should not be And where are Tim’s parents. Kon has to suppress a wince, remembering what he said to Tim on the docks earlier tonight. Then call your parents, if you’re so picky. No wonder Tim had flinched at that.

“Like it’s my fault passports are so easy to forge,” Tim is saying. “But yeah, you caught me. Point to Red Hood and Superboy. Seriously, are we done n—”

Kon holds up a hand. “Did someone put you up to this?”

Tim blinks. “What?”

“Lying about your uncle, did someone make you do that?” Kon’s first guess would be whatever mutual friend connected Tim to Hood in the first place, but Hood hadn’t been in on the ruse, so maybe not. But there are plenty of reasons why someone might make a kid lie about their living situation.

Tim frowns, which is relieving only in that it puts some inkling of expression back on his face. “No? I did it myself.” At whatever he sees on Kon’s face he adds, defensive: “Look, it’s a temporary situation. My dad is—he can’t take care of me right now, and the only actual relatives I have live in Nevada and understandably didn’t want anything to do with all this considering Dad’s not dead and there’d be no money in it, and playing the Gotham foster system is like flipping Two-Face’s coin except both sides are you’re f*cked and I didn’t have time for that. So when my wayward Uncle Edward showed up it just made things easier all around.”

Kon processes that. That’s…not so bad, actually. Not ideal, but not, like, A supervillain is holding my dad hostage and is making me lie to cover it up or even Because it’s easier to party this way. Tim’s heart rate hadn’t changed as he spoke, so he’s probably telling the truth. But— “How did you get a fake uncle to actually show up?”

“Craigslist,” Tim says, apparently 100% serious. “I mean, obviously I covered my tracks after the fact and had to tweak a few documents, but I literally just hired an actor. And he gets paid very well, so everyone wins.”

“Holy sh*t,” Kon says. He can’t help it. “That’s—kind of amazing.”

Tim brightens a little. “Right? I mean, no one even noticed.”

“Excuse me,” Red Hood says, “I noticed. And you”—jabbing a finger at Kon—“stop encouraging him.”

Tim waves a hand. “It doesn’t matter if you noticed, you don’t care. That’s why I called you in the first place. For all intents and purposes I totally pulled it off.”

“So is he just, like, on call?” Kon asks. “The actor, you just call him when your uncle is supposed to be somewhere?”

“Basically. Except on Fridays, because he does a theater workshop in Blüdhaven, and if I call him on the weekends it’s considered OT.” Tim shrugs.

This guy is nuts, Kon thinks, awed. And also rich people in general are nuts. Maybe next time Mr. Kent’s tractor breaks down Kon should pick up a few fake relative gigs or something. “What’s the going rate for an uncle? Or like, a cousin? Is there some sort of standard fee?”

“No,” Red Hood says. “Whatever this conversation is, I’m ending it. Not relevant. And you.” He turns to Tim, arms crossed over his chest. “You think I don’t care?”

Tim raises an eyebrow. “Are you going to tell me that you do?”

“I do now.”

“Okay,” Tim says. “Well, don’t.”

“Yeah, no,” Hood says. “This is nuts even for you, kid.”

“It’s also none of your business.”

“I’m a crime lord who moonlights as a vigilante. Poking my nose in other people's business is literally what I do.” As if to emphasize his point, Hood pokes Tim right in the middle of the forehead. Tim rocks back with it, glaring. “Especially when that business involves a poor, helpless, sixteen-year-old civilian.”

“I will kill you,” Tim says.

“Please,” Red Hood says. “Try.”

“I’ll tell”—a tiny pause—“everyone about your favorite safehouse.”

“You don’t know my favorite safehouse.”

“Sure I do. Third floor walkup, has a stain that kinda looks like G. Gordon Godfrey on the west-facing wall.” The corner of Tim’s mouth quirks up. Kon watches, fascinated. “Nice alias on the lease, by the way.”

“What the f*ck,” Hood says. “What the—you’re a freak, you know that?”

“Yes,” Tim says. “And unless you want Nightwing crawling all over your artfully stained walls, you’ll leave my fake uncle in peace.”

Hood stares at him for another moment, then steps back. “Jesus,” he mutters.

Kon raises his hand. “I would like to know the location of Hood’s safehouse. For reference.”

Tim shakes his head. “I’m keeping it for leverage. That’s what’s happening here, that’s the whole point.” And then he just—deflates. He sits on one of the bottom steps of the curved staircase, shoulders slumped. “Look,” he says. “Thank you. Really, thank you for—for answering me when I called. Both of you. That’s.” He clears his throat. “I appreciate that. And I appreciate that neither of you, like, kicked the other one through a window or anything along the way. But now that we’re all on the same page, I’m really fine now, and I’m tired, and I need to take about three showers. So can we just call it a night?”

Kon hesitates. Tim does seem pretty much sober by now. He could probably manage by himself from here and be totally fine. And maybe Tim likes it this way, prefers being alone. But something about the hunch of Tim’s shoulders and the recent void of expression on his face, about the way the penthouse is empty-empty and not filled with strewn clothes or pizza boxes or whatever else Kon assumes a rich kid might leave lying around with no one telling him to pick up after himself, about the way Tim spent his birthday at some party where no one even missed him when he disappeared—it’s all telling Kon that’s probably not the case.

Kon and Hood share a look over Tim’s head, and he knows neither of them are leaving just yet.

“I don’t think so,” Kon says. “You’re supposed to be drinking a ton of water, and I haven’t seen you drink any so far.”

“So true, Superboy,” Hood says, turning abruptly toward the dark kitchen. Light flickers on in the doorway, followed by the sound of cabinets opening and closing.

“I don’t need a glass, I have a water bottle somewhere,” Tim calls. The noises don’t stop. “Hood, what are you doing now?”

“Making a cake,” Hood says from the kitchen, like duh. “A sh*tty cake, because you have the pantry of a first-year college student, but I hear birthdays only happen once a year so we’re working with what we’ve got.”

Tim raises his head, bewildered. “It’s after midnight. It’s not even my birthday anymore.”

“Stop making your loneliness complex everyone else’s problem,” Hood says. There’s a thump of dishware on the counter. “I want cake. Be a good host and invite Superboy for cake too, since he’s already here, and then go shower because you stink.”

Tim looks up at Kon with almost the exact same Can you believe this sh*t face Hood had earlier. This time Kon just shrugs one shoulder. “I like cake,” he says.

Tim keeps looking at him for another endless stretch of seconds. “Okay,” he says finally. “Then—okay. Please stay for cake.”

Kon feels himself grin. And it feels like the whole, ridiculous night has been worth it when he’s rewarded with Tim’s tiny smile in return.

◇

Kon gets home around two in the morning and promptly passes out until eight, when the smell of pancakes and coffee lures him to the farmhouse kitchen. Mrs. Kent doesn’t look surprised to see him, but does say, “I don’t think we were expecting you back from the city until later today, were we?” as she loads up a plate.

“I couldn’t miss your Saturday morning pancakes,” he says earnestly, taking a bite right there at the counter. He makes sure to chew and swallow before saying, “Mrs. Kent, what’s a good birthday present?”

Mrs. Kent gives him a Look over her shoulder. “What was that, dear?”

“Oh, um,” Kon says. “Ma?”

She smiles. “Yes, Conner?”

Kon saws off another bite but doesn’t take it yet. “What’s a good birthday present for someone? Like, someone you don’t know very well.” He’s been thinking about this for the approximately five minutes he’s been awake, since he opened his eyes and remembered birthday presents are a thing. He’s even given a few of them himself, but always to someone he actually knows, like Bart or Cassie or Clark or the Kents. (Robin, annoyingly, always manages to dodge the birthday question, and also seems to have every cool gadget before anyone else, but Kon did get him a pretty hilarious set of knockoff Bat action figures—Ratman, Midnight Feather, and Pigeon—for the team’s secret santa swap last year. Robin pretended like he hated them, but he still uses them as stand-in figures on the strategy board sometimes.) Also, crucially, Kon’s never given a gift to a random civilian before, unless passing along tupperwares of homemade scones to his teachers before summer break counts, which Kon doesn’t think it does. “Oh, and it’s a person who’s kind of rich, so they can probably buy a lot of things they want already.”

“Hmm,” Mrs.—Ma Kent hums, raising one eyebrow. “Does this have something to do with your late night adventure?”

“Late night adventure?” someone echoes. It’s Clark, appearing in the doorway that leads to the back porch. He looks tired, but whole, so whatever took the League off-world must have gone all right.

“Did you just get back?” Kon asks as Ma Kent pulls down another plate and starts filling it.

“About an hour ago, but we had to debrief a bit.” Clark yawns into his hand and steps inside, taking his plate of pancakes and kissing Ma Kent’s temple before he leans against the counter and levels Kon with the exact same eyebrow tilt as his mother. It’s like they practiced. “So these adventures, how late are we talking?”

Kon does not sigh into his pancakes, because he respects the pancakes too much for that. Lois must’ve clued Ma Kent in—Kon had zipped by the Metropolis apartment long enough to switch out his back soon note for a headed back to the farm! note, but he should’ve known they would put the pieces together anyway. No use lying, at least not entirely. Still, he shoves a bite into his mouth and chews, making Clark wait a minute before answering. “Not too late.” And then, because the cat’s halfway out of the bag and he kind of wants to see the look on Clark’s face, he says: “I stopped by Gotham for a bit.”

Clark doesn’t disappoint, his hand stilling on the syrup pitcher. “Gotham? Doing what?”

Kon waves a hand, biting back a grin. “Don’t worry, I didn’t run into any Bats.” Just one of their unfortunate associates, but he probably doesn’t have to mention that part.

“Okay,” Clark says. “But that’s not—why were you there? Is everything okay?”

And—Kon doesn’t want to admit it, but something warm sparks in his chest at that. There was a time, not too long ago, when he would’ve expected Clark to instantly lecture him. Back when Clark was white-knuckling his way through the fact of Kon’s existence and couldn’t seem to look at Kon without seeing every possible thing Kon could do wrong, and Kon couldn’t hear anything beyond how much Clark expected him to f*ck up.

Now, though, the first thing Clark does is assume Kon had a reason.

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” Kon says, twisting to set his plate back on the counter and get some coffee, casually avoiding Clark’s gaze until he’s sure his expression won’t betray the sudden sappy feelings tangled up inside him. “I was just there to pull Tim Drake out of the harbor.”

“Oh,” Clark says, then seems to actually process that. “Wait. Tim—how do you know Tim Drake?”

The way he says it makes Kon look back over, narrowing his eyes. “How do you know Tim Drake?”

Clark recovers quickly. “I’ve met Bruce Wayne through work,” he says evenly, and Kon can genuinely never decide if he likes or hates when Clark uses this weird Parental voice. “Tim is a friend of his family. Your turn.”

A friend of his family. Kon remembers Bruce Wayne at the police staging area in Metropolis last year, the relief on his face when he saw Tim after the rescue. The way he’d thanked Kon so sincerely that Kon (mostly) tossed his theory about Wayne being a minor supervillain. “Oh,” Kon says. “Well. I don’t know Tim, really, except that I found him when those Gotham kids got kidnapped last October.”

Clark blinks. “That's right.”

“I guess he remembered me,” Kon continues, “because he yelled my name—well, Superboy—right before he fell. And I was doing Find a—I was doing hearing exercises at the time, and just happened to catch it. I got to him pretty much right away, too, I could pinpoint his location exactly.”

Kon kind of expects Clark to be impressed with that, but Clark’s expression has gone weirdly intent. “Fell,” he repeats. It’s his Journalist Prodding for Information voice, which is at least better than his Trying to Parent voice.

And, right, that might sound worse than it is. “Just into the water,” Kon says quickly. “Which was gross, but he’s fine. He went to some yacht party for his birthday, except it sounds like he was there alone, and then he took a tumble over the rail and I pulled him out.”

“It was Tim’s birthday?” Clark sounds alarmed now.

“Yesterday? Yeah.”

Clark opens his phone. “Damn it,” he says to himself. To Kon: “He was definitely alone?”

“Yup.” Kon pops the p, because he knows it annoys Clark. Then he remembers it also might annoy Mrs.—Ma Kent, and glances over, apologetic, but she’s just watching the two of them with warm eyes. “Yeah, I mean, I don't think he really knew anyone at the party. At least no one was looking for him after. And then we went to his house—well, first to a clinic, because that water is disgusting, but then we got to Tim’s place and…” Now Kon hesitates.

Because in addition to birthday presents, and the fact that he has no evidence Tim had gotten any, Kon has also just been thinking about Tim. Not like—not like in general, but specifically replaying the first time they met, everything from Kon scooping him out of that bunker to handing him over to Bruce Wayne by the side of a road, and then last night, the way Tim had been surprised that Kon and Hood waited at the clinic, and the way their footsteps had echoed later in the penthouse doorway. The way the only person Tim could ask for a ride was Red Hood, of all people, even if Red Hood handled things better than Kon wanted to admit.

The way that, when he was in trouble, the person Tim had called for was Superboy. A hero he had only met once.

The objective, reasonable conclusion Kon keeps circling back to is that Tim Drake is probably fine. He’s rich and clearly resourceful, and seems to have things under control, other than whatever was going on last night. It really shouldn’t be Kon’s concern if a (newly) sixteen-year-old boy wants to live without supervision; Kon was running around without supervision at way less than that, technically.

But. It wasn’t great, is the thing. Kon just didn’t realize it at the time. But now that he’s lived at the Kent farm for almost a year, now that he knows—what it’s like, he guesses, to have adults he can call if he needs to, well. In retrospect, that time when he thought he could do everything himself wasn’t so great.

And to that point, Superman is currently eating pancakes next to him and waiting to hear what Kon is going to say next. Maybe this is how Kon can actually help, more than pulling Tim out of the harbor and making sure he didn’t get mugged by crocodiles on the way home.

“And, okay,” Kon continues. “Speaking of Bruce Wayne. Do you trust him?”

“Yes,” Clark says immediately.

“He’s like—a good person?”

“The best,” Clark says, in that stunningly sincere way only freaking Superman can pull off.

“Okay.” Kon fiddles with his fork. “Okay. Well. Apparently Tim’s supposed to be living with his uncle. But turns out the uncle doesn’t actually exist.”

Clark pauses in the process of setting his phone aside. “Pardon me?”

“Long story.” Sort of, but Kon isn’t about to give away all of Tim’s secrets. “Short version is, something happened to his dad and Tim wanted to stay out of the system, so he made up the uncle.”

“Made up the uncle,” Clark repeats.

“Yeah. And I don’t think he’s like, in danger or anything,” Kon adds quickly. “I just think…you said Bruce Wayne is his family friend. And Wayne was there when Tim got kidnapped in Metropolis, and he seemed really worried about Tim. And it sucks that Tim didn’t actually have an uncle to call when he was in trouble. So if you think it might help, if Wayne knew, then maybe you could…mention it to him. And he could check in on Tim.”

“Oh,” Clark says distantly, “yes. Bruce will be hearing about this.”

“Okay,” Kon says again, and the amount of relief he feels is probably normal. “Or—wait.” He thinks back to the kidnapping. “Do you know him better as Clark or as Superman?”

Clark opens his mouth. Closes it. “It depends.”

“Then, if you tell him, tell him as Superman, because Tim will definitely figure out I’m the one who blabbed. So, it would make sense that it would come from Superman.”

“Right,” Clark says. “That’s—good thinking.” He looks at Kon for another long moment. “Really, that’s good thinking. I’m glad you told me about Tim.”

Kon shrugs, face heating. Really, damn those Clark Kent genes. “Can’t pass up a chance to make Superman run an errand for me,” he says, and takes a quick bite of pancake.

Clark has his phone out again, tapping out something while shoveling the rest of his pancakes in his mouth in a move that is probably his worst superpower. He finishes in a blink and washes his plate just as fast, giving Ma Kent another kiss on his way back to the door. “Please tell Pa I’ll be over to help with the fence after lunch instead. And Kon, good job, really. Though,” Clark adds from the doorway, and there’s that Parental Attempt tone again, “you really should stay out of Gotham. Because, uh, Batman has his rules. And also it’s dangerous.”

“You’re leaving already?” Kon asks, still chewing the same bite. “Where are you going?”

“Gotham,” Clark says, and has the audacity to wink before disappearing out the door.

Kon finishes chewing. “Kids these days,” he says. “No manners whatsoever.”

“Kids indeed,” Ma Kent agrees, amused. “At least I still have one good, polite child who stays and appreciates my cooking.”

Okay, Kon glows a bit. Anyone would.

“Now don’t rush,” Ma Kent says. “But when you’re finished eating, get washed up and meet me out back. I think I have an idea for your present conundrum.”

◇

Ma Kent’s idea takes them out behind the barn, where there’s a little workshop connected to the woodshed. “I don’t use it much anymore,” she says, explaining that the workshop isn’t well insulated, too hot in the summer and far too cold in the winter, and her joints aren’t as forgiving as they used to be. “But I used to do quite a bit of woodworking, especially for special occasions. We didn’t always have money to spare for gifts, but I’ll let you in on a trade secret: you can make up a lot of mileage by making something by hand. I know for a fact the same principle applies to wealthy friends who can buy anything they want.”

“Really?” Kon asks, trying not to sound skeptical at the idea.

“If it’s from you, yes,” she says simply.

She directs Kon around the workshop, rolling up her sleeves and walking him through selecting a cut of wood and using the saw and planer. She heads back to the house around lunchtime, but Kon keeps going. He doesn’t use his heat vision or his super speed, working slowly and carefully, following Ma’s instructions to the letter. He gets a twinge in his neck from hunching over the work table without moving for so long, which wasn’t something he realized he could get. There’s something wholly calming about it, and wholly—mundane. Ever since he burst out of a glass tube at Cadmus, Kon has had to learn how to be normal in reverse. How to fold himself down into the outline of a human, because being other, being more, was his baseline. Instead of pushing past his own limits he’s had to create limits and remember them, mapping out various layers of himself that were acceptable, that could exist in the field, at the Tower, in the Kents’ kitchen, in a school classroom. He rarely gets a chance to feel normal without trying.

Usually Robin is the one who helps with the limits thing. Bart and Cassie and the other Teen Titans aren’t, as a rule, pinnacles of normalcy themselves. Kon is more likely to test boundaries with them, like when he and Bart race laps around San Francisco or he and Cassie fly up on overcast days and turn the wild cloudtop landscape into an obstacle course. But Robin was the first one to find Kon after a bad mission and teach him a set of breathing exercises, which somehow helped even though Kon doesn’t actually need to breathe. Robin is the one who seems to know when Kon is about to hit too hard or fly in too fast, who will murmur Kon under his breath or call out Superboy as a warning. And Kon will listen, because it’s Robin.

Not that Robin himself is normal. Rob’s an absolute weirdo, which Kon means in the best way, and will careen past his own limits until he physically collapses, which has happened more than Kon would like. But Robin knows his teammates better than they know themselves. He knows how to help them stay in control, how to understand their abilities so they get to choose their boundaries rather than fear a lack of them. It didn’t take long for Kon to figure out that Robin is used to keeping people in check. Being aware of his partners at all times, both physically and mentally. Never not being five steps ahead of everyone else. No wonder the guy has a whole fridge for Red Bull in the Tower.

Kon tries to imagine Robin here in this little workshop, perched on Ma’s empty stool and watching Kon sneeze on sawdust. It might be nice—nice for Robin, Kon thinks. He doesn’t expect there are many places like this in the middle of Gotham, somewhere small and quiet that smells like wood shavings and wax finish, with nothing outside to make noise but wind and animals and Ma Kent rattling around in the house and Pa Kent and Clark all the way down in the south field stretching new wire across a fence. And Robin wouldn’t even be able to hear all of that. For him it would just be Kon, and the quiet.

Maybe Robin might even lose the mask, just for a bit. Just while it was them.

Ha. That’s probably where this little scenario—not daydream—veers into pure wishful thinking. Rob sees Kon at the Tower already, and he’s pretty much always busy otherwise. What use would he have for a trip to Kansas to watch Kon do something he’s not even that good at? It doesn’t matter how calm and normal the workshop feels—Kon is sure that it will take something a bit more intense than amateur woodworking to see Robin’s face for the first time.

He shakes sawdust off his sleeve and gets back to work.

◇

Sunday afternoon finds Kon back in Gotham, knocking on the door of Tim’s penthouse with one hand and holding an oblong package in the other. He’d decided to interpret Clark’s stay out of Gotham reminder as don’t get caught in Gotham, so he woke up early and took a bus from Metropolis in civilian clothes, then pulled a classic Superman maneuver by changing on the roof of Tim’s building and letting himself into the stairwell. Pretty slick, he thinks, even if the bus ride gave him time to get irrationally nervous about this whole thing.

He must still be distracted, because he doesn’t even hear footsteps inside before the door swings open. “Hey, sorry to just—” Kon starts, and then stops, because it’s not Tim on the other side.

The person in the doorway is tall and lean, maybe in his early twenties, with dark hair and blue eyes a few shades lighter than Tim’s. For a moment he seems to fill the doorway, expression sharp, before he relaxes so quickly Kon might’ve just imagined it. “Hello,” the guy says, his tone warm and amused. “Can I help you?”

Kon clears his throat. “I, um. Is Tim here?”

He is—Kon can hear another person inside—but it’s polite to actually ask.

The guy’s eyebrows inch up and he turns to shout over his shoulder. “Timmy, are you expecting company?”

“Is it Jason?” Tim’s voice says from down the hall. “Because I told him we don’t need his help. You both have to stop hovering.”

“Nah, this guy’s a little shorter than Jason. Cool jacket, red tights, ringing any bells?”

“What,” Tim calls.

The guy turns back to grin at Kon. “I’m Dick, by the way.”

“Um.”

“Dick Grayson,” he clarifies.

Oh. The name vaguely rings a bell. “I’m Superboy.”

Dick’s grin widens. “Yes, I know.”

Behind him Tim appears in the foyer with what looks like a whole load of laundry in his arms. Only his eyes are visible above the heap, glaring at Kon so intensely that Kon is suddenly very glad regular people don’t have heat vision.

“You,” Tim hisses. “You tattletale.”

“Hey,” Kon says weakly.

“Unbelievable.” Tim dumps the laundry at the bottom of the stairs so he can cross his arms, still scowling. “I expected it from Hood, sure, but I didn’t think I’d have to blackmail you too.”

“Tim, we’ve talked about this,” Dick Grayson says. “Blackmail is not a good way to make and maintain friendships.”

Tim rolls his eyes. “It worked on you.”

“Would we call that blackmail? I always categorized it as moderate-to-severe stalking,” Dick says, and steps aside. “Here, Superboy, come on in. We’re just packing up the rest of Tim’s things.”

Kon comes in, not totally sure Tim isn’t about to kick him back out, but Tim just frowns down at the laundry at his feet. “Speaking of, I need more bags,” Tim says to the pile.

“I’ll grab them,” Dick says. He twirls a Wonder Woman keychain around his finger and ducks out the door, leaving Kon alone with Tim in the entryway.

Tim is still staring at the pile of clothes. Now that Kon has a moment to look around he can see two suitcases at the mouth of the hallway and a full backpack propped against the shoe rack.

“Sorry,” Kon says. “If this is a bad time, or if you’re like, actually upset, I can—”

“No,” Tim says quickly, then lets out a long breath. “No, it’s—fine, actually. I was mostly kidding. I mean, you did tattle, but it’s, uh. It actually worked out okay.”

Kon feels something unclench in his chest. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Tim rubs the back of his head, glancing up. “I’m going to go stay with Bruce for a bit. So Uncle Ed can retire for now. Which is probably good timing, because apparently he got a bit part on the next season of NCIS: Metropolis.”

“Oh, cool,” Kon says. “And you—you didn’t get in trouble or anything?”

Tim sort of shrugs, but the corner of his mouth curls up. “Not really. I think Bruce was kind of impressed, actually? Like, mostly worried, but at least a little bit impressed. Dick has been worse, honestly. He’s hardly left me alone all weekend.”

Kon nods. “And Dick is…?”

“Bruce’s kid,” Tim says. “His oldest. He’s—yeah. A lot. But not in a bad way.”

“Okay.” Kon shifts on his feet. “I’m glad. And look,” he says, because it suddenly feels important to explain this, “I wouldn’t have said anything if I didn’t think—I mean, if I didn’t trust Superman, because he said Bruce Wayne is a good guy, so, I wasn’t telling just to tell. So you know.”

“No, yeah,” Tim says. “I figured. I’m more annoyed that I didn’t see it coming.” He huffs a small laugh. “Of all ways to get caught. Anyway, is that why you came back? To make sure everything worked out?”

“What?” Kon says. “Oh, no, I actually—here.”

He untucks the package from under his arm and holds it out. Tim blinks. “What’s this?”

“A present,” Kon says. Tim still looks baffled. “It’s normal to get presents on your birthday. Ask anyone.”

Tim gives Kon a flat look, but takes the package, slowly turning it over. It’s wrapped in plain brown paper, the only non-holiday wrapping Kon could find at the house, and tied off with a thin red ribbon. Something inside Kon feels like it’s going to rattle out of his chest as Tim carefully tugs at the bow, sliding the ribbon off and unwrapping the paper without tearing it.

“Oh,” Tim says. “It’s…?”

“It’s a, ah, charcuterie board,” Kon explains.

“Charcuterie,” Tim repeats.

Kon shrugs. “So far it’s the only thing I know how to make. And it sounds fancy, so there’s that.”

Tim stares down at it, running a finger down the rounded edge of the board. It does look nice, if Kon’s being honest. Maybe a bit clumsy, but Ma Kent showed him how to smooth out the wood with epoxy and carve it into shape. It looks like something that might hang in the Kents’ kitchen, a little piece of the farmhouse and all its quiet charm. The opposite, Kon thinks, of Tim’s cold and sterile penthouse. Which might mean Tim will hate it, but at least that would be a matter of taste and not the board being a sh*tty board.

A few more seconds tick by, and Tim still doesn’t say anything. Kon resists the urge to fidget. There was this time a few months ago, right after the team had saved Seattle from being erased from existence by a disgruntled physicist from another timeline, when he and Robin stayed behind after everyone went back to the Tower. An outdoor concert was playing in the city that night, a concert that no one but them knew almost never happened. Kon and Robin perched on the roof of a nearby warehouse where the sound carried almost perfectly, and at some point Robin fell asleep with his head on Kon’s shoulder. His hair was still damp with sweat where it tickled Kon’s jaw, his breathing slow and even, and Kon found himself absolutely frozen. He knew Robin hadn’t been sleeping well, had pushed himself too hard during the mission, and suddenly Kon was sure that not waking Robin up was his most important task of the day. He stayed like that the rest of the concert, not moving until Robin stirred during the encore and mumbled, Oh, sorry, and Kon still didn’t shift away until Robin was completely back on his feet and arranging for a ride.

Kon feels kind of like that now, frozen and waiting, like if he breathes wrong he might shatter whatever’s going on in Tim’s mind and ruin the moment entirely.

“Thank you,” Tim finally says, voice thick. He swallows. “I don’t, um. No one’s ever given me a charcuterie board before. So this is. Neat.”

“Cool,” Kon says. Tim’s face is definitely a bit red, which Kon finds he can’t think about too hard if he wants to cling to his last semblance of composure.

“Holy cow, did you make that?” Dick Grayson says over Kon’s shoulder, and Kon nearly jumps out of his skin because what the f*ck, when did he get back. “That’s perfect, we can use that as the centerpiece for Tim’s belated birthday dinner this week.”

Tim’s grip tightens on the board. “Oh my god. I told you, you don’t have to do that.”

“Just try and stop us,” Dick says, ruffling Tim’s hair.

Tim ducks, batting him aside. “Go away. Go be somewhere else.”

Dick laughs. “Sure, sure.” He slips around them, heading down the hall. “Nice to meet you, Superboy! Make sure to stay out of sight on your way back.”

Tim shakes his head, but he still looks pleased, turning the board over in his hands. “Sorry. He’s annoying. But, uh, really, I appreciate this. Thank you, Superboy.”

“You can call me Kon,” Kon says, entirely without meaning to. And it’s not like that can give Tim any info on Kon’s secret identity, because it’s not on any records anywhere, but it still feels like—like offering up something important. “It’s…my name. My Kryptonian name. If you want.”

Tim looks more surprised by this than by the charcuterie board. “Okay,” he says after a long moment. “Then, thank you, Kon.”

And oh, Kon miscalculated, because something bright and warm flares in his chest at that, and he knows if he stays here any longer he’s going to say something even more ill advised, like, Have you ever seen what the top of a cloud looks like, because it’s even cooler than a charcuterie board and I could take you there. “Yeah,” Kon gets out, “yep, for sure. No problem. Hey I, um, have a thing I should probably go do, but—glad you like it. Happy birthday again. See ya.”

He ducks out—definitely not fleeing, just leaving with enhanced speed—and heads home. The warmth in his chest keeps burning long after he’s back in Kansas, bright and strong.

“Did the gift work out, then?” Ma Kent asks when she finds him in the loft later that evening.

“Yeah,” Kon says, tipping his head back and feeling the scratch of hay on his neck, his homework open across his knees and nowhere near even started. “Yeah, I think it did.”

◇

[Sunday, 11:36pm ET]
robin
btw
not that you should make a habit of it
but if you ever need to sneak in and out of gotham, here are a few rooftops out of oracle’s camera range
[quickchange_locations.maps]
anyway
hope you’re having a good weekend

sb
pretty good weekend yeah
sorry we missed each other when i was secretly in town
maybe next time?

robin
yeah, i’d like that
night, kon

sb
goodnight, rob ✨

Chapter 3: the mall

Chapter Text

The third time, he doesn’t even realize he’s calling for help until it’s over.

◆

The day starts off normally, which is to say Kon drops Tim off on a dark Gotham rooftop somewhere past 3:00 in the morning. It’s one of the nooks with no camera or balcony views that Tim sent Kon this summer, which have gotten some use the past few months when team missions run late and Kon somehow deems Tim too tired or injured to pilot the Batplane back from the Tower. (And Kon’s definition of injured is ridiculous; he freaks out if Tim has, like, a sprained wrist.) Tim should probably protest more for both pride and stealth reasons—he isn’t under any delusion that Batman and Oracle don’t know about Kon’s occasional rooftop stops—but, well. It’s nice, sometimes. Even on a morning like this, when Gotham’s temperature has plunged to late-autumn lows and Tim’s breath clouds in front of his face the moment they touch down, Tim thinks it’s nice.

Kon doesn’t seem to agree. “Are you sure there isn’t somewhere else I can drop you?” he asks quietly. It’s hard to see specific features even with the mask’s night vision, but Tim can tell from Kon’s voice that he’s frowning.

“Nah,” Tim says, keeping his teeth from chattering by sheer force of will. “Cape’s got thermal lining.” It’s not even a lie. His cape does have thermal lining. The implication that Tim’s not cold anyway, that part is the lie.

Literally, Tim thinks for the thousandth time, literally how did Dick and Jason patrol year-round in shorts. They must’ve had leggings or something. Stealth tights. Nude legwarmers. He makes a note to puzzle that out later. Maybe Jason will tell him in exchange for blackmail material in the form of old Nightwing pictures.

“I still feel like I’m responsible,” Kon is saying. “I leave you on this rooftop, it’s my fault if you freeze solid on it.”

“I won’t freeze. You know we have a rogue with a literal ice gun, this is nothing.”

Kon tips his head back with a small groan. “No matter how many times you say stuff like that, Rob, it doesn’t get less alarming.” His breath fogs as he speaks. They’re standing just a foot apart; Tim hadn’t stepped back after Kon set him down, and Kon hadn’t stepped back, either, his hand still resting lightly on Tim’s side as if to steady him. Tim’s suit is nearly bulletproof, Kevlar weave and tiny, interlocked pressure-dispersing plates, and yet Tim feels the press of every one of Kon’s fingers against his ribs.

It’s quiet the way cities are, a million overlapping noises that all sound impossibly far away. Like they’re in the eye of a storm. That’s witching hour in Gotham, the stretch of night into morning when the city holds its breath. Tim used to imagine this time belonged to him, long before he was even Robin, just a kid with too much curiosity and too much loneliness to be daunted when it felt like he was the only one in the world. No self-preservation skills, he’d been told, but it wasn’t just that. He wasn’t being reckless for the sake of it. He was chasing the beating heart of Gotham because it was Gotham, because it was his city, because he loved it even in its darkest and coldest hours. That’s what you do with something you love, isn’t it? You stay through the dark and the cold.

Tim watches the wisp of Kon’s breath curl up into the slate-black Gotham sky and finds he doesn’t mind the chill so much after all.

In fact, he might even—

“Robin.”

Kon jumps, his hand disappearing from Tim’s side. Tim just rolls his eyes. “Batman,” he says.

Bruce melts out of the shadows, all Batman in the way he looms and lets his cape flutter to emphasize the creature of the night vibe. “Superboy,” he says next. His growl is actually on the nicer end of the scale, more dealing with a dumbass civilian than dealing with a dumbass mugger, but Kon shuffles back anyway.

“Be nice, B,” Tim says. The chill is back with gusto, so he lets himself tug his cape more firmly over his shoulders

Bruce glances at Tim—it’s an exasperated glance, Tim can tell—but says, “Thank you for dropping Robin off safely,” with significantly less growl.

“Yes, sir,” Kon says. “I mean. Of course. I was just—making sure he wasn’t too cold, but he says your capes have thermal lining, and also I guess you know all about cold with that ice gun guy, so, um, everything’s fine actually.”

Bruce doesn’t move out of the shadows, but he stays still in a very pointed way.

“Right,” Kon says, backing toward the edge of the roof. “I’ll just—see you next time, Rob?”

“Bye, Superboy,” Tim says. Kon has good night vision naturally, so he can probably tell Tim’s smiling just a bit.

Kon throws Tim a little salute before leaping off the roof and disappearing into the dark sky.

Tim watches the spot where he vanished for a moment longer, then turns back to the hulking mass of shadows that is his crime fighting partner and current foster father. “You’re a jerk.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Bruce says blandly. “Did the mission go well?”

“I want to tell him.”

Silence from the shadows. Whoops. Tim hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that—he has a whole plan, actually, along with a powerpoint of supporting arguments, which he was going to present after arranging for Jason to come over for dinner so Bruce would be in a good mood, bonus points if Cass was back in town too, and maybe he’d also do it on Hanukkah or something if he could find a good enough gift for Bruce. His backup plan was to bribe the Ghost-Maker into doing a little Blüdhaven drive-by, close enough to raise Bruce’s hackles, and bring it up then. It’s always better to ask for stuff when adults are happy, and if that’s not manageable then the next best thing is for them to be distracted.

Asking at 3am on a freezing rooftop when they’re both sleep deprived and unprepared was not the plan.

Time to salvage what he can, at least. “Kon is trustworthy. You know this, or you wouldn’t let me work with him. If he knew my identity he would help protect it, and I could even call him for help in a civilian crisis.”

“You can call me for help,” Bruce says. “Or Nightwing. Or Oracle. Or Superman. Or Red Hood, if he’s amenable. Or—”

“I’m talking about contingencies,” Tim says. “You love contingencies, you’re just being deliberately obtuse. Besides, Kon has already almost found out my identity twice now—wouldn’t it be better to do it preemptively in a controlled scenario?” Tim swallows. “Also, it just feels—unfair? That I’ve known his name for this long and he still doesn’t know mine.”

Another beat. Bruce shifts, emerging slightly from the darkness. “Is there something you want to tell me?” he asks carefully. “About Conner?”

“What—no, it’s not—I don’t, um,” Tim says. Obviously he does, but he’s not at the, like, talking about it stage yet. He tries to rally his thoughts again. “He’s my best friend. Isn’t that enough?”

“It isn’t about that,” Bruce says, infuriatingly even. “Or about fairness. This is a decision that affects all of us.”

“I know, which is why I’m asking, and not just—just doing it anyway. I know that.”

“Then you know that we have to minimize risk wherever possible.”

“You let me tell Spoiler.”

“She is one of us,” Bruce says. “And that still doesn’t change the fact that every person we tell presents a new danger.”

“Okay,” Tim says, lowering his voice even more because it looks like it’s time to bring out the (metaphorical) big guns, “seriously? What about you and Clark? What about you and, and Selina, or Talia? Even Ghost-Maker knows who you are.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

Bruce straightens his posture infinitesimally, which is the Bat equivalent of putting his hands on his hips. “Regardless, one person—or multiple people—knowing does not negate the risk of introducing a new variable.”

“Clark trusts him,” Tim hisses.

“And yet Clark has not suggested I share my identity with him.”

“Have you asked? Or did you just assume the matter is closed because you decided it was closed?”

“Robin,” Bruce says, and Tim takes a deep breath, trying to steady himself. That’s Bruce’s I’m being reasonable, but also this is not a discussion voice. “The danger is not only to us. Have you considered the risk to each person we tell? You’ve seen firsthand what people will do to try to find out who I am.”

“Bullsh*t,” Tim says before he can stop himself. “I mean, yes, that’s true to a certain degree but it’s not why you’re hesitating. I know it’s not. Is it because you think Kon and I—? Is that why? Because that’s hypocritical of you if it is.”

Bruce looks down at him, and Tim has to fight back the instant, instinctual panic telling him that he’s just stepped over the line. He hasn’t, yet, but that doesn’t stop him from worrying. Especially now that Bruce has to be responsible for him, has to deal with not just Robin but Tim, legally—one day it’s going to be too much and that line is going to be there after all.

But this is also part of being Robin: calling Batman out when he forgets that people can be trusted as people, and not just as variables.

So Tim wraps his cape more tightly around himself, clenches his teeth so they don’t chatter, and lets the silence stretch.

“You’re right,” Bruce says after a long moment. Tim’s shivering covers his jolt of surprise, but only just. “That’s not why. My answer hasn’t changed, but—you’re not wrong.”

Tim swallows, fighting down both annoyance and almost overwhelming relief. “Then…?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Bruce says. “Right now you’re cold. We’re both tired. Let’s get home and get some sleep.”

It’s as good as he’s going to get for now. Maybe for a while. But it’s not—it could have been much worse. Bruce didn’t even get mad, Tim realizes. It’s nowhere near the opportune scenario Tim planned, but Bruce didn’t get mad, and he listened. Even if Tim didn’t get permission, it almost feels like a win.

“Okay,” Tim says. “Later, then.”

Bruce nods and turns with the familiar click of a grapple gun unsheathing, and Tim follows him into the night.

◆

“That is one f*cked-up Santa,” Steph says about twelve hours later.

Tim glances up from his phone to look over her shoulder. The Santa in question is a life-size plastic figure in one of the mall’s holiday displays, this one featuring Santa holding out a giant candy cane, rotating gently back and forth on its platform against a backdrop of fluffy fake snow. There is something unsettling about it in an uncanny valley sort of way, its artificially crinkled eyes and round cheeks at odds with a hinged jaw that makes Tim think of the Nutcracker. “It’s a little gauche,” he agrees.

“Gauche,” Steph repeats. “I’m going to shove you in a locker. No, I mean the thing’s got full-on Freddy Fazbear vibes. This is a murder Santa.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“That candy cane is one hundred percent poisoned.”

Next to them Babs slowly shifts backward, watching the Santa. “Yeah, its eyes are definitely following me. Love that.”

“All art does that, though,” Tim says. Off the simultaneous raised eyebrows from both girls: “Doesn’t it?”

“Only the creepy stuff,” Steph says. “What kind of art are you looking at?”

“Normal art.” Okay, maybe he’s just thinking of the portrait hall at Wayne Manor. Tim isn’t exactly superstitious, and he’s more than accustomed to the strange and unusual, but every time he passes by the hall it’s hard not to feel like all the Wayne ancestors are frowning down at him and wondering what he’s still doing there.

“Do you often feel like you’re being watched, Tim?” Babs says seriously.

He gives her a pointed look. She cracks after a moment, winking back.

“Well, I for one am moving on,” Steph declares, boots squeaking on the tile as she turns away. She’s stuffed her puffy coat into a plastic Dollar Party bag, one purple sleeve sticking out next to a box of Green Arrow-themed Christmas crackers, but still has her scarf on after an hour of shopping. Tim reins in the urge to tug on the fluttering end of it and hurries after her. “I still have, like, four different gifts to find. If Santa’s toy sack is actually full of severed heads, that’s not my problem today.”

“Severed heads? How unoriginal,” Tim says.

Babs catches up to Steph, and Tim trails behind, letting them set the pace while he scrolls on his phone. He’s waiting on two different chemical test results to update from the Cave lab, and he’s got remote diagnostics running on the Tower’s security update, and also after dropping Tim off this morning Kon texted a picture of the sunrise from somewhere over the Atlantic, so high up the curve of the earth was visible under a glowing pink and orange sky, along with the message it’s 6am somewhere 🌅 which isn’t even that funny and yet Tim has been agonizing over how to reply for the better part of five hours now. It’s just that every time he opens the message he remembers what happened a few minutes before that, and it’s like he can feel Kon’s hand on his ribs all over again. It’s ridiculous. It’s uncalled for, even. Tim is fully, fully aware by now that he has a crush. Has had one for a while, probably. He admits it (to himself, in his head, in the code he made up to record Batman’s patrol routes when he was a kid, but still). His subconscious doesn’t need to be hitting him over the head with Harley’s sledgehammer every other minute, especially because Tim can’t even do anything about it except slowly lose his mind, apparently.

Maybe if he could tell Kon his name. Maybe that would be a start. If he could say, Hey, funny story, we actually know each other. And Kon would be like, Yeah, Rob, we’ve been teammates for like two years now, did you maybe hit your head on something? And Tim would say, No, I mean you know the other me, you saved me from that bunker once and then you came to pull me out of the harbor on my birthday and had cake with me and Red Hood. You made me the weirdest birthday present I’ve ever gotten. I know you think I’m cagey and you don’t know much about me and that’s true but also you’ve seen the inside of my parents’ apartment and you’ve met my sort-of family and you’re the reason I live with Bruce now. You literally changed part of my life and you didn’t even know it was me, but it was. So you do know me. And then Kon would—

Would—

The problem is, the whole thing stalls out right there. Because—what does he think Kon is going to say to that? Oh awesome, good to know my best friend and team leader is actually just some guy named Tim. By now Tim has proven himself capable and smart and sometimes even cool as Robin, but Kon has seen Tim the civilian in two different but equally unimpressive situations so far and probably knows very well just how, well, unimpressive Tim Drake really is. And Kon is just—he wouldn’t be mean about it, because he’s kind to his core, as evidenced by him making Tim a birthday present and worrying about Tim’s whole uncle thing even when he literally had no reason to. Kon wouldn’t actually call him just some guy named Tim. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be jarring to learn. Disappointing, maybe. Telling Kon the truth is all but guaranteed to end whatever chance there might be of Kon having reciprocated crush feelings for him.

And Tim’s not willfully ignorant here—he’s pretty sure there’s something in the way Kon looks at him—Robin-him—lately, the way his hand lingered on Tim's side this morning, the way Kon sends pictures of a sunrise to Tim directly, not the team groupchat. Tim sees it, okay. He’s very aware of it, as evidenced by the five hours he’s spent crafting seven different responses to one message and then not even sending them. But it doesn’t matter because he can’t date someone with just half of himself (having learned that lesson from his brief and complicated relationship with Steph) and his whole self isn’t exactly a stellar deal. Tim still wants to tell Kon because, like he said, it’s a matter of fairness at this point and also because—it’d be best to nip this in the bud, right? Let whatever Kon feels for Robin fall away when faced with the reality of Tim Drake. Let Kon shift his attention elsewhere. Let Tim get over it. Let them stay best friends.

But Bruce is still being Bruce, so Tim’s stuck in agonizing-over-sunrise-pictures limbo for the foreseeable future. Ugh.

A kid darts into his path and Tim twists out of the way on instinct, weaving through a flurry of harried shoppers like it’s one of Bruce’s training setups. The mall is bright and loud, floors gritty with melting slush from outside and shop windows bursting with fake wreaths and winter clothes and candy cane stripes. It’s almost too bright, the way everything outside of Gotham feels oversaturated at first. Tim has literally been to space, and something about the overbearing cheer of a New York shopping mall gearing up for the holiday season still feels more alien to him than the surface of another planet. Steph planned this trip to shop somewhere that might be slightly harder for the Bats to “accidentally” figure out their gifts in advance, and also they haven’t really had a chance to hang out together lately outside of night work. Even then Steph has been busy training with Babs, and Cass when she was in town, and Tim’s been spending a lot of time at the Tower. (For many reasons, most of them practical and nothing to do with feeling a weird, new kind of underfoot at the manor now that he’s no longer just a guest, of course.)

So he and Steph made the trip out of Gotham, no masks involved, just two average teens and their average twentysomething friend. (Obviously New York is small potatoes, but what kind of mentor would I be if I let you run off all by yourself? Babs had said when she pulled up outside the manor that morning. Also, I want to get Bruce one of those new Batman bears because he will absolutely hate it, and our Build-A-Bear store is still being rebuilt after that stupid Riddler thing in October. Tim didn’t tell her Last night I was in Svalbard poking around a possible alien shipwreck, I think I can handle going one state over without a chaperone, mostly because Babs is cool and Tim doesn’t mind being chaperoned if it’s her.) They actually drove the whole way, too, all two and half hours of it rather than stealing the Batplane. It was less hassle, to be honest—maybe one day the League’s Zeta-Tube project will turn into something practical and road trips will be for nostalgic purposes only, but Tim found himself enjoying it, watching the gray and brown scenery go by while Steph belted along to whatever Christmas carols were playing on the radio and Babs muttered about cloverleaf interchanges. He was glad he was with them, out of everyone—all three just a bit outside the Wayne family, members in uniform but not on paper. Well, that’s currently a gray area in Tim’s case, but still—he’d probably feel a bit awkward if he were trying to holiday shop with Dick (and he couldn’t even imagine it with Bruce, or Jason, and Cass was set to fly in today so she wasn’t here yet). But there in a car with Steph and Babs he didn’t have to figure out a new place. Not at the moment, at least.

He has his messages open again, compulsively rereading it’s 6am somewhere when Steph grabs his elbow and drags him out of the flow of people. “You’re lucky you have above-average spatial awareness, or I’d need to leash backpack you,” Steph tells him. “We’re splitting up, Babs is going to start at Build-A-Bear and I’m commandeering you to help me pick out something for my mom. Lotion, maybe, you know the good brands.”

Tim does know the good brands, or at least he knows what his own mom used. He got one of her hand creams for Alfred this year—not hers, obviously, all her stuff was boxed up or donated once Tim got his sh*t together over the summer, but the same brand she used to use. It was in a little blue tub, special ordered, the unscented kind. Good for working hands, she’d told him more than once with a little hint of pride in her voice. He’d gotten the same kind for Steph last year, too; was that weird? (Would Kon like hand lotion? Tim’s never noticed him have dry skin, it might not be biologically possible. Though, Kon also wears gloves most of the time, so maybe he just—)

Steph snaps in front of his eyes. “Earth to Timothy. Are you thinking about work? This is a no-work zone. I’ll tell Babs to lock your phone if I have to.”

“I’ll do it,” Babs says gravely.

Tim bats her hand away. “I heard you, I heard you, I’m on lotion duty.”

“Yes, and then I asked if you need anything else while we’re here,” Steph says with exaggerated patience. “You got your team gift thing all ready and everything?”

“Oh,” Tim says, “yeah, I’m all set.” His secret santa gift for Cassie is pretty good: weapons-grade hair gel for her newly short hair that should stand up to air resistance while flying. At least, while flying at her typical speed range. There isn’t hair gel in existence that can stand up to top-speed super flight, though maybe Tim can convince Bruce to get WayneTech R&D on it. There’s probably more than one practical use for something like that. “I’ll just keep an eye out for something for Bruce.” He already has something picked out—a self-published book by a local author about Gotham University campus ghost stories, because Bruce is weird and would both enjoy that and also potentially find it useful on a case—but Tim should probably find something else as well. Always better to have a few gift options in the event that the other person gives you something far nicer or far more casual than you were expecting, so you can avoid any awkwardness in the reciprocation. Maybe Bruce would also like some hand cream?

“Okay, then it’s time for phase two: gifts for parents and emotionally stunted pseudo-parent figures,” Steph says. “We’ll break and meet back here, at the…jeez, how much of a discount do you think they got for renting these things in bulk?”

She gestures at the display behind Babs. It’s another smiling, dead-eyed animatronic Santa, this one standing in front of a bright red sleigh piled with boxes from various stores around the mall.

“At least this one’s advertising something,” Tim points out. “Like, the boxes actually send a message.”

“Yeah, the message being the original purchasers of these items were murdered and fed to my reindeer. Here, take a selfie of us with this guy and send it to Jason with the caption ‘you in 40 years lol.’”

“You send it,” Tim says, opening his camera. He and Steph lean in, Babs in the middle and Creepy Santa grinning overhead. “I’m trying to survive the holidays, personally.”

“I’ll send it, you chickensh*ts,” Babs says through her smile.

Tim is just snapping the picture when he hears it: Somewhere under their conversation and the overlapping Christmas jingles and squeaks of wet shoes on tile is a low, rhythmic clicking. Tim stills, watching the camera display on his phone screen as Santa’s mouth slowly opens behind them, jaw stretching into an extended yawn until the clicking stops.

It’s not even his Robin instincts, but Tim’s born-and-bred Gothamite instincts that immediately raise the hair on the back of his neck. He spins around just as sickly yellow gas starts to hiss out of the creepy Santa’s mouth.

And, yeah. Born-and-bred Gothamites definitely know what fear gas looks like.

“Aw, f*ck,” Steph says, reaching into her purse.

Tim is already pulling out his emergency gas mask, and by the time he finishes securing it Babs and Steph have theirs on as well. “Bag,” Tim says without taking his eyes off Santa, voice tinny through the mask, “Steph, I need your—thanks,” and then he vaults over the security rope to wind Steph’s emptied Dollar Party bag around Santa’s head. The plastic stretches across Santa’s gaping mouth, grotesque, made even more so when the gas immediately starts to condense and drip down its beard from under the plastic. It’s a stopgap, not a solution, but if they can contain it—

Screaming starts further down the walkway.

“There are other Santas,” Babs says, sharp even through her own mask, her taking command voice. “We won’t reach them all in time, we need to evacuate.”

“Right, right, evacuate an entire mall,” Steph says, already snapping a picture of the floor plan off the wall display behind Santa. “What the f*ck, though, this is New York. Who fear gasses a mall in New York?”

“If we can trigger the fire sprinklers that should help neutralize the gas,” Tim says, raising his voice to a shout as the screaming gets closer. “So if we find an alarm, or a security office—”

“Security office is on the second floor,” Steph calls, dodging someone sprinting by with an armful of shopping bags. “Behind Macy’s, bordering the parking garage.”

“sh*t, someone just put the whole mall on lockdown,” Babs says, her own phone in hand. As if on cue, the lights cut out, eliciting more screams around them. “We have to get to the emergency exits on the north and south ends, make sure they don’t get blocked. Damn it, I only have two comms.”

“You guys take them,” Tim says. “Take the exits, you’ll need to coordinate. I’ll clear the second floor and find the security office.”

Babs nods sharply, tossing a comm to Steph. “I’ll try to reverse the lockdown as we go. I just sent an emergency signal, but we’re on our own for now.”

“Then let’s do this,” Steph says. She takes off at a run, shouting as she goes. “EVERYBODY OUT! COVER YOUR FACE AND GET THE HELL OUTSIDE!”

“Keep your phone on,” Babs orders, and then she’s gone too.

Tim takes off at a sprint, careening up the nearest escalator. The down escalator is packed, people shoving their way to the ground floor, and gas is already swirling around Tim’s ankles in the emergency track lights when he reaches the top. He can only see flashes of people’s faces in the eerie half-lighting, but a few fleeing shoppers are wearing their own gas masks and respirators. So he and Steph and Babs aren’t the only tourists here today. As he vaults over a bench he remembers a comic that ran in the New Yorker once: A lineup of illustrated kids in a classroom, one child wearing a gas mask. Caption: Spot the child from Gotham.

The first thing he does is go for a fire alarm by the bathroom, wrapping his coat around his fist to break the glass panel and pull the switch. Ink sprays across his coat, spattering his hand and arm, but nothing happens—no wailing alarm, no sprinklers. Whoever turned off the power must have overridden the alarm system, too. Tim catches a curse on the back of his teeth. sprinklers down, he texts Babs and Steph, before taking off again.

Most of the stores up here are empty or emptying. Tim weaves his way through, telling people to get to the north or south end of the mall, to cover their mouths and noses and get outside. Some listen, but others look right through him and keep doing whatever they’re doing, whether it’s running or hiding or standing paralyzed in the middle of the floor. A few people are too far gone to do anything at all, curled up and whimpering at the base of one of the second-floor Santas.

This would be so much easier as Robin. People would listen to him as Robin, even outside Gotham. But he didn’t bring his suit because he was supposed to be Tim today. He was supposed to go shopping for gifts for his—for a family that was sort of his, as much for Tim as they were for Robin, even if it was only temporary. That was supposed to be the mission today.

Well, lesson learned. He’s bringing a spare suit with him everywhere from now on, even grocery shopping. He forgot how much harder it is to get people to take him seriously without the cape. Tim Drake is someone who fades into the background, which is usually a good thing—it’s usually the point of being him, but right now it’s making it very hard to make half a mall’s worth of people follow his lead.

He has to change tactics, he realizes. He can’t be Batman’s Robin right now—can’t be the one flitting around drawing attention or leading victims away while someone else focuses on the main danger. He can’t be the Teen Titans’ Robin, either, strategizing with a team and moving his partners around the battlefield on his own mental chessboard. Instead he has to be some secret, third thing that’s Robin without the flash and Tim without a team, which means he has to narrow his focus and fast.

Okay. He’ll go to the security office first—he can see if anyone’s still there, if there are any other threats he can cut off before they’re triggered, and then he can manually override whatever’s blocking the fire sprinklers. Even that will go a long way to clear the air for people until reinforcements arrive—the gas is heavy enough already, sinking to the ground and rolling off the balconies and down the escalator wells. Not one of Crane’s more advanced formulas, then. A knockoff? An old recipe? Steph was right, why here?

His phone chimes twice as he reaches the Macy’s entrance. The first notification is an image from Babs, screenshots of the mall blueprints showing access points for the security office. The second is an automated Batcomputer alert telling him there are reports of gas and/or toxin attacks in seven other states across the country, each one categorized as Severe.

sh*t. So, he and Babs and Steph might just be the reinforcements here.

He ducks into Macy’s. The store is unsettling—lights off, almost entirely empty, static hissing over the speakers in lieu of Christmas carols. The shouting in the main mall area grows muffled the further in Tim goes. According to the blueprints the security office is accessible from the parking lot on the other end of the store, or, if one is a vigilante who assumes the main doors will be locked down like the rest of the mall, accessible by unscrewing a wall panel in the Women’s Department fitting rooms. He weaves through clothing racks and is almost past the makeup counters—in view of the exterior doors where, yep, the security gates have indeed dropped—when he hears it: the sound of a child crying. Not sobbing or wailing, but small, hitched breaths, the kind of crying that comes from trying desperately not to, and failing.

There’s no version of Robin that can ignore that sound.

Tim finds the kid huddled behind a display of sweaters. They’re small, ten or eleven, shoulders heaving as they snap their head up to look at Tim.

“Hey,” Tim whispers through his respirator, “hey, are you hurt?”

The kid keeps staring. Their eyes are normal, aside from being red—no dilated pupils, they haven’t been exposed yet. The air in here is clear so far, only hazy at the front of the store; their fear is real, not artificial. They’re close enough to the security office that maybe they saw something, Tim thinks, some glimpse of how this all started. Or maybe they’re just a kid alone in a place that’s supposed to be safe, but isn’t.

“It’s okay,” Tim continues, like he’s talking to a kid on a Gotham street. “This is just a safety mask, I’m a good guy. I just want to make sure you’re not hurt. Did something happen?”

Another moment, then the kid shakes their head once. “My mom,” they say. “And m-my aunt. They were outside getting pretzels, and then they s-started screaming, so I ran in here, but I lost them and everyone—everyone’s gone—” They cut off, wheezing as they stifle another sob.

“Okay,” Tim says, feeling a pinprick of relief that at least the kid hadn’t gotten trampled or threatened. It doesn’t tell Tim anything new about the situation, but it’s still important, because it’s a kid in trouble. “You did the right thing, hiding here, that was really smart. This is all going to be over soon, so you should stay here until—”

He hesitates just a moment, trying to decide what to say—until your mom finds you, except he can’t count on that if their mom needs to wait for an antidote—and that’s when he hears it. Clicking again, soft and rhythmic, coming from behind the makeup counter.

Tim spins around in time to see another Santa on display next to a tree-shaped tower of perfume bottles. He hadn’t caught it earlier; it’s smaller than the others, but that hardly matters as its mouth stretches open and yellow gas pours out, swirling across the floor.

Tim doesn’t think. He unhooks his mask and presses it over the kid’s face, pulling the straps tight. They make a startled noise, twisting to face him, and he grabs their shoulders.

“Run,” he says, pulling the kid to their feet. “Go back into the mall, turn left, and go down the escalator. You’ll see a woman by the outside doors. She has red hair and a gray wheelchair. She’ll help you. Go.”

The kid stares up at him, eyes gleaming in the dim light, before they nod again and bolt toward the door.

Okay. Okay, Robin, get moving, Tim tells himself. There’s no telling how many other stores have delayed Santa traps, how much worse this is going to get. All he can do is try to finish this, and fast.

He grabs a patterned scarf off a display mannequin and wraps it around his face, holding his breath as he goes. He makes it to the back of the fitting rooms and is prying open one of the wall panels before he has to switch to breathing shallowly. Depending on what strain this is he should have at least some tolerance to the toxin, but he still digs his nails into the base of his left palm as he shoves through the wall, focusing on the pain to ward off any encroaching hallucinations.

The security office is empty, one spinny chair still gently rotating in front of the camera feeds—whoever was here, he just missed them. Tim makes himself focus, breaking into the computer system, wishing he had his Robin gloves instead of his clumsy winter gloves to cover his prints, wishing he were Babs who would know how to find some unintentional trace of the attackers in the system, wishing he had just been faster or smarter or better enough to neutralize the last Santa or catch the attackers before they fled. He manages to find the alarm system override and cancels it, activating the alarms and sprinklers all at once and lifting the mall’s lockdown. Now anyone still coherent will be able to get out to clean air, and emergency services will be able to get in, and the sprinklers will start to suppress the gas still floating around. Tim can dart out the now-open doors to the parking lot and double back to meet Babs or Steph at the exits, handle the situation on the outside. He’s reasonably sure he can do that; he hasn’t started seeing things yet.

He reaches for his phone to let them know, but his pocket is empty. Tim stops, quickly checking his other pocket, his jacket, and nothing. He could’ve sworn it was just there. Did he drop it when he crouched to talk to the kid? No, he’d used the flashlight to find the seams in the wall panel. It’s not on the floor in here, so it must have been before he shoved his way into the security office. Stupid, clumsy slip-up if that’s the case, but he should be able to find it fast. He pushes back through into the fitting room, scanning the ground, paradoxically wishing he had his phone so he could use his flashlight to look for it. Another reason to bring the Robin suit everywhere: the three different backup lights in his belt, not to mention the emergency light on his gauntlets as well.

He’s checking to see if his phone skittered into one of the changing stalls when he sees it—a single door at the end of the row, made of reinforced metal and stark against the flimsy changing stall doors. He must have been too focused on getting through the wall to notice on his way in, but now he pauses, a chill running up the back of his neck. That’s not supposed to be here, something tells him. It isn’t on the blueprints, and, more damningly, no less than three heavy locks line the edge of the metal door. But—every single one is unlatched, the door itself cracked open just enough to let a thin slash of light spill into the changing room.

Tim thinks about the still-spinning chair in the security office, and inches forward on silent feet.

The door makes no noise as he pushes it open, slipping inside a small, concrete-lined room that reminds him, oddly, of a morgue. For half a second he just stands there, braced to attack or be attacked, but nothing moves inside the room. Nothing moves at all. Because—

Because—

It’s Steph and Babs. On the. On the floor. They’re on the floor, and they’re—

Steph’s scarf soaked with blood, Babs slumped on the ground with her eyes open and blank—

No. Tim chokes, jerking forward, hands shaking as he rips off his gloves to try to find a pulse. Her skin feels cold, tissue-thin. “No,” he’s saying, maybe out loud. “No, no.” Steph’s head lolls to the side, and there’s dark blood already crusting on her blue-tinged lips, and there’s no pulse. They’re dead. Somehow they’re both dead, killed and dragged and stowed here while Tim was running around the second floor pulling useless fire alarms and trying to get people to run outside. She’ll help you, he’d told the kid, not knowing Babs was the one who needed help, that Tim was already failing his team.

He needs—he needs to find his phone, he needs to call for help, he needs—Bruce, oh, god, he needs to call Bruce and Bruce is going to—he’s going to fall apart again and Tim doesn’t know if he can fix it this time, he can barely think and his hands are shaking and he can feel the panic and grief teetering above him waiting to fall and if it falls he’ll be useless. He’s already useless. He already let them die.

His hand drops from Steph’s neck. He’s freezing. He’s—there’s ice cracking inside him, cold terror swallowing him from the inside out. For a moment he thinks, dimly, I told Kon I wasn’t cold. I keep lying, and then he wrenches himself away, shoving back through the door because he has to find these people, he has to find help, he has to shout for Clark or activate the panic button on his phone or do something but he’s—

He’s not in the fitting room. His feet skid on smooth, shining tile, surrounded by sterile white walls. Hospital, he thinks, because that’s what he needs, a hospital for Steph and Babs, but—no, there’s something wrong. This isn’t a hospital, it’s a mall, except this isn’t a mall, either. It’s a—

It’s a lab. It clicks, and then he understands what he’s seeing in the middle of the room, the burnished steel table and the foreboding red glow and the blinking machines, the steady beeping and the tick-tick of a machine spitting out a long strip of chart paper onto the floor. There’s a lab hidden in the depths of this New York mall—is it a rogue operation? A government facility? Was the fear gas a cover-up?—and strapped to the table, the cause of the beeping and the readouts, is. Is.

“Kon,” Tim whispers.

He is, thankfully, horribly, still alive. When Tim staggers to the table he can see the weak flutter of a pulse in Kon’s throat, nearly obscured by a thick metal collar studded with green kryptonite. His limbs are similarly bound, metal cuffs strapping down his elbows and wrists and ankles. Where his earring should be there’s a plastic tag with the number 13. “Kon,” Tim says again, and then it’s a scream tearing its way out of his throat—“Kon!”—as he scrabbles at the cuffs. He can’t get traction; nothing gives except his own fingernails, tearing against the metal. The cuffs are welded to the table, lurid burns blooming on Kon’s skin around the soldered ends. The table is also fixed to the floor, not budging when Tim shoves, not even when he pushes so hard something wrenches in his side and he collapses forward, braced over Kon with a strangled cry. Tim tries to find somewhere to touch him, but Kon is—broken. Where there aren’t burns his skin is mottled with bruises, and his left hand is puffy and twisted, fingers at odd angles. His hair is sweat-soaked, his face gray, lips cracked and bleeding. A series of cuts are scored across his chest, evenly-spaced and deliberate, and the Bat-trained part of Tim distantly notes that they were made with different blades, like whoever put them there was testing the efficacy of various weapons, while the rest of Tim’s mind is jumbled, still-screaming white noise. The red glow, he realizes. Red sun radiation. They made Kon vulnerable and they hurt him. They put Kon back in a lab and experimented on him and hurt him. Tim pulls his gaze away and tries to find the source of the light. He can—he can fix this, he can—except the glow is coming from everywhere, built into the room itself, and he can’t. Tim is a failure. He couldn’t save Steph and Babs and now Kon is here in a lab again, and Tim knows this is one of Kon’s worst nightmares because this is also one of Tim’s own worst nightmares, the freedom and hope and self-determination that Kon fought so hard for getting ripped away, and Tim can’t stop this, he can’t turn off the red sun or pry off the kryptonite restraints, and Kon is still alive which means they’re only going to hurt him more.

“Please,” Tim says, the word scraping out his throat, “Kon, please, please.” He doesn’t know what he’s pleading for. He reaches out, cupping Kon’s cheek despite the bruises. It feels wrong, blood gritty on his skin, and Kon doesn’t wake up. He needs Kon to wake up. “Kon. Can you hear me, can you—Kon.” His voice is rising again, desperate. Embarrassing. He’s supposed to be better than this, but he can’t stop shaking. He can barely think. “Please, Kon—”

Arms close around him. Tim thrashes, crying out as he’s dragged backward. When he cranes his neck he sees a flash of white, a faceless figure in a lab coat behind him. Lab coat. Panic dances up Tim’s spine and he drives his elbow back, aiming for the lab tech’s lower ribs, the easiest to break, except he hits something solid and unforgiving and feels a sickening jolt in his own arm instead.

“Oh sh*t,” he hears through the pain, the lab tech’s voice oddly distant, like bad radio reception. “Hey, don’t do that, you’ll only hurt yourself, okay?”

The tech relaxes their grip for half a second and Tim lunges forward, only to be caught and spun around, held at arm’s length. “Whoa,” the tech says, and their face flickers and blurs in front of Tim’s eyes. Alien tech? Magic? Some sort of mask? “Whoa, hey, Tim, breathe—”

The tech knows his name. Knows who he is. Tim kicks out, trying to grab onto the tech’s wrists for leverage, but he’s still shaking so hard and why is he shaking so hard and the tech is saying something else, but before Tim can piece the words together or kick again a shadow moves over the tech’s shoulder.

“Tim,” Bruce rasps, his voice echoing crystal-clear off the white walls.

And it is Bruce—his cowl is down, eyes visible and blank, red-rimmed. His shredded cape drags across the floor as he steps into the lab. Tim freezes, waiting for relief, for hope, but none comes, because he knows, instantly and nauseatingly, that this is wrong.

“Bruce,” Tim breathes.

“What?” the lab tech says, but they’re drowned out by Bruce, who says: “They’re dead, Tim.”

“I know,” Tim says. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“They’re dead.” Bruce’s voice is empty and raging all at once, a howling wind across a hundred miles of tundra. “Stephanie and Barbara. You were supposed to help me. You were supposed to make this better. Make me better. I trusted you with them and now they’re dead.”

“I’m sorry.” He can hardly get the words out; he’s so numb. “I’m—I didn’t—”

“What is the point of having you,” Bruce says, cold and vacant, “if you couldn’t save them? If you couldn’t save me?”

He moves, a small, jagged motion, and then there’s a batarang impaled halfway through the lab tech’s neck. Blood sprays out, soaking the coat’s white collar almost instantly, too much blood to survive losing. A killing blow.

“No,” Tim chokes out, his voice breaking on it. Bruce just watches, his expression hollow, and he was right. Tim couldn’t save him after all. Couldn’t be a good enough Robin to keep Batman from breaking apart in the end. Jason is going to hate Tim for this, hate him all over again. Alfred will be devastated. Dick will leave, for good this time, and Bruce’s whole family will shatter and it will be all Tim’s fault. His terror is a living thing now, a writhing mass clawing at his throat, ripping him inside out. His heartbeat slams against his ribs in time with the ringing in his ears. He failed. He’s already failed. But he still has to try. “I’m sorry,” he sobs, throwing himself against the lab tech’s immovable arms, reaching for Bruce. “Let me go, let me—Bruce, please, I’m sorry, I'm so sorry, please, I'm sorry.”

“Tim,” the dead lab tech says. Arms tighten around Tim a second time, almost crushing, clutching him against their chest. It should be gross, Tim thinks, because of the blood, but it’s just leather under his cheek, warm and damp and somehow familiar. Tangible. “Hold on, okay, just hold on!”

“Please,” Tim gasps again, and then there’s a jolt in his stomach, a sudden swoop, and the last thing he sees before shutting his eyes is the lab melting away in a blur of color, Bruce dissolving with it like he was never there at all.

◇

Thirty seconds after arriving at a mall in New York, Kon hears someone scream his name, and his day goes from complicated to really complicated.

The complications started fifteen minutes ago in Metropolis, where he was playing bananagrams with Jon on Clark’s living room floor when Clark had called. Actually called, on his phone. “Jon’s fine,” Kon had said, answering the call. “Ate all his vegetables and everything, I am a model babysitter. Except for the part where I’m about to epically crush him at Bananagrams.”

“‘Laserified’ is not a word!” Jon shouted.

“Superboy,” someone who was definitely not Clark said on the other end of the line.

Kon froze with his hand on the D tile. “Um,” he said. Why the hell was Batman calling him on Clark’s phone? On his civilian phone? He jumped up and ducked into the apartment guest room, ignoring Jon’s protests behind him. “Batman? Can I help you? Oh sh—shoot, is Superman—?”

“Superman is fine,” Batman said. “He’s occupied. I don’t have much time. Are you in a secure location?”

Oh, god, Kon thought wildly, he’s calling about this morning. Batman found him on the roof with Robin at 3am and saw—well, not that there was anything to see, but maybe he thought—maybe he suspected— “Yes,” Kon said, voice a note higher than usual. “And just for the record, I only ever fly Robin home when he’s like, really tired and probably shouldn’t be piloting anyway—”

“The League is responding to multiple fear gas attacks across the country,” Batman cut in, brisk and efficient. Kon straightened. Now that he was listening for it, he could hear a whistling rush of wind that suggested Batman was mid-flight, and Clark was probably the one flying. This was a mission-related call, not about—anything else. Kon tried not to feel relieved about that. “Superman and I are nearly on location in Colorado. Oracle is temporarily unavailable; we will patch you into the League communications once we can spare someone to do so. For now I sent your phone the location of known attacks. Have Impulse and Wonder Girl assist you in distributing fear gas antidotes from Gotham General’s reserves as fast as possible. Keep the rest of your team on reserve.”

“On it,” Kon said, already throwing open his closet to grab his gear. “Wait—and Robin?”

“Robin is already engaged. Keep an ear out for Superman in case of further instructions.” The line beeped, ending the call.

So Kon fired off an alert to his teammates, dropped Jon and his Bananagrams off with Clark’s elderly neighbor, and got going. By the time he and Cassie arrived in Gotham, Red Hood was already at the hospital loading bay overseeing the antidote handoff. “Rogues can get ideas when sh*t like this happens, so we’re keeping an eye on things,” Hood said when Kon landed next to him. “Your speedster friend just left for the west coast. How’re we splitting up the rest?”

“I’ll take the ones in Texas, Colorado, and Iowa,” Cassie said. Her newly short hair was windswept and her arms were crossed as she spoke, addressing Kon and pointedly ignoring Red Hood. “Superboy, you take the final three. Check in when you’re done.”

Kon saluted. Hood didn’t take the bait of Cassie’s pointed dismissal, just nodded and waved a hand at what must have been his subordinates, who finished lashing nylon straps around a stack of medical transport containers. Kon didn’t know what he’d expected, but Hood commanded the situation with a grim sense of urgency.

“Take these, too,” Hood said, handing Kon and Cassie a set of rebreathers—sleek and compact, Bat tech for sure. “You don’t want to risk it with this sh*t, trust me.”

Cassie scoffed, taking one before grabbing a stack of containers in both arms and launching into the sky.

“…I piss in her Cheerios or something?” Hood asked as Kon fitted on his own rebreather.

“She’s also friends with Robin,” Kon said, voice tinny through the mask. “So, kind of.”

“Ah.”

“So’s Impulse. Maybe you should consider some handwritten apologies as a next step. Or schedule time for everyone to come yell at you, I personally found that very cathartic.” Kon glanced at his phone—still no message from Rob; not that he was expecting one, but he checked just in case—and looped the straps for another stack of containers around his forearm. “Thanks for your help, though,” he added, preparing to take off. “And good luck. I’ll just be—”

“New York?” someone asked.

Kon jerked around to see someone standing right at his shoulder—one of the Gotham vigilantes, the new Batgirl. She was in all black, a yellow bat across her chest, and Kon only knew who she was because Robin had tacked a little photo of her on his Tower corkboard with the rest of the Bats. Her cowl covered her whole face, but Kon could still feel the intensity of her stare.

“You’re going to New York?” Batgirl asked again.

“Yeah,” Kon said. “Delaware and Virginia and New York, that’s me.”

Batgirl nodded and climbed onto one of the stacks Kon was holding. “Go,” she commanded.

Kon, perfectly used to taking direction from a Bat, went.

They offloaded antidotes in Wilmington and Chesapeake before Kon flew them to the last stop, a mall in Queens. The last stop and, Kon noted, the biggest. There were people clustered outside both ends of the mall, some still trickling out, everyone corralled by arriving ambulances and police that seemed to be totally out of their depth. Kon dropped the final crate of antidotes off to the EMTs at the south entrance, Batgirl smoothly leaping off to take charge of the scene before he even touched the ground, and without an immediate task to do Kon found himself pulling back, rising away from the crowd to get a better vantage point. He should check in with Cassie and Bart, probably, but this scene was big enough that there might still be loose ends, so he took a moment to close his eyes and adjust his hearing range to sweep through the whole mall, trying to assess how many people were still inside—

Which brings him to right now, eyes snapping open as somewhere inside the mall someone screams: “Kon!”

It’s—his name is a syllable. It could conceivably be short for Conner, a name that many, many people also have. It could be short for Connie or Constance or Conrad, even, not to mention a zillion other words than begin with the same sound, and it also could be a word on its own, the kind meaning trick or deception. All of that is technically true, but Kon doesn’t pause for a single one of those possibilities. He knows, immediately, that someone is calling his name.

A few seconds—and a broken mall window—later, Kon is lurching to a stop in a Macy’s dressing room and Tim Drake is sobbing in one of the stalls in front of him.

“Oh, sh*t,” Kon breathes. For half a second he just stares, trying to confirm what he’s seeing. It is Tim Drake—his hair is longer than it was in July and Kon doesn’t recognize the bulky jacket, but he can see Tim’s eyes, wide and wild and red-rimmed, gleaming in the dim light the same way they did at the harbor. In that farm cellar. The rest of the fitting room is empty, clothes strewn across the floor and the air hazy with rolling gas, swirling in the wake of Kon’s sudden arrival. There’s a yanked-out wall panel on the other side of the room, a stray winter glove on the floor beside it in a puddle from a spitting fire sprinkler, and the whole place is eerie. But more disturbing than any of that is Tim himself. He’s hunched over on his knees, the gaudy floral scarf hanging around his neck a disconcerting slash of color against a black jacket and jeans, and he’s—he’s scrabbling at the floor, Kon realizes with dawning horror, tearing at it like he’s trying to rip up the carpet, shoulders heaving.

“Please,” Tim gasps, voice wet. It’s not to Kon; he doesn’t seem to realize Kon is here, except— “Kon, please, please.” Kon jerks at his name, but Tim doesn’t even look at him, just hunches further and presses a shaking hand to the lines he scored in the dampening carpet. His nails are torn, cracked and bleeding, his voice hoarse. “Kon. Can you hear me, can you—Kon. Please, Kon—”

Fear gas. Tim is terrified, and he’s calling for Kon.

Kon unfreezes all at once, darting forward to loop his arms around Tim and pull him up. “Hey,” he tries to say softly, soothingly, only he aims too soft because there’s something lodged in his throat and he has to swallow past it while Tim thrashes, caught in whatever nightmare hallucination this gas has cooked up. Robin has told the team enough about this Gotham speciality that Kon can guess Tim’s pretty far removed from reality right now, enough that Tim doesn’t seem to recognize him even after calling for him. Kon winces as Tim’s elbow connects with his stomach and Tim chokes out a pained noise. “Oh sh*t,” Kon says. “Hey, don’t do that, you’ll only hurt yourself, okay?” He tries to shift position, and Tim moves fast, twisting out of Kon’s grip in an instant. Kon catches him before Tim can slam himself right into the wall, holding Tim at arm’s length with a little TTK boost so Tim won’t accidentally fracture another bone on the whole boy-of-steel situation, and for a moment Kon is nonsensically reminded of some of the angrier cats he’s rescued from trees. Honestly, none of them were this hard to keep hold of.

He’s not sure how he’s going to move Tim like this short of fully TTK immobilizing him, which seems like it would only freak him out more. “Whoa,” he says, “whoa, hey, Tim, breathe—” Tim kicks out and Kon shifts to let it glance off his ribs, and sh*t, Tim’s on the verge of hyperventilating now—

All at once Tim goes still, his unfocused gaze slipping over Kon’s shoulder.

“Bruce,” he whispers.

And—what?

“What?” Kon says.

Tim doesn’t look at him. His devastated expression doesn’t even flicker, wholly focused on whatever he’s seeing. There’s no one else here—Kon would’ve heard them—but Kon finds himself looking over his shoulder at the empty stall door anyway.

“I know,” Tim rasps between stuttering breaths. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—I’m sorry. I’m—I didn’t—”

“Tim, there’s no one there,” Kon says. He’s trying to scan for injuries as fast as possible, making sure there’s no hidden skull or neck fracture to worry about before making any more sudden moves, and he’s also trying not to panic at the horrible, scraped raw way Tim is apologizing. Bruce, he’d said, locked in a hallucination of what is supposedly one of his worst fears. Bruce. Bruce, the man he’d gone to live with a few months ago, because Kon went and tattled about the fake uncle and thought he was helping. “Please, just—”

“No,” Tim cries, and starts to thrash in earnest now, beating himself against Kon’s TTK and arms alike. His heart is racing, both in Kon’s ears and against Kon’s palms as he tries to keep Tim still. “I’m sorry, let me go, let me—Bruce, please, I’m sorry, I'm so sorry, please, I'm sorry.”

Kon’s own panic crystallizes, and he’s still wearing a mask, so this is 100% organic horror spiking inside him. “Tim,” he says, and oh, hell. He pulls Tim in, tucking Tim’s head against his shoulder. “Hold on, okay, just hold on!”

“Please,” Tim says into Kon’s jacket, and Kon is already in the air, using his TTK to pry open a hole in the ceiling—sorry, Macy’s—and pulling Tim the most direct route into the sky.

They land on a flat rooftop a few blocks away. Kon doesn’t have much of a plan except putting distance between Tim and that place, getting somewhere with guaranteed clean air, and having a moment to think.

“Okay,” Kon says, just standing there for a second, staring out at the skyline and still holding Tim. “Okay, I just dropped off some antidotes. I can go get one if—”

He’s barely settled Tim down when Tim bolts again. And f*ck, Tim’s still incredibly fast, even with his legs shaking so hard he shouldn’t even be able to stand, let alone launch himself toward the edge of the f*cking roof. Kon has to put more than a little super speed into his lunge to intercept him, dragging Tim back.

“What the f*ck!” Kon says.

“No,” Tim pleads, nearly incoherent. “No, let me go to him. They’re still there. They’re still—Steph and Babs and—Kon.”

“I’m here,” Kon tells him. “I’m literally right here, god, don’t fling yourself off the roof again.” He should take Tim somewhere street-level, probably, but if Tim is this out of it he also doesn’t want to leave Tim where someone random could find him even for the minute it will take Kon to grab an antidote, and he definitely doesn’t want to bring Tim back to the mall. So he sends out an alert for backup.

Bart makes it in thirty seconds, arriving in a puff of kicked-up dust. “What is it? Did you find the people who did this? Are they still here? Do we need to give chase? This whole thing was super messed up so I’m very much in the mood to give chase right now, just point me in the—oh, who’s that?”

“This is Tim,” Kon says. Tim jerks under Kon’s hand, and Kon pauses just long enough to make sure Tim isn’t about to bolt again. “I need you to watch him,” he tells Bart, focusing the rest of his attention on filtering through the noise in the surrounding streets, trying to make sure there are no more imminent threats before he leaves. His earlier panic has turned into a sick urgency working its way through his gut, more frantic with every hitch of Tim’s shoulders. “He was in the mall, he’s fully freaking out—most of the people I saw were just curled up and crying, but he keeps trying to run. Like, off the edge of the roof. I don’t know if he got more exposed than everyone else or if he just has an extra bad reaction to this stuff, but I need you to keep him here, keep him breathing clean air. I’m going to get an antidote.”

“sh*t, okay,” Bart says, and a moment later he’s crouching next to Tim. “Okay. Okay. Hi, Tim.”

Tim mumbles something while Kon is listening to the whine of sirens down the street, and Bart does something very un-Bart-like, which is freeze for almost a whole second.

“Superboy,” Bart says.

“What?” Kon says, distracted.

“Who did you say this was again?”

“Tim Drake,” Kon says. “He’s from Gotham, I don’t know why he’s here, but I’ve met him a few—it doesn’t matter.”

“He said ‘names.’”

“He’s said a few names”—like Kon’s name, and Bruce, which Kon can’t think about right now or he might do something stupid like go hunt down Mr. Wayne and drop him in the middle of Antarctica so Tim never has to apologize for anything ever again—“because he’s high on an extremely f*cked-up hallucinogenic. Just focus on keeping him physically secure.”

“No, he literally said—” Bart cuts off, eyes widening. “Oh. Oh. Never mind.”

Kon launches into the air. “See if you can get in touch with Robin, okay? He’ll know what to do for something like this.”

“Right,” Bart says, a bit faintly, and blurs forward to catch Tim again. Tim thrashes, staring unfocused into the middle distance, but Bart just loops his arms around Tim and holds him close, almost like a hug. “Right, right, right. Okay. I’ve got him. But I think—make a plan b, too? In case Robin is, um, otherwise occupied.”

Kon doesn’t have time to puzzle that one out before he’s arriving back at the mall. Batgirl seems to have gotten things quickly in hand at the south entrance, EMTs already distributing antidotes to a slowly-calming crowd, and he’s able to get a dose and take off back to the roof before more than a few people even notice he’s there. Bart and Tim have hardly moved by the time he’s touching back down on the roof, Bart still wrapped around Tim and talking low and fast. Tim isn’t trying to run anymore. Instead he’s just still, eerily still, every part of his body locked up as his eyes flick back and forth, following something that’s definitely not there.

“—so then Nightwing kisses the SpaceForce President’s daughter while still married to Agent Blue, and not even as a cheating thing, like it was all totally cool with everyone which seems like a no-brainer but was honestly still progressive by 22nd-century media standards, so there was way more drama about it on the messageboards than on the show itself—and it was before my time obviously but I still dug up so much BlueSpaceWing fanfiction on one of the old archives, and anyway the President finds out about this right before the season two finale where—Tim, hey, you’re going to want to hear this part, okay? I know you are,” Bart is saying, probably too fast for Tim to keep up, but if he’s rambling about Nightwing SpaceForce then he’s trying to distract Tim with the sound of his voice more than anything. Kon’s pretty sure Bart could recite this in his sleep; Robin has made Bart recount the plot of the show in full at least three times.

Kon really, really wishes Robin were here right now.

He motions for Bart to keep talking as he approaches, and Bart doesn’t miss a beat, shifting to describe the attack on Nightwing’s home planet that sets up the brutal season 3 rebellion arc, and Kon injects the antidote into Tim’s left arm as carefully as he can when Tim starts fighting Bart’s hold again, saying, “Please, please—don’t—” And Kon knows it’s the fear gas; all of the teams have had emergency training for stuff like this, from JL-mandated field aid courses to Robin pop quizzing them on antidotes for the various sh*t that bubbles up in Gotham like clockwork, just in case. Still—it sucks. He has to grip Tim’s arm so hard he’ll probably leave fingerprint bruises, which is another thing he can’t think about too hard or he might be sick inside his gas mask, but between him and Bart they manage it. Kon’s fingers only fumble a little as he wraps the empty syringe and tucks it into his side pouch.

Tim is still in Bart’s arms, chest heaving, no longer fighting to get away but definitely not lucid yet, either. “You’re going to be okay,” Kon says for probably the fifteenth time.

“Kon,” Tim mumbles. Bart makes a small, surprised noise.

Later, Kon mouths to Bart. To Tim he says, “Yeah, buddy, right here.” It’s the way he’s heard Nightwing talk to kids when he’s shadowed the older Titans. He clears his throat. “Uh, Impulse, you were in the middle of season 3?”

Two minutes later Nightwing is reuniting with Agent Blue after a mid-season death scare, Tim’s shaking is starting to subside, and Kon is feeling like the emotional equivalent of a chair teetering on its back legs when Tim speaks again.

“Kon?” Tim rasps, and this time he actually looks right at Kon when he does, eyes still a little hazy but steady enough. “What…”

“Hey, Tim,” Kon says, a wave of relief nearly knocking him flat.

“You’re here?” Tim asks fuzzily. He lifts one hand, brushing his fingers above the seam of Kon’s rebreather. His skin is freezing against Kon’s temple. “I’m still…am I still…”

“No, no,” Kon says. “You were hit with fear gas, but you got an antidote. I mean, we gave you one.” Tim’s gaze tracks up to Bart and his eyebrows twitch, but he otherwise doesn’t react. At least he’s not full-body shaking anymore. At least he’s able to focus his eyes. Kon has no desire to see someone look so unreachable ever again. “You’re okay now, you just gave us a scare. I mean, hey,” Kon says weakly, “aren’t you Gothamites supposed to carry around emergency gas masks everywhere?”

“There was a,” Tim says, still staring at Bart. “There was a k-kid. Didn’t have one.”

Something twists in Kon’s chest. Oh. “That’s—sorry, ignore me. Important thing is, you’re gonna be okay. Right, Impulse? Tim, this is my friend Impulse. You might know him from, um, the news.”

“Right, totally,” Bart says. “Really great to meet you for the first time ever.”

Tim just keeps staring. His teeth are chattering slightly, Kon realizes. Maybe the gas knocks people’s systems out of whack, or maybe Tim’s just not bundled enough against the late November air, but either way it’s time to get off this roof. Kon’s not taking Tim back to the mall, or to Gotham, though. Not until he sorts a few things out.

“Impulse,” Kon says. “Batgirl is over at the mall. Can you—?”

Bart is already moving, shifting Tim so he’s braced against Kon instead. “Yep, yep, I’ll go see if they could use a speedster. You take care of him, yeah?”

“Batgirl?” Tim says, half a beat behind while Bart is five beats ahead. “Batgirl’s here?”

“She’s at the mall, helping with the antidotes,” Kon says.

“Oh.” Tim tips his head back, resting against Kon’s shoulder. “They’re okay, then.”

Kon nods to Bart, and Bart nods back, and then he’s gone. “Tim, hey,” Kon says. Tim tears his eyes away from where Bart blurred and vanished and looks up at Kon, expression blank. It reminds Kon of how he looked back in the foyer of that penthouse. “Let’s get out of here. You up for some flying?”

Tim looks at him for another long moment, then reaches up to curl a hand around the lapel of Kon’s jacket, as if grounding himself. “Just don’t do any flips,” he mutters.

Kon is almost startled into a laugh. He gently, gently hoists Tim into his arms and, for the second time today, takes off into the sky.

◇

He brings Tim to the woodshop. As they descend he tells Tim to keep his eyes closed, supposedly because of the wind, but also so Tim doesn’t see the patchwork of Kansas rising up to meet them, dormant fields caught right at golden hour. It’s one of Kon’s favorite sights, but he at least has enough sense not to advertise to an unvetted civilian exactly where Superboy lives.

But he brings Tim to the woodshop at the edge of the Kent farm anyway, because—it’s somewhere small, and safe, and familiar. The kind of place Kon thinks Tim might need right now.

“Okay, you can open your eyes,” Kon says once they’re inside, flipping on the lights and knocking a bit of sawdust off the overstuffed armchair in the corner before slowly setting Tim down in it. Tim blinks, looking around. Kon tries not to feel self-conscious about it; it’s surely shabbier than what Tim is used to, between that penthouse and wherever Bruce Wayne calls home, but it’s better than that mall and besides, if Tim is going to suddenly be stuck up about a rescue then Kon won’t care about his opinion anyway.

Tim isn’t stuck up about it, though. He says, “This is where you made the charcuterie board,” and his voice almost sounds full of wonder.

“I—yeah,” Kon says. There isn’t too much to look at beyond the woodworking supplies and an old boombox on one of the shelves. There’s a window on the opposite wall, but it’s high and small and only shows a strip of sky from this angle. Kon finally unhooks his gas mask and pulls it off his face, carefully wrapping it in a plastic bag just in case there’s any of that sh*t clinging to the outside. The familiar smell of wood shavings and the general earthiness of the farm fills his lungs. “I thought it’d be a good place to wind down a bit. Here.” He flips on one of the space heaters in the corner. “How are you feeling?”

“Hm,” Tim says, shifting on the armchair. His gaze has settled back on Kon, and Kon feels it like a blanket over his shoulders. “Eighty percent.”

“Eighty percent what?”

“Lucid,” Tim says. “How long has it been? Since the attack.”

Kon checks the time. “Thirty minutes, give or take, I didn’t have an exact timeline when I got the call. Do you want water or something?”

“I need to borrow your phone.”

Kon blinks, then hesitates. “Who are you calling?” It’s just, if Tim is calling Bruce Wayne, then Kon needs to stall for a bit.

Tim gives him a weird look, there and gone in the space of a second. “My friends were with me,” he tells Kon slowly. “I need to…make sure they’re okay.”

Well. Kon abruptly feels like an asshole. “Of course, yeah,” he says, pulling out his phone. He has three different operating systems depending on what passcode he uses to log in—for Conner Kent with his normal person apps, for Superboy with his team servers and database hookups, and one with no identifying info attached for situations like this, where a civilian needs to make a call. Robin’s idea, of course. Kon swipes into the third one and hands the phone over, just like he did that night at the harbor.

Tim punches in a number with only minutely trembling hands and holds the phone to his ear, bracing his elbows on his knees.

“This better be you,” someone says on the other end, loudly enough that Kon decides he doesn’t even feel bad about listening in. “I swear to god if it’s not you, I’ll—”

“It’s me,” Tim says. His shoulders have slumped in relief, leaving him nearly folded in half on the armchair. “It’s Tim. I’m okay. Are you okay? Is Babs okay?”

“We’re fine. We didn’t f*cking disappear and lose our phones, you f*ck.” It’s a girl, with a thicker Gotham accent than Tim has. “Cass found your phone, by the way, in the dressing room, along with your gloves and no you. You know how that looks? We were about to call in the f*cking cavalry.”

Tim winces. “I must have dropped it. I don’t know.”

“Okay, Butterfingers, not the point. Where are you now?”

“I’m…” Tim glances at Kon. “I’m safe, Steph. I swear. You can tell everyone I’ll be home for dinner.”

It does not escape Kon’s notice that Tim doesn’t mention the part where he apparently gave his gas mask to a kid and got a full dose of fear toxin. Kon raises an eyebrow, but Tim is doing a great job of avoiding eye contact.

“I need so much more than that,” the girl is saying. “Do you need someone to come get you? We’re still in the thick of things here, but we can—”

“No, I’ll figure it out. I. I have to go.”

“Tim, what the f*ck—”

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Tim says, hangs up, and bursts into tears.

Kon startles, jolting the workbench behind him. “Whoa,” he says. “sh*t, are you—?”

“Sorry,” Tim says between gasps, “sorry, I’m okay, it’s the—the aftereffects make me a bit—temperamental—” He swipes a rough hand across his cheek, and Kon notices for the first time that Tim’s arm is splattered with ink. “It’s just a biochemical blowback, I’ll be okay soon. I’m okay now. I’m just. I’m just.”

“No, yeah, that makes sense,” Kon says, which is ridiculous because it’s not like it needs to make sense when it’s clearly happening anyway. He moves forward, kneeling carefully in front of Tim, unsure what to do next. “Do you need…what do you need?”

Tim shudders, curling his fingers into his hair. “You mentioned. Water?”

“Yeah. Yeah, water,” Kon says, way too thrilled to have a task. He remembers how freaking slippery Tim has been all day, though, and also his anxiety irrationally ratchets up the moment Tim’s out of sight, so he makes it to the farmhouse and back in about six seconds with a quick HeyMadon’tcomeouttotheworkshopsorrybye tossed over his shoulder in the kitchen. Half the water definitely spills on the way back, but Tim takes the glass and drains it anyway, and Kon’s back where he was, kneeling in front of the armchair trying to figure out what the hell to do next.

Well, he knows one thing he’s going to do next. But he has to wait until Tim is okay, first.

“Sorry,” Tim is saying again. “I swear it’s not…usually this bad, after. I just. I saw.” He swallows. “The toxin, it made me see my friends—it made me think—even though I knew it was fear gas, it still made me think I saw—”

“sh*t,” Kon says. “They’re okay, though. Your friends. You just talked to them.”

“Yeah,” Tim says. His face is blotchy, wet all over with tears he can’t wipe away fast enough, and Kon kicks himself for not thinking to equip the workshop with tissues. Everyone needs tissue now and then, especially when you panic and sort of kidnap a traumatized civilian boy and bring him here because you didn’t know where else to go. He has an extra flannel shirt slung over the bench, maybe he could offer that to Tim instead? “Of course. I’m being”—a sharp, shallow breath—“irrational.”

Irrational. Tim’s dealing with the aftereffects of one of the most f*cked-up toxins ever invented after giving up his gas mask for a kid, and the word he uses for himself is irrational. Kon feels a sudden, searing flash of anger toward whoever taught Tim to do that.

Tim’s done with the water. Kon takes the glass back, cupping it in his own hands as he tries to phrase his worry as a question. “Your friends are okay,” he repeats. “Were there…other hallucinations?”

Tim shudders, but doesn’t answer.

“Never mind,” Kon says. “You don’t have to tell me. Just, let me know if I can do anything else.”

Tim takes a shaky breath. Another. “Can I,” he starts. Kon waits. It’s another thirty seconds before Tim shudders again and says, “Can I touch you.”

“Uh,” Kon says, like an idiot.

Tim’s head shoots up, narrowly missing cracking against Kon’s nose. “Just,” he says, “I mean, the hallucinations. They’re not so good with the. The tactile part. So I just meant—actually, forget I said anything. Sorry.”

His face is bright red. Kon’s might be, too, but he doesn’t care, hastily setting the glass aside. “Tim,” he says, and reaches out, curling his hand around one of Tim’s. Tim’s hand is still cold, his jacket sleeve damp against Kon’s knuckles, and Tim makes a choked-off noise, shifting his other hand to cover Kon’s. And it’s like something clicks into place, some set of instructions unearthing itself in the back of Kon’s mind, because suddenly it’s so obvious that he should lean in, reach out his free hand and cup the back of Tim’s neck, cradle Tim’s face against his shoulder again in some sort of half hug. Kon wonders if there is, in fact, some sort of instruction manual in his brain—all the information Cadmus dumped in there has historically been light on the physicality, touch being something Kon’s had to figure out on the fly, but this seems to be the right move. Tim presses closer, fingers tightening around Kon’s hand to the point where it would hurt if Kon weren’t halfway alien, and stays there, breath hitching. Kon finds himself stroking his thumb across the base of Tim’s head, through his tangled hair, slightly tacky from what is probably some combination of sweat and sprinkler water, and Kon has a flash of that feeling again—the same one he got sitting on a rooftop with Robin earlier this year, the same one from the cold foyer in Tim’s penthouse. The feeling that for all his strength and speed and world-saving responsibilities, the most important thing he could possibly do right now is just be here.

It only lasts five minutes, probably, but also feels like it might be forever. The piece of sky through the window darkens bit by bit, streaked through with deep purple by the time Tim shifts, turning his face toward Kon’s.

“Thank you,” Tim says softly. “For getting me out.”

There’s a lump in Kon’s throat when he swallows. “You called for me.”

“Yeah. I suppose I did.”

Another moment, then Tim pushes himself upright, swaying as he goes and blinking blearily at the workshop.

“You good?” Kon asks.

Tim nods, but he’s clearly fighting to stay awake. “That’s another—side effect,” he says through a yawn, scrubbing a stray tear off his cheek, his other hand still curled around Kon’s. Kon isn’t a fan of how well Tim seems to know fear toxin side effects. Gothamites. “Increased enzyme activity. Melatonin spike. My sleep schedule’s going to be f*cked. Plus, it’s just. It’s nice here. It’s quiet.”

“Yeah,” Kon says. “It is.”

“I should go,” Tim mumbles.

“You don’t have to. You can stay a bit.”

“Do you have to go back out there?”

“Not yet.”

“Hm,” Tim says. “Five minutes. Then I’ll go.”

He’s fast asleep in two.

Kon waits another few minutes, listening to Tim’s steady breathing and definitely not feeling creepy about it, before delicately extricating his hand from Tim’s. He could leave his hand there—he would, if he didn’t have something to do. He would let Tim hold on and sleep. Tim probably deserves it.

Instead, Kon finds a pad of sticky notes and pen and scribbles DON’T GO ANYWHERE, I will be RIGHT BACK —Kon. He sticks the note to Tim’s forehead and slips outside, closing the door softly, and then shuts his eyes and throws his hearing out wide.

◇

He finds Clark in Atlanta, of all places. Kon tracks his voice to the security suite in a dormant satellite branch of S.T.A.R. Labs. Kon has enough restraint to make sure the security wing is empty except for Clark and two other familiar figures before he bursts through the doorway and snarls, “You lied to me!”

Clark heard him coming, of course, and is already facing the door. Behind him Batman and Nightwing spare Kon a glance from where they’re reviewing security footage on the monitors.

Clark, infuriatingly, seems puzzled but not alarmed. “Superboy,” he says. “Is this—can this wait? We’re investigating a break-in, we think it might be connected to today’s—”

“No!” Kon says. All of his bottled-up panic and horror and creeping fear that he’s majorly, majorly f*cked up is surging to the surface and he needs to fix this now. He points at Clark, taking half a step forward. “You said he was good! You said he was a good person!”

Now Clark has the grace to look a bit startled. “Who?”

“Bruce Wayne,” Kon hisses.

Over Clark’s shoulder both Batman and Nightwing go still, turning their heads toward Kon in eerie synchrony. Clark twitches back, even though Kon’s furious pointing hadn’t even made contact.

“Okay. I can see you’re upset,” Clark says placatingly, attention fully on Kon for the first time since he landed. Batman and Nightwing, too, are looking intently at him; the weight of all three gazes is unnerving, but Kon doesn’t waver. “I’m listening. Just—give me a bit more info, here. Did someone say something about Mr. Wayne?”

“Something like that,” Kon bites out. “I just pulled Tim Drake out of the mall attack in New York. He was out of his mind on that fear gas sh*t and he just—all he kept saying while he was hallucinating was Bruce, please, I’m sorry.”

Somehow Batman reacts before Clark does, jerking forward. “Where is he now?” Batman demands.

“What?” Kon says.

“Batman,” Clark says. “I’m sure—”

“Tim. Where is he?”

Kon lifts his chin. “Somewhere safe.” He turns his glare back on Clark. “You know what that sounds like, right? Why is Tim’s fear gas hallucination making him apologize to the guy he’s living with? Why did we rat him out to someone who—who might be—because if that’s what’s going on then it’s our fault.” And that’s what keeps sticking in Kon’s head, what’s been curdling in his stomach ever since Tim started begging empty air for forgiveness in the Macy’s fitting room. Kon thought he had been helping. That he’d done something good, that he did more than just pull someone out of a cellar or a harbor. But maybe Tim had a reason for making up a fake uncle. Maybe Kon had been wrong; more terrifyingly, maybe even Clark had been wrong.

Nightwing is on his phone, expression grim below his domino mask. Batman hasn’t moved, as far as Kon can tell, even to breathe, and Clark has both hands up like he’s trying to quell both Kon and Batman at once. “Superboy, is Tim okay now?” Clark says in his Mission Debrief voice.

“He got an antidote,” Kon says. “So if you mean momentarily okay, then yes.”

“That’s good. Let’s take a moment, then, because I’m sure there’s an explanation—”

“You didn’t see him!” Kon says. “You didn’t hear what he was saying!”

“No,” Clark says firmly. “I didn’t. But I also didn’t lie to you. Bruce Wayne would never hurt one of his children. He would never make them fear him.”

Batman inhales sharply. Kon, too, takes a deep breath, trying not to meet Clark’s fierce calm with more anger.

“You can believe that,” Kon says. “But something is going on. And you—you better fix it, or I will.” He would. He’d even call up Red Hood, if he had to, because whatever Kon’s feelings on him are, Kon’s pretty sure Hood would help Tim. “He deserves to be safe.”

“Nightwing,” Batman says.

“I got this, B,” Nightwing says. “Go.”

At first Kon thinks they’re doing the Bat thing where they just start having their own conversation in the middle of another, but then Batman turns back to Kon. “Take us to him,” Batman says, already reaching for Clark. Clark reaches back automatically, slipping his arm around Batman’s waist and lifting into the air.

Kon blinks, surprised and a bit mollified at how gravely Batman is taking this, which is somehow even more grave than his baseline. But— “Superman,” Kon says, “I took him to the, um, workshop. So—”

“Batman knows about the farm,” Superman says. “We’ll meet you there.”

A rush of air, and for a brief moment Kon is left alone in the security suite with Nightwing. Nightwing seems to study him, face devoid of its usual open humor. “You did good, Superboy,” he says before Kon can take off.

“I don’t think I did.” Kon hates how brittle his voice sounds now that his anger has been yanked out from under him. “Not if I’m the one who messed up in the first place.”

Nightwing tilts his head. “There may be a misunderstanding, but you did your best with the information you have. And it’s not nothing, facing down those two and standing your ground.”

Nightwing would know, Kon thinks; he’s been tempering Batman and Superman since before Kon even existed. Kon just nods.

“We’ll figure this out,” Nightwing says, and this time there’s a hint of warmth. “Now go, you’ll want to beat them back.”

Kon goes.

◇

He does beat them to the farm, but barely; he only has the advantage of flying solo to make it back first. He makes himself slow down enough to not leave skid marks in the grass, and reenters the workshop in a tumble of cold air.

Tim is already stirring in the armchair, frowning when the sticky note dislodges and falls into his lap. He picks it up. “...Did you leave? How long was I out?”

“Yes,” Kon says. “Not long. Um, listen. It’s nothing bad, but we’re about to have some visitors.”

“Visitors,” Tim repeats. Then his gaze slides past Kon toward the doorway. “Oh, god.”

“Tim,” Clark says, both his voice and his movements gentle as he enters the workshop. Batman stays behind him, hovering in the doorway. It’s not his usual looming—if Kon didn’t know better, he’d say Batman almost looks hesitant. “We heard what happened.”

Tim’s gaze flicks from Kon to Clark to Batman. “I’m fine,” Tim says slowly. Kon doesn’t quite know how to read Tim’s reaction, but it’s definitely not the usual reverence or intimidation. Kon takes half a second to feel irrationally pleased that his woodshop elicited more awe than Superman and Batman in all their caped glory. “I’m fine now.” His gaze shifts back to Kon, giving him clear What the f*ck look. Kon gives him an apologetic grimace back.

Clark doesn’t miss it. “Superboy, why don’t you go get Tim some water,” he says, not looking at Kon.

“I already did. It’s right there by the chair.” Kon crosses his arms. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Clark and Batman exchange a quick glance. Kon braces himself for a fight, because they’re off their collective rocker if they think Kon isn’t going to see this through himself, but—

“It’s okay,” Tim says from the armchair. He sounds exhausted, voice scratchy—from screaming, Kon knows—but steady. “Superboy can stay. Like I said, I’m fine, just a little tired. The usual stuff. But I got the antidote in time and everyone else is okay, so no one needs to worry.”

“Of course,” Clark says. He still keeps his tone and body language calm, but between him and Batman in full cape mode the woodshed suddenly seems even tinier than before. “Only, it sounds like there are some things we might need to clear up, if you’re up for it.”

“Things…involving Superman?” Tim darts another look at Kon. “What did you tell them?”

Kon swallows. “Just that—if there’s something wrong with you staying with Bruce Wayne, then we need to figure it out.”

Tim’s eyes widen. “What? Why would there be something wrong?”

“You were screaming his name,” Batman says quietly from the doorway. “You were apologizing.”

Tim’s breath catches.

“Look,” Kon says. “If—if there is something wrong. This is our mess, okay? I tattled. Superman told Mr. Wayne. So we’ll fix it. We will.”

Tim’s alarmed gaze doesn’t move from Batman. Clark seems to track it, turning toward Batman in the door. “Maybe—you should go,” Clark says, low. “Wait in the house. I’ll—”

“No,” Tim says.

No one was moving, but it feels like everyone freezes anyway. Everyone except Tim, who scrambles to his feet, bracing himself against the arm of the chair.

“No,” he says again. “Don’t go. I don’t—it’s not what it sounds like. I’m not afraid of Bruce. Never.”

“Tim,” Kon starts, feeling the worst kind of helpless, “you were…”

“I know,” Tim says. “I don’t remember everything, but I remember enough to—to imagine what you heard. But I swear, I’m not. I’m not now, and I wasn’t when I was—seeing things.” He glances at Clark, at Batman, and then turns to Kon, setting his shoulders. “I wasn’t afraid of him. I was afraid for him.”

“Tim,” Batman says. And Kon has heard—has seen—that Batman is good with kids, is especially protective of Gotham’s citizens, but there’s none of that usual skill on display now. Batman just sounds wrecked.

Tim doesn’t look at Batman. He stays facing Kon, taking a deep breath. “When I first met Bruce, he was—going through something awful. And I just wanted to help. I wanted to help him find something he’d lost. And I did, in a way, and now—I didn’t think I’d even have this, okay, that his home would also be my home like it is now, and it’s. It’s great. I’m happy there. And I think that’s why the gas—why it showed me what it did. I’m afraid of losing that. Of making things worse instead of helping. So it made me see a version of Bruce that I’d failed, and I was upset for him, and for me, but I wasn’t afraid of him. Okay?” Now he turns back to Clark and Batman. “Okay? That’s it. That’s it.”

Kon doesn’t have a response right away, trying to turn all that over in his head and make it fit what he thought he saw. He glances at Clark, whose eyebrows are doing the thing they do when he’s trying very hard not to look hurt. “I see,” Clark says, voice a little raspy himself. “Thank you for telling us that, Tim. And. I don’t want to overstep, but I feel pretty confident in saying that even if he’s not the object of your fear, Bruce wouldn’t want you to feel responsible for—for his actions. You couldn’t fail him, not like that.”

“No,” Batman says softly. “Not ever.”

“Also, I’m sure Bruce will tell you this himself when you get home,” Clark adds. “And possibly hug you, if you let him.”

“Oh,” Tim says faintly. “He doesn’t have to do that.”

“Hm,” Batman says.

“So,” Kon breaks in. “So, if I bring you back to Mr. Wayne’s. You’ll be safe? You’ll definitely be safe with him?”

“Yes,” Tim says.

His heartbeat doesn’t waver.

Abruptly Kon feels like a thousand-ton steel weight has been lifted off his shoulders. Like he can actually breathe for the first time since busting open a Macy’s roof. (Which he’s probably going to have to tell Clark about at some point, but—later.) Kon did not, in fact, send Tim to live with someone who terrifies him. He didn’t hurt Tim, even indirectly, and more importantly, Tim wasn’t in an even worse situation now than he was with an uncle who didn’t even exist. And okay, Tim might have some unresolved issues that make for particularly horrible fear gas hallucinations, but who isn’t a little messed up, right?

“I’m sorry,” Kon says. “f*ck. I’m really sorry for jumping to conclusions, this was probably the last thing you needed after all that—”

Tim shakes his head. “I probably would’ve thought the same thing if it were the other way around.” Now that he’s no longer radiating determination, Tim looks like he might sway himself right back into the armchair. “Well. I might’ve done a bit more research first, but. Yeah.”

“Even if it wasn’t what it seemed, I’m glad we cleared this up,” Clark says.

“Yes,” Batman says. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Superboy.”

“Well—you’re welcome,” Kon says. It hits him, then, the absurdity of it: standing here in his little workshop with Superman and Batman and Tim Drake, of all people. Kon isn’t sure which of the latter two is weirder. Batman, probably; just this morning he was looming down at Kon on a Gotham rooftop, but it’s hard to Loom in a cozy little shed. Batman knows about the farm, Clark had said, and Kon wonders how many times Batman has been here before. If he always wears the suit, or if Clark has seen him without the cowl. Kon’s mind tries to conjure the image of Batman in full getup eating pancakes at Ma and Pa’s kitchen table, Looming at their glass pitcher of orange juice, and Kon almost bursts out laughing. He doesn’t, smothering the impulse, but man, Tim’s not the only one whose emotions are going on a roller coaster right now.

Also, a persistent little part of his brain insists, if Batman visits the farm, then maybe Robin can too, one day.

“We’ll take Tim back to Gotham,” Batman is saying. Kon pulls himself back to the present and opens his mouth to protest, but Batman holds up a hand. “I will be able to check and make sure the toxin was successfully neutralized. And I will make sure he gets home safely.”

“As will I,” Clark says. His expression isn’t hard, but open, like he’s asking rather than demanding. And Kon realizes Clark might be feeling the same guilt-relief co*cktail that Kon is right now, all things considered.

“Nightwing could use some backup with the investigation,” Batman adds.

It does make sense; no one is more equipped to combat a Gotham toxin than Batman, and Clark can carry them both. Kon would be extraneous. Also, he won’t pretend it doesn’t mean anything, that Batman would trust him to help Nightwing.

Still, Kon looks at Tim, who is blinking sleepily from the chair. “Go ahead,” he tells Kon. “I’m probably going to pass out again in, like, five minutes anyway.”

“Okay,” Kon says, but moves toward Tim, hoisting him to his feet before Clark can intervene. Batman has disappeared—Kon can hear him waiting just outside, if he focuses—and Clark shifts to the doorway, clearing a path. “Just, real quick.” Kon digs around in his thigh bag for the pen he always carries—Robin likes to take analog notes, but can’t keep track of a pen for longer than twenty-four hours to save his life—and pulls it out. “Can I see your hand?”

“Why?” Tim holds up his hand, the one not spattered in dried ink.

Kon reaches out, carefully holding Tim’s hand still, hyperaware of Clark lingering in the doorway as he writes his phone number along the base of Tim’s thumb. The number for the anonymous login, but still a number for Kon’s phone. “Shouting is great and all, but this is—you can actually call, if you need to. Even if it’s not an emergency. Just in case.”

Tim looks down at his hand. “Huh,” he says, and his mouth curves into a soft smile, there and gone in an instant, but it happened. Kon did that. “Okay. I just might do that.”

◇

Kon ends up staying out until nearly sunrise trying to help Nightwing scrounge up any sort of clue about the S.T.A.R. Labs break-in. That lab had apparently closed down most of its projects a few weeks ago and was in the process of readying its equipment for transport; by dawn the best they could figure is someone took advantage of the League’s attention being elsewhere during the attacks and did a smash-n-grab, except without any smashing, because at least smashing would’ve left behind some sort of trail. Kon’s pretty sure by the end of the night Nightwing was mostly just having fun giving Kon an impromptu but incredibly thorough lesson on the intricacies of evidence gathering, which Kon really should’ve anticipated, because Nightwing is just as much of a nerd as Robin. He just hides it a bit better.

At least Kon’s not the only one yawning his way through Sunday’s Teen Titans training afternoon—this one previously scheduled, at least, and led by Beast Boy. Whatever Robin was up to yesterday has him looking more tired than usual; Kon thinks it might be because no one has managed to track down whoever organized the attacks yet, but when Kon asks if everything’s okay Rob just hesitates for a long moment—very un-Robin of him—and makes an ehhh gesture with his hand. “I had to have some emotional discussions with Batman,” he says. “Anyone would need three to five business days to fully recover.”

“Man, what is that like,” Bart says, slowing his warm-up laps just enough to be more than a figure-eight blur around them. “Does he actually use full sentences, or does he mostly glare pointedly?”

“There’s a lot of inference involved,” Robin says. “But this time was—pretty productive, all things considered.”

Bart stops, or does the Bart version of stopping, which is bounce on the balls of his feet in front of them. “I’m glad everything’s okay,” he says to Robin, oddly intense. “We missed you yesterday.”

Robin stares back for a long moment, body language indecipherable. “Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

Bart darts off. Kon raises an eyebrow at Robin, but Robin just shrugs.

Beast Boy, surprisingly, runs some of the toughest training sessions out of all the older Titans, so even Kon feels wiped by the time they all gather for pizza at the end. The stack of boxes is even higher than usual, because Beast Boy can keep pace with the best of them appetite-wise. Kon snags a few slices of ham and pineapple and settles into his usual corner spot at the table.

“Oh yes, this is the same place as last time,” Beast Boy is saying by the counter. “You really shell out for the good stuff here. When Nightwing’s in charge of pizza night he always just gets Domino’s.”

“I still think the deep dish place on Valencia is better, but these guys are thin crust truthers,” Cissie says as she ties back her hair.

“When you’re a rich and famous movie star, you can pick the pizza spot,” Cassie tells her, loading her plate. “Until then we’re all Robin’s sugar babies.”

“You don’t have to phrase it like that,” Kon says.

“Weren’t you actually a movie star for a minute, Superboy?” Beast Boy says, claiming a whole box of pepperoni.

Kon makes a face around his next bite. He chews fast, but Bart still beats him to answering.

“No, no, you’re thinking of the Disney Channel original movie Superlad,” Bart says right through his own mouthful of pizza.

“Superlad?” Greta asks.

Bart nods so fast his head blurs. “Back, like, three years ago Disney Channel made this movie about Superlad, a teen who discovers he’s a secret alien prince with super alien powers and a super alien dog companion.” Bart strikes an exaggerated heroic pose, and Kon gamefully does not bang his head against the table. Mostly because he doesn’t want Rob to have to replace it. Again. “Now he must stop an alien invasion before it totally ruins prom night!”

“They gave him the Hercules treatment,” Cassie says, patting the top of Kon’s head. “You know how the original Hercules is a demigod because Zeus cheated on Hera, as usual, but Disney can’t do an infidelity plotline so in the animated movie Hercules is fully Zeus and Hera’s kid? They made up some nuclear alien family for Superlad instead of letting him be a super test tube baby.”

“Is that weird for you?” Anita asks Cassie. “The Hercules thing.”

“Probably not as weird as Superlad is for Superboy.”

“Okay but surely Superboy still gets, what’s it called, rerun payments from that,” Beast Boy says.

“Residuals,” Cissie says from the kitchen.

“They claimed it as parody rights,” Robin says. Beast Boy jumps, clearly not having noticed Robin reappear. Rob’s hair is damp from a shower, curling a little at the nape of his neck, and he’s shed his outer uniform, leaving just the soft technical fabric under layers and his domino. Kon suddenly feels less like banging his head on the table. “For all intents and purposes, Superlad is original Disney IP.”

“Which is bullsh*t,” Cissie says, “considering it totally confused Superboy’s branding to the point where they had to put out a whole statement about how the production wasn’t affiliated with any official superheros.”

“Was it even a good movie?” Greta asks.

“Nooo,” Bart says. “Completely flopped. Not sure if that’s more or less insulting than the fact that it’s a ripoff? Like if you’re going to do it, at least do it well? But more importantly Superboy hates it, so that means it’s bad no matter what.”

Robin tilts his head in Kon’s direction, just slightly, and Kon is reminded of Batman and Nightwing doing the same thing the night before. Bats. “You hate it?” Rob says.

Kon wrinkles his nose. “It’s whatever.” Really, the movie is nothing compared to actual, like, enemies and stuff. It just made him a bit uncomfortable at first, because of the whole “Superlad has a loving alien family” thing. It felt like a spotlight highlighting this crucial component the real Superboy didn’t have, even if only a few people knew that.

“And no one could do anything about it?” Beast Boy says, making a face. “Like make them stop airing it? That’s such a bummer.”

“Mickey Mouse’s lawyers are pretty ruthless,” Cassie tells him. She doesn’t mention that three years ago Kon was also still—new, and out of place, and had only tenuous trust from the superhero community. Disney Channel movies weren’t anyone’s top priority. “By the time we figured out how blatant it was, there was really nothing left to do.”

Robin hums, contemplative.

“I know that look,” Kon says. “Rob. Do not hack the Walt Disney Corporation.” His words are probably undercut by how helplessly fond he sounds, but there’s not much Kon can do about that.

“Couldn’t prove it was me,” Rob mutters, but seemingly lets the topic drop and settles in next to Kon at the table. Their knees bump under the table as Rob reaches for Kon’s leftover slice of pizza, the conversation shifting to Top Ten Disney Villains To Fight In Battle around them. “I didn’t realize you hated it,” Robin says quietly.

I don’t, Kon almost says, but thankfully realizes Robin is talking about Superlad and not their knees, which are still just-barely touching. He shrugs. “It was a while ago.” Back when he and Robin were still sort of at odds, trying to build a team, and Kon was trying to figure out where he started and his blueprint ended. “I was in my Cool era. Obviously I’m still in my Cool era, but it’s a more refined cool now.”

“Cool, right,” Robin says, and Kon knows he understands. Robin takes a bite of pizza and chews, looking at Kon, or maybe somewhere past Kon’s shoulder; it can be hard to tell with the mask. “You’re good,” Rob says suddenly.

Kon blinks. “Yeah, it’s all good now. I mean, Mickey Mouse can kiss my ass, but I’m not still brooding about it or anything.”

“No,” Rob says, “I mean, you’re a good person.”

“Um,” Kon says, feeling like he’s lost the thread of their conversation. The spot where their knees touch somehow feels disproportionately warm. “Thanks?”

“You are.” Robin says it with such conviction, even as he keeps talking low enough that no one else hears. It’s just the two of them in the corner of the Tower kitchen. “Like this weekend. I heard about—what you did in New York. And I wanted to say that was really good of you, because you deserve to hear it.” The idea of Robin getting a mission debrief or something about Tim makes Kon’s stomach do a weird, nervous flip, but he ignores that in favor of focusing on not letting his face heat up. “My point is, you’re good. You’re someone I trust. So, I’m working on it.”

It takes Kon a moment to respond. “Working on what?” he manages.

“On Batman,” Robin says. “Getting permission to tell you who I am. And if he doesn’t—f*ck it. I’ll tell you anyway. Okay?”

There’s something tangled in Kon’s chest, warm and humming and pleased even if he still isn’t quite sure how they got here. “Rob,” he says, once again trying not to betray how much f*cking affection he feels at the determined set of Robin’s shoulders. “You know you don’t—you don’t have to tell me. I’m your friend no matter what.”

“Hm,” Robin says, which isn’t really Of course I know that, but isn’t not that, either. “Well, I’m going to. His way or mine, it’ll happen. I still have to figure out how to—what I should—but I will. Just, give me until the end of the year.”

Robin’s nervous, Kon realizes. Well, can’t have that. “Ah,” he says. “I think I know what’s going on.”

“...Do you?” Robin says.

“Yeah,” Kon says gravely. “You have an embarrassing real name. Like, Bartimous Bartholomew the 42nd or something. And you have to come up with a way to do the reveal without absolutely killing the vibe.”

Robin pinches the bridge of his nose. “Oh my god.”

“But, Rob,” Kon says, really working up some momentum now, “it’s not about the name. It’s about the presentation. You just need some Konfidence.”

“No.”

“Or maybe someone to Konfide in.”

Robin’s eyes are, as ever, hidden behind the domino mask, but Kon can tell by the purse of his lips that he’s pretending not to be amused. “You can’t faze me with bad puns. I know Nightwing.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re Robin, you’re unflappable”—Rob gives him another unimpressed look—“but everyone gets performance anxiety sometimes, Rob. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m going to lock you and Nightwing in an impenetrable vault and just have you take each other out.”

“We would simply fuse into one single pun entity and come out stronger and more annoying than ever,” Kon tells him. Then, because he thinks it’s probably important to say: “But, seriously. Whatever your name is, I’ll be happy to know it. And it’ll be cool, you know, to hang out and actually be able to make eye contact.”

He’s not entirely sure why he does it—maybe another one of those hidden manuals in his brain—but he reaches up as he speaks, brushing the back of his knuckles against the corner of Robin’s mask. Rob holds still—stiller than usual, Kon notices somewhere in the back of his mind—and Kon doesn’t pull back yet, and—

“—Robin,” Cassie calls, landing feet-first on the table with more of a thud than necessary considering she can fly. Kon’s inner Ma Kent rails against the entire situation. “I could totally take Beast Boy in a 1v1. Tell him.”

Robin leans back slightly, considering, and Kon’s hand falls away. “Depends on his form and the terrain, Wonder Girl,” Robin says.

Cassie whirls around, pointing to a laughing Beast Boy. “Any mammal. Training room. Two minutes.” And then she’s off, racing out of the room, and the kitchen devolves into scraping chairs and scuffles over the last pizza box as the rest of the team scrambles to follow. Kon doesn’t move right away, watching Robin, and Robin turns back to him, and it’s like they’re still in their tiny kitchen corner bubble, the two of them together while chaos rages around them. Robin grins, small and sharp, and Kon grins back. And even if he doesn’t have it all figured out yet, Kon must be doing something right to be here, surrounded by these people. To have Robin as a best friend.

“All right,” Robin says, pushing to his feet with a small huff. “We should go make sure they don’t do anything that’ll make me have to file a damage expense report later. You coming?”

“Right behind you,” Kon says, and it’s the easiest answer in the world.

◆

[Sunday, 10:23pm]
Robin
did u know some species of carnivorous bats eat mice for dinner
https://www.imdb.com/title/tk0494716/

Oracle
On it.

◆

www.reddit.com/r/whatsthemoviecalled/comments/17t4ke/disney_alien_prince_movie/

Posted by u/Br0kendr3am 12 hours ago
Disney alien prince movie
does anyone remember a tv movie called superlad? or maybe superprince? like an obvious teen superman ripoff movie set in i think atlanta for some reason? i swear i remember watching it on disney channel a few years ago but i can’t find evidence of it existing
12 comments | Share | Save | Hide | Report
sort by BEST
burnttoast51 · 11 hours ago
yea wasn’t the guy from high school musical in it
Br0kendr3am OP · 10 hours ago
Which one?? I don’t see it on any of their imdb pages
swanheartWA · 11 hours ago
Wait wtf i can’t find it either
0thruss · 9 hours ago
i think this was just a collective fever dream
13twister · 2 hours ago
omg this is just like that one song on that podcast
souperDreamer · 1 hour ago
So the Mandela effect
prypheus · 1 hour ago
I swear disney channel is like some kind of memory black hole
dr4per · 13 minutes ago
the movie probably sucked anyway. oh well 😌

Chapter 4: the zoo

Chapter Text

The fourth time, he doesn’t even call for help.

◆

Server: teen titans redux (disney ver)

[Monday, 5:45pm ET]
t as in tired
fyi for obvious reasons i have doubled the tower’s rebreather and Misc. Gotham sh*t supply bins
except fear toxin antidotes, still playing catch-up on that one
but until we track down whoever orchestrated this whole thing we should be extra careful about our backup caches. also our next training with one of the elder titans is a nightwing session so i’m thinking we should do a gotham review
…did we get a server revamp

robin hood (1973) (not robin)
bart’s idea

disney’s 52nd first gay character
bart’s idea

mickey mouse dni
bart’s idea

year 3000
we need some fresh inside jokes!!! i’m just encouraging the process

Direct message: impulse & robin

[Monday, 5:51pm ET]
robin
hey

impulse
hi hi
what’s up??

robin
just wondering
is there a reason you made my server nickname “t as in tired”

impulse
adherence to the theme!
it’s a riff on an iconic 21st century high school musical meme
also you could use a nap bud

robin
ah

impulse
unless there’s some other reason i would do that
which if there was i wouldn’t tell anyone about it or anything
i mean if my friend ever wanted to talk to me about why he thinks his server nickname is memery about names that start with T i would totally listen
but i wouldn’t push him to tell me anything until he’s ready and in the meanwhile my friend could just know that particular inside joke is safe with me ❤️

[robin is typing…]
[robin is typing…]
[robin is typing…]

robin
i see

impulse
i really can change it if u want though
backup options are “grumpy” and “syndrome”

robin
no, it’s okay
it’s a good meme
thanks, bart

impulse
for what? 😜

Text message: [Unknown number] & Kon

[Tuesday, 7:15pm ET]
[Unknown number]
Hey, this is Tim
From the mall thing last weekend
And before that, technically
Tim Drake
Just wanted to send you my number too in case you ever needed it

[“Unknown Number” contact info updated ➡️ “Tim Drake”]

Kon
oh hey!!
okay good i’m glad you texted
not that you had to
but how are you doing? any more side effects?

Tim Drake
Oh yeah no, I’m okay
100% lucid and everything
Got the best night’s sleep I’ve had all year after I crashed, one might even call that a win

Kon
no??

Tim Drake
Or one might not, apparently

[Wednesday, 5:34pm ET]
Kon
WordCrash: Kon is inviting you to play WordCrash!

[Wednesday, 6:01pm ET]
Tim Drake
Was that meant for me?
It’s fine if it was
Just making sure

Kon
yeah
if you want!
unless you’re a coward

Tim Drake
Are you sure you want to go there?
Because I fight to win

Kon
i am so sure

Tim Drake
Your funeral 👍
WordCrash: Tim Drake has played the word SKEAN

[Thursday, 4:15pm ET]
Kon
http://www.buzzfeed.com/blaireheyman/five-terrifying-things-you-wont-believe-they-found-in-gotham-harbor-this-year
#6: tim drake

Tim Drake
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gotham/comments/yavsho/people_seriously_need_to_stop_believing_killer_croc_is_a_literal_crocodile

Kon
him not being a literal crocodile is worse. you do see how that’s worse right

Tim Drake
Enough with the killer croc slander
The man is practically a queer icon

Kon
all right, i’ll bite
(get it 🐊)
how so

Tim Drake
a) Unfairly ostracized by society
b) Participates in hom*oerotic sport (wrestling)
c) Hangs out in the sewers
d) Something about vore probably

Kon
the sewers??

Tim Drake
Have you ever met a straight person who lives in the sewers?

Kon
you know what. you got me there

Server: teen titans redux (disney ver)

[Thursday, 5:11pm ET]
disney’s 52nd first gay character
everyone fill out the secret santa when2meet or i’ll kill you 💪

Text message: [Unknown Number] & hood 🔫

[Thursday, 5:15pm ET]
[Unknown Number]
question

hood 🔫
? Who the f*ck is this

[Unknown Number]
superboy
obviously

hood 🔫
Great
Is someone in trouble again or did robin give you this number just to punish me

[Unknown Number]
i have it from when tim called you
not my fault you didn’t save it
and the only reason i’m texting is because robin doesn’t know i have your contact info, so if you tell him about this i’ll relocate your motorcycle to antarctica

hood 🔫
I’m shaking

[“Unknown Number” contact info updated ➡️ “Super Annoying”]

Super Annoying
anyway
do you know what robin might want for a secret santa present
i got him knockoff bat action figures last year so i’m trying to think outside the box this time

hood 🔫
Hmm

[hood 🔫 is typing…]

hood 🔫
Probably a charcuterie board

Super Annoying
forget i asked 🙄

Server: teen titans redux (disney ver)

[Friday, 9:02pm ET]
t as in tired
hey all i won’t be at this weekend’s training
gotham thing came up
starfire will be leading, nightwing will reschedule his session
you can put pizza on the robin tab at the usual spot

disney’s 52nd first gay character
🍕

year 3000
🍕

mickey mouse dni
🍕

Direct message: sb & robin

[Friday, 9:05pm ET]
sb
not prying but other than the training i’m p free this weekend
in case you need any help with anything

robin
probably not but it’s nice of you to offer
i will explain later
also i’m still working on the batman thing i promise. just have to deal with some stuff first

sb
seriously don’t stress if there’s something important going on
just lmk if i can help
[Read: 9:53pm ☑️]

Text message: Tim Drake & Kon

[Friday, 11:02pm ET]
Kon
WordCrash: Kon has played SUNDER

[Sunday, 10:31am ET]
Tim Drake
sorry, it’s been A Weekend
WordCrash: Tim Drake has played CUSPID

Kon
no worries
giving me time to perfect my next move
WordCrash: Kon has played DRIER
everything okay though?

Tim Drake
Yeah
I think?
WordCrash: Tim Drake has played REFUSE
I mean yeah it’s nothing life threatening or world ending

Kon
well that’s good
those aren’t the only two options for what something can be though
WordCrash: Kon has played LAND

Tim Drake
WordCrash: Tim Drake has played ABYSSAL

Kon
WordCrash: Kon has played LAMENT
also if things do take a turn for world-ending i’ll remind you i have super strength 💪

Tim Drake
Unfortunately not relevant in this case but thanks
WordCrash: Tim Drake has played DERMA
Though. Maybe

[Tim Drake is typing…]

Tim Drake
Do you have any advice about younger brothers
Younger sort-of brothers

Kon
actually yeah
what about them

Tim Drake
Like, having them
At all

[Incoming call from Kon]
Call duration: 1 hr 5 minutes

Tim Drake
That was
Really helpful
Even if your sort-of brother sounds way nicer than mine
Thanks, Kon

Kon
yeah, of course
you got this
just remember, they can smell fear
so just fake it til you make it

Tim Drake
That, I can do

Server: teen titans redux (disney ver)

[Sunday, 2:12pm ET]
t as in tired
sorry everyone i’m still OOO, as it were
i’ll try to be back next weekend, but same deal re: pizza
also sorry i didn’t fill out the when2meet yet, i don’t think i’ll be free til january

disney’s 52nd first gay character
boo
what, is batman making you do nonstop training exercises for christmas

t as in tired
something like that

disney’s 52nd first gay character
BRO
that’s an OSHA violation

t as in tired
it really isn’t but i appreciate the energy

robin hood (1973) (not robin)
get him on the discrimination angle
he can’t make you work on christmas just bc you’re jewish

zero’s mom
rob’s jewish??

robin hood (1973) (not robin)
guys. he had “extra menorah candles” on his december supply list

zero’s mom
knowing robin that could be for an undercover op

disney’s 52nd first gay character
or a rube goldberg machine

bart do not even think about it
or he knew you’d be peeking at his supply list and it’s reverse psychology

t as in tired
1) i am an enigma
2) B always forgets candles and nightwing always loses one somehow and the packs come in very specific quantities
3) can’t argue discrimination if he’s discriminating against himself

zero’s mom
BATMAN’S jewish??

mickey mouse dni
[The_More_You_Know.png]

t as in tired
anyway, if there’s a time that works for everyone else you guys can go ahead without me

year 3000
literally how dare you suggest that

[“secret santa take three” event thread has been renamed ➡️ “secret santa take three in january”]

◆

The lights at the zoo are bright enough that even at 8pm in December, Tim can see every wrinkle on his jacket sleeve.

He tries to smooth them out without being super obvious about it. Luckily no one’s paying him much attention at the moment—that came a few minutes ago, on the way in, when he weathered blank stares from Blüdhaven socialites and muted surprise and pity from the ones who made the drive from Gotham and saw their first chance to pounce and tell Tim how sorry they were over his father’s latest prognosis, but how good it was that he was making an appearance in the social circuit again. How proud his parents would be of him for keeping his chin up, et cetera. It was, in Tim’s honest opinion, a bit over the top, but Gotham’s elites have always been better at navigating subtle insults than actual sympathy.

At least the collective interest has quickly shifted from Tim to the far more exciting subject of Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne’s biological tabloid scandal, here in the flesh. Which, yeah. That’s a thing, now. And look, Tim isn’t a monster, but Damian has Bruce shielding him from most of the questions and also Damian’s own tiny glare is enough to quell even the most dedicated gossip mongers, so Tim doesn’t really feel bad about letting the attention fall on them when he has the chance. So sue him; it’s been a weird few weeks.

He lets himself fade into the background now, drifting toward a heat lamp and wishing he hadn’t checked his coat. His suit jacket is warm enough, literally designed for the ill-advised outdoor gala, but it’s still after sunset in a state where winter likes to arrive early. Instrumental Christmas carols play out of hidden speakers along the walkway, mixing with Mrs. Hartford’s beloved jack russell terrier barking over by one of the bar stations. A riot of string lights and glittering baubles decorate the trees and direction signs, and some deeply ingrained instinct makes him turn back toward the entryway to snap a picture of the sign, a massive archway that says Blüdhaven Animal Sanctuary in wrought iron letters lit up with multicolored spotlights. It’s a good shot; from this angle the backwards lettering is purely silhouette, a riot of soft color cut through by dark, twisting shapes, and for a moment Tim considers posting the picture on Instagram. He’s here as Tim Drake, after all, in a deliberately public appearance. That would be allowed. It would be good, even—the kind of post that says Tim Drake has enough connections to get into an exclusive holiday gala but uses it as an opportunity to take aesthetic photographs; isn’t that so interesting of him? Doesn’t that give him so much depth? Doesn’t that provide an easy shortcut to imagining him as a fully realized person? How nice.

Having a secret identity is way less exciting and way more exhausting than Tim ever considered at age thirteen, that’s for sure.

Anyway, he already knows he’s not actually going to post this picture. Turns out there’s a difference between posting things to cultivate a general public persona and posting things knowing Kon-El Conner Kent now knows Tim Drake exists in a more-than-passing way might one day look up his public instagram and see what he posts so he has a mild spiral every time he opens the app and therefore has uploaded a grand total of zero pictures over the last few months.

Maybe that will change once he tells Kon the truth. Hopefully, for the sake of Tim’s public persona and also his sanity. He’ll find out soon enough—he’s going to tell Kon. He’d just like to do it without getting benched first, and also in a way that won’t blow up in anyone’s face. Especially Kon’s.

He had been so close to getting permission—Bruce had agreed to sit down with him a week after the mall incident and he had to know what Tim wanted to talk about—and then things went sideways like one day later, as things usually do, and apparently Bruce has a biological assassin kid who is now living with them and the whole thing thrust not just Bruce Wayne but the whole family back into the civilian spotlight in a major way. So Bruce has been busy dealing with his surprise child and making sure their civilian covers are even more airtight than before as they navigate the holidays as the Waynes + the foster kid who already got a lot of press over his own family situation + the long-lost son who instantly made tabloid headlines. (Tim suspects Talia had something to do with the tabloid part—making sure Bruce had no recourse to reject Damian without risking his civilian reputation. Which was sweet, in its own way, but wholly unnecessary considering the soft, quietly shellshocked microexpression on Bruce’s face every time Damian says father.)

But Tim made a promise to Kon. End of the year, which is in exactly two weeks. At this point it’s a foregone conclusion; he just has to find the right time, whether Bruce is on board or not. And find the right way to explain it to Kon to minimize disappointment/embarrassment. And in the meanwhile he’ll just…keep standing here, not posting on Instagram.

(He’s not even touching the Bart thing right now. Because first of all: Tim did not tell Bart anything, technically. Plausible deniability. Second: He’s waiting to mention that to Bruce until after Kon knows. Or maybe never. And third: Tim is 100% sure that this information is safe with Bart whether Tim confirms it or not. So basically as long as he doesn’t make direct eye contact with the situation, it’s not a real situation.)

Ah. There’s another wrinkle in his sleeve. He brushes it out, watching out of the corner of his eye as Bruce deftly deflects half the comments about Damian’s sudden appearance and misdirects the others until the stream of party guests disperses, finally paying more attention to the open bar and the Capuchin monkeys perched on zoo trainers’ shoulders than on the Waynes. And then Bruce rests a hand on Damian’s shoulder. Tim can never turn off the part of his brain that is fine-tuned to Batman’s movements, so he sees the way Bruce’s hand tightens just slightly, Bruce’s wordless reassurance/acknowledgment/apology, and also sees the way Damian’s shoulders relax minutely even as his expression doesn’t change.

Not that Tim had any doubts about Damian being Bruce’s kid, but if he had, they would’ve vanished right here and now.

A few seconds later something catches Bruce’s attention and he slips away toward where Dick is talking with the zoo’s new owners, making brief eye contact with Tim along the way. Tim nods, shakes out his sleeve, and catches up to Damian where he is dubiously eyeing a table of hors d’oeuvres.

“The canapés are usually a good bet,” Tim says.

“I’m vegetarian,” Damian says.

“Okay.” Tim knows this, obviously. Alfred’s added a lot of new recipes to his rotation the past few weeks. “There are tomato ones.”

Damian scoffs and moves away from the table. Which is fine. So Damian doesn’t really like Tim and especially doesn’t like Tim as Robin—that’s not exactly new when it comes to Bruce’s kids. It could be worse; Damian only got in like two whole murder attempts before Bruce caught on and sat him down for a long talk about the League of Assassins that Tim definitely wasn’t eavesdropping on when he was supposed to be down in the medbay re-wrapping a minor stab wound. Bruce had the same stilted-yet-determined tone he had when he talked to Tim after the fear gas thing, and it didn’t even take Kon yelling at Superman in front of him this time. If Tim is feeling generous he might even call it character growth.

So yeah, Tim’s in a weird place with Damian, somewhere between “not getting murdered, at least” and “offering to play Bananagrams together” (Kon’s suggestion, which was given to Tim Drake, Civilian, without the full former assassin who thinks I stole his birthright context, but Tim has filed it away for the future anyway because it’s not like he has any better ideas about how to be an older sort-of brother).

Of course, the grand re-opening gala for the Blüdhaven Zoo—animal sanctuary, as they now call it—isn’t exactly the ideal setting for working through their differences. It’s more about pretending for the very audience Bruce just tied in a conversational pretzel. With all the tabloid coverage surrounding the Waynes in the last few weeks this outing was planned deliberately, to show off Bruce and his kids and sort-of kid to the public in a controlled setting. Though, their numbers are pretty low, not that Bruce hadn’t tried. Cass had laughed in Bruce’s face when he asked if she wanted to come. Steph said If Cass isn’t going, I’m not going. Jason said I’m dead, to which Bruce said We can fix that, if you want, to which Jason said Whoops I'm late for a two-week mission with the Outlaws, see ya. (He didn’t have a mission planned; Tim had hacked their calendar back in August.)

Ultimately Dick, Tim, and Damian ended up on socialite duty. Tim almost feels bad for Damian, especially because he’s pretty sure Bruce and Dick have just clocked this place as a front for a smuggling operation, so Dick is distracted on his phone and Bruce has vanished to, presumably, Brucie his way into some evidence, all of which means Damian is stuck with Tim right now. Damian is dealing with it by scowling and ignoring Tim and the other partygoers alike, working his way through each animal exhibit sign while Tim trails after him.

It could be worse. Tim has been to, like, at least a dozen galas and fundraisers worse than this, even if the heat lamps aren’t enough to beat back the chill of December in New Jersey and Mrs. Hartford’s dog is still barking over the jazzy Christmas carols. Damian doesn’t seem to agree, stopping long enough to let Tim catch up as he glowers in the direction of the barking.

“That woman’s dog does not appear to be comfortable,” he mutters.

“That’s Archibald,” Tim tells him, tucking his hands in his pockets. He’d had an eye on his phone in case Bruce or Dick needed help with whatever impromptu investigation was going down, but now he sees Dick heading their way, shoulders relaxed, so Tim lets himself relax a bit, too. “Mrs. Hartford brings him everywhere.”

Damian sniffs. “She should not have brought Archibald if she wasn’t going to pay him adequate attention.” His expression slips into something analytical, like he’s contemplating the best way to steal the dog from under Mrs. Hartford’s nose.

Damian’s adorable, is the thing. Many, many layers down, but he is.

(Tim will never say so, obviously, because Damian’s ego is big enough and also he’s 50% sure Damian would bite him if he tried, but it doesn’t make it less true.)

Tim is turning toward Dick, still across the path, when he hears a faint cracking noise under the barking and the carols. He looks down, sees the pebbled pathway shifting under his feet, and says, “Damian, get off the grass.”

“The landscaping here is dismal, Drake, I am hardly—”

Tim grabs his arm and pulls. To Damian’s credit, after an initial hiss of rage he seems to clock Tim’s expression and catches on, springing onto the path just in time for several giant vines to burst through the grass right beside them. They unfurl to reveal a bright orange flower bud the size of Tim’s head, swiveling so the tips of its petals are aimed right at Tim and, by extension, the crowd of party-goers.

Of course, Tim thinks, and even in his own head he sounds exhausted. We were overdue for some Ivy shenanigans, anyway.

He hears someone—probably Dick—shout behind them, but he doesn’t have time to figure out another plan. All he thinks, in the split second between the orange flower starting to bloom and flinging himself at it, is that whatever this is, he’s right in the line of fire. Which means Damian’s right in the line of fire. Which means he has to do something.

Still, he admits it’s not his finest improvisation. He doesn’t have any gadgets easily or subtly accessible, so he just—grabs the rapidly-blooming bud with both hands, clamping the petals shut as best he can. And he does manage to keep the flower from fully releasing whatever it is; the bud struggles against him for a moment before emitting a weak cough and going still. Shimmering yellow pollen, for the most part, just clogs the creases of the petals instead of swirling into the air. Tim’s not wearing his impermeable Robin suit or a rebreather, though, so the puff of pollen that breaks through and coats his chest is still probably not good news.

“Great,” he groans. In front of him the flower slumps over, going inert just as the whole party’s attention turns their way. “Just great.”

“Drake, explain,” Damian hisses over Tim’s shoulder. Tim glances back to see Damian is, at least, pollen-free. Behind him Dick pushes to the front of the gathering crowd, taking in the scene. Oh sh*t, he mouths at Tim.

No sh*t, Tim mouths back.

“Drake,” Damian says, trying to shoulder his way forward. Tim shoves him back with his uncontaminated arm.

“Don’t,” Tim says. “Just, hang on, you’ll see in a moment—and really, if anyone else wants to start like, making their orderly way to the exit now would be a good time to get started—”

The giant vines unravel in front of them, parting to reveal Poison Ivy—yep, yeah, there it is—stepping out in all her Rogue Mode glory.

“Oop,” Dick says, vanishing back into the crowd.

“Guests of this so-called sanctuary,” Poison Ivy calls, red hair shimmering under the nearest lamp, “I have chosen you to—what did you do?” She breaks off, blinking at Tim, then looks at the miserable-looking flower. “Why would you…?” Ivy sounds genuinely baffled. “You ruined it! The pollen is intended to circulate through open air, not attach itself at close range.”

“Right, my bad,” Tim says. He can feel it caking on his neck, the underside of his chin. “What does this one do? Am I about to turn into a giant flytrap? Or get eaten by one? Damian, seriously, stay back. Oh god, please tell me this isn’t the cuddle one.”

Ivy isn’t looking at him, instead digging a notepad out from—Tim isn’t entirely sure where, but presumably some sort of pocket. “It causes animal magnetism. Tell me, are you feeling feverish at all? Experiencing tingling or numbness in your extremities?”

Tim jolts back. “You sex pollened me?”

“What? No,” Ivy says, glancing up with an offended expression. “Don’t be ridiculous, there are children here.”

You don’t say, Tim thinks, half-hysterically. Somewhere behind him Archibald the dog starts yapping again, mixing with Damian’s furious demands for Tim to move. Tim’s very aware of the crowd ringing around them at a distance, the multiple phones held up and definitely recording. “Then what does it do?”

As he speaks there’s a flash of movement in the corner of his eye, and then a Capuchin monkey launches itself off one of the trainers and makes a beeline for Tim. He yelps, dodging its attempt to latch itself to his leg, but even after Damian scoops up the monkey it keeps screeching and reaching for Tim.

“It does that,” Ivy says, pointing her pen at the monkey. Damian glares back, struggling to keep hold of it, and Tim finds himself missing the golden age of five minutes ago when he was mostly just bored. “It is an enhanced concoction modeled after the nectar of Sarracenia psittacina. Animals in an expanding radius will be drawn to your person until the effects wear off.”

“You hit me with a Disney princess pollen,” Tim says faintly.

“You stepped in front of my propagation bloom. At its intended dose it should have turned everyone here into a zoo exhibit for the very animals they arrived to gawk at, a fitting punishment for supporting a sham business venture owned by a man who makes his real millions smuggling and abusing quote-unquote exotic plants that never make it to their intended exhibit environments—”

Tim pinches the bridge of his nose. Bruce and Dick couldn’t have clocked this, like, an hour earlier? No, this is on Tim, too. He should’ve dug back a few layers into the new owner’s financial portfolio before accepting the invitation in the first place. That’s just the bare minimum due diligence for stuff like this.

“—after razing a meadow to the ground to build this filthy ‘sanctuary’ in the first place.” Ivy had drawn herself up during her rant, but now she frowns again. “But you…I have no idea what the pollen will do in that concentration.” She scribbles down another note.

Tim eyes the monkey—and Damian—warily. Archibald’s barking pitches higher somewhere in the crowd, and a concerning cacophony of squawks and screeches are floating over from the nearby aviary. “Could you find out? Fast?”

“How do you expect me to do that? You change my operation conditions, you deal with the consequences,” Ivy says. “I suggest you just stay there, and maybe I can still salvage—”

“Heyyyyy Ivy,” Nightwing says, waving from where he’s now perched on a lamppost. The crowd gasps. Ivy bites out a curse and starts packing up her notebook. “Look, not that I’m against party-crashing in general, but I’m going to have to insist you do it back in your own city.”

“It was a failed experiment anyway,” Ivy snaps, and bolts, Nightwing swinging after her.

Some of the bolder partygoers trail after them, but most hang around the spectacle that is Tim, Damian, an aggravated monkey, and the giant withering vines all around them. Tim very briefly closes his eyes and tries to manifest Batman swooping through with his toolbelt that has a whole collapsible biohazard rinse apparatus in one pouch, but Bruce must be busy with the zoo owners, because he does not materialize on command. There’s Batman for you: showing up when you’re having a maybe-charged moment with your superhero teammate on a roof, but not when you’re covered in experimental pollen and stuck in front of a dozen phone cameras with a kid who, come to think of it, really likes animals.

“Drake,” Damian is saying in the tone of someone commanding an army and not someone who is currently clutching a small disgruntled monkey, “disperse some of the pollen to me.”

“We are not doing that,” Tim tells him.

“I can handle the threat,” Damian insists. “I am not afraid. Also, it’s not fair that you jumped in front of the plant before I did, as I did not have all the facts.”

Oh, Bruce has his work cut out for him with this one.

“You snooze you lose,” Tim says firmly, then raises his voice. “Hey, everyone, you should really still get to the exit just in case. Start heading over there, that way it’s not a scramble when the party inevitably gets shut down. Pretty sure Blüd has the same protocol as Gotham for this kind of thing.”

“Drake—”

“Damian, I mean it, this is not a sharing-is-caring situation.”

“But—”

“You should go give that monkey back and head to the gates with everyone, I’ll stay here and wait for someone to—”

“Drake.”

Tim pauses, realizing Damian is looking past him, expression sharp. Tim turns slightly and catches the flutter of wings as a cluster of pigeons land on the lamppost Dick just vacated. Over the nearest exhibit wall an elephant trumpets, joined immediately by another one.

“I believe the magnetism radius is expanding,” Damian says.

“Ah,” Tim says, and tries to catalog the new information. How far the pigeons likely were when they were drawn in, the distance from him to the elephants, the number of partygoers still goggling at them both, and the fact that—

He doesn’t hear Archibald barking anymore.

A split second after this registers, a tiny white blur streaks through the crowd, making a beeline for Tim’s ankles. Tim meets Damian’s eyes for a brief, startled moment, and then Tim does what any highly trained vigilante would do in this situation.

He bolts.

◇

“Okay, one more,” Jon says, worming his way back into the space between Kon and the floral-patterned arm of the couch and shoving his phone under Kon’s nose. “Wait until the end, it’s so funny, I promise.”

“Is that a pinkie promise?” Kon asks, waggling his little finger in Jon’s face.

Jon looks at it cross-eyed and bats Kon’s hand away. He waves his phone again, which is partway through a Tiktok video of a boy in a yellow hoodie playing both parts of a skit about the Riddler at a Taco Bell drive-thru. (Now answer my riddles three, to pass off my Crunchwrap Supreme, the guy says as the Riddler. Dude, says the same guy as the drive-thru employee, I don’t think you understand how buying things is supposed to work.) Jon is, for whatever reason, obsessed with these skits, and has already made Kon go through at least half of this guy’s account over the past hour. “You’re not watching! You have to start it from the beginning now.”

“Not until I get a pinkie promise,” Kon says brightly, and spends the next thirty seconds forcibly extracting said pinkie promise from Jon, who ends up dangling over the back of the couch red-faced with laughter as Kon uses TTK to whack him with one of the cushions.

“Boys!” Pa calls from the kitchen.

“Nothing’s broken!” Kon and Jon chorus back.

“That better be true, or I’m putting you both on dish duty.” It’s an empty threat, because Pa is already on dish duty as punishment for going out in the snow on his bad knee even though he told Ma he totally wasn’t going to do that.

“Okay, okay,” Jon gasps. He clambers back onto the sitting side of the couch, hooking his pinkie through Kon’s as he goes. “Truce.”

“Truce,” Kon agrees generously, and settles the cushion back in place.

“Now scooch.” Jon shoves Kon’s thigh and hands over his phone again. Kon lets himself be scooched—Jon’s enhanced hearing and invulnerability may have started coming in waves, but he hasn’t shown any super strength yet. Which is probably good, for now, because Kon can still sling Jon over his shoulder or hold him upside-down from an ankle with no repercussions (not that there would be any, Jon just giggles up a storm every time) like a proper elder sibling. Kon is a great big sort-of brother; other big brothers take note. (Which reminds him, he should ask Tim how his new sort-of brother situation is going. Maybe once he sends his next play on WordCrash.)

One video turns into three before Jon relents and takes his phone back. Kon kicks up his feet, propping them on the arm of the couch over an indignant Jon, and tries to make a word out of the unfortunate array of WordCrash letters available to him. If he uses all of them he might have an actual shot at winning. It would be so cool if he could pull off a surprise victory, and he kind of cares about being cool, when it comes to Tim Drake.

“Hey Jon,” Kon says, because it can’t possibly be considered cheating to ask for help from a third grader who, despite his love for Bananagrams, consistently takes after Lois Lane on his spelling tests. Also, Kon’s out of better ideas. “What’s a word you can make with the letters M, W, S, S, and E?”

“Uhh,” Jon says, eyes glued to his screen. His brow scrunches in thought, and Kon is about to feel bad about asking when Jon lights up. “Smews!”

“And you gave me grief about laserified, huh.”

“That’s not in the dictionary! Smews is a real word.”

Kon raises his eyebrows. “Wait, is it really?”

“Yes. A smew is a type of duck. We learned about them in our bird unit last month and I got extra credit because I could remember all the kinds of ducks on the take-home sheet.”

Apparently there are advantages to attending third grade after all.

Kon has just played SMEWS for 10 points when Jon sits up, tapping on Kon’s leg. “Kon. Kon.”

“Jon. Jon.”

“I was scrolling, and—look!”

Jon holds out his phone to Kon again. It doesn’t look like another skit—the video is shaky and far away, all the voices jumbled up in the background. Onscreen there’s a big lit-up archway with what looks like someone climbing up the side. Kon frowns. “Is this one of the parkour ones?”

“No, this is happening right now.” Jon taps the top corner of the screen, where a little LIVE graphic blinks on and off. “It’s real, Poison Ivy did something and now this guy is in trouble.”

Kon is reaching for the phone, a half-formed thought taking shape about sending the link to Rob as a little FYI, when he stops. Because the image has zoomed in just in time for the light to catch the figure Free Solo-ing up the side of the archway, and it’s none other than Tim Drake.

“Holy shi—holy crap,” Kon says, sitting up. That really is Tim. He’s in a suit, a really nice one—not that Kon knows suits, but it’s the kind of outfit that you can tell is expensive even on a shaky phone feed. It must be some sort of fancy event, and based on the comments flashing by the bottom of the screen the event was in fact interrupted by Poison Ivy a few minutes ago.

And Tim is there.

The camera zooms out just enough that Kon can read the words on the archway, and then he’s standing and typing Blüdhaven Animal Sanctuary into his maps app, already shrugging off his sweater. “If Ma and Pa ask, tell them I might be back later, okay?”

Jon’s face lights up. “Are you going to save the day?”

“Hell yeah I am,” Kon tells him, and races off to get changed.

◇

By the time Kon arrives at Blüdhaven Animal Sanctuary, Nightwing is also there, perching on the sign’s giant metal D with a little less grace than usual due to the fact that he appears to be shaking with laughter.

“Shut up,” Tim is saying, clinging to half of the umlaut above the U with one hand and batting away two different pigeons circling his head with the other. There’s a small dog barking up a storm at the base of the archway. “I swear, if you just sit there and laugh—”

“Do you,” Nightwing wheezes. “Do you need some help, Mr. Drake?”

“I hate you,” Tim hisses. “Are you gonna actually do something? Because I can see the headlines already: Nightwing Laughs at Helpless Teen Besieged By Zoo Animals. And—do not get out your phone right now—and if that doesn’t ruin your reputation, I will.”

“Um, hi,” Kon says, dropping down to hover in front of them.

Tim gapes, freezing for a moment, and both pigeons take the opportunity to land in his hair. A few feet away Nightwing doubles over, laughing harder.

“What are you—I didn’t call him,” Tim says to Nightwing. Tim’s suit is nice, Kon notes. Notices. Up close he can tell the suit itself is dark green, almost black, with a black turtleneck and boots, and fits way too well to not cost a zillion dollars. The group of people tittering below are also all dressed to the nines. “I swear, I did not call him!”

“Uh huh,” Nightwing gasps, wiping at his eye even though Kon is 99% sure Bat dominos are watertight. “If you say so. Hey, Superboy.”

“Hey. Sorry for barging into your city,” Kon says, because Bat territories are also pretty watertight. “I didn’t know you were already here, I just saw someone’s live-stream and I know this one. Tim, I mean. I know Tim.”

“Oh, I’m aware,” Nightwing says. “Atlanta, remember?”

Right. Kon doesn’t facepalm, but it’s a near thing. Of course Nightwing is aware that Kon knows Tim, and also that Kon yelled at Superman about Tim in that S.T.A.R. Labs facility, because Kon did that right in front of him. Kon clears his throat. “Cool, yeah. So since I’m here I thought maybe I could help with…what is going on, actually?”

“Well,” Nightwing says, watching Tim fend off the pigeons again, “it’s a bit of a weird one. Poison Ivy paid a visit—I just took care of that part, but before I arrived it seems like Timothy got hit with a concoction that makes him best friend to all manner of animals.” There are three pigeons now, one clinging stubbornly to the top of Tim’s hair. Looking closer, Kon can also see some sort of shimmering substance coating Tim’s chest and the underside of his chin. “I think we’re calling this one the Disney Princess pollen.”

“Forget Disney,” Tim says through his teeth. “It’s f*cking Hitchco*ck. It’s The f*cking Birds over here.”

“Golly,” Nightwing says, “you sure swear a lot under stress, Mr. Drake.”

Tim flips him the bird, which Kon finds funny on a few different levels. Before either of them can say anything, though, there are shrieks from inside the zoo and a resounding thud. A quick x-ray scan shows Kon one of the elephants in a nearby enclosure up on its hind legs, thumping against its exhibit fence and angled directly toward the archway. There’s a rising cacophony from the other exhibits, too, and while none of the animals seem in danger of actually getting out just yet it’s enough for Nightwing, Tim, and Kon to exchange unsettled looks.

“This probably isn’t the best place to be, if it’s actually some sort of animal-magnet concoction,” Kon says. “I can fly Tim away, find somewhere safe so we can wash it off or whatever.”

“Yes,” Tim says. “Yes, good plan. More importantly, get me away from those cameras.”

“I don’t know,” Nightwing says, tapping his chin. “Am I supposed to get a signed permission form before releasing you into the custody of another dashing young superhero? Say, you wouldn’t happen to have a legal guardian hanging around this party, would you, Tim? Maybe I should go find him.”

A look of horror passes over Tim’s face. “Do that and you’re dead, Nightwing.”

“Again with the threats! You know, I’m really concerned about your propensity for violent language here, Mr. Drake—”

“Hey,” Tim interrupts. “Hey, seriously, you should go. My, um—the kid I was with, remember? I’m assuming my legal guardian is occupied right now, so, you should go find him. The kid. Make sure he’s not getting into trouble.”

“Oh,” Nightwing says, some of the teasing draining away. “Yeah, I probably should, shouldn’t I?”

Tim nods pointedly.

Nightwing does some fluid motion that Kon doesn’t think obeys the law of gravity, ending up poised right on top of the archway so the white eyes of his domino mask are level with Kon. “All right, you can take him,” Nightwing says to Kon. “But get in touch right away if Tim develops any other side effects. Like a sudden rash, or spontaneously singing about his feelings. And be sure to use protective measures,” he adds. “For the pollen, of course.”

“Go away right now,” Tim says through his teeth.

“Can’t be too safe! All right, havefunyoutwobye.” Nightwing steps off the arch and twists neatly in the air, already grappling his way to the edge of an enclosure fence down the path.

Kon looks at Tim, cheeks feeling a bit warm. “So,” he says, “should we…?”

Tim bats away another pigeon. “Get us out of here,” he says, and then jumps.

Kon doesn’t move for a split second, too caught off guard. In that moment he catalogs the flare of Tim’s suit jacket against the lights of the archway, the gasps from the crowd below, the overlapping wingbeats of the startled birds. Then Kon dives forward and scoops Tim out of midair, launching them into the sky and easily outpacing the disgruntled pigeons left in their wake. “What the—give a guy some warning before you just jump like that!” Kon shouts over the wind.

“You were right there,” Tim says.

“Still!”

Tim huffs, breath warm against Kon’s neck. “I didn’t see you getting mad when Nightwing did it.”

It’s as if Tim Drake exists to test Kon’s xenobiological predisposition against heart attacks. When Cadmus was poking around running stress assessments they should’ve tried dropping a mildly unhinged civilian with no sense of self-preservation into the tank with him. “If Nightwing jumped off a cliff, would you jump, too?”

“Would probably depend on why he jumped,” Tim says, in what he must think is a reasonable tone.

“‘No,’” Kon says. “The correct answer is ‘No.’ For future reference.”

“Sure.” Tim cranes his neck to peer over Kon’s shoulder. “Any birds following us?”

“Not successfully,” Kon reports. They’re high enough now that he throws out his usual TTK field to keep them warm and shield them from the worst of the wind. “And you’re pretty safe from land animals for now.”

Kon feels Tim relax a bit. “Thanks,” Tim says. “Ugh. Freaking Ivy, she’s usually one of my favorites.”

“Does she rank before or after Killer Croc?”

“Right now? After.” Tim pulls a face, trying to look down at his chest. Kon has Tim held in a sort of princess carry so the pollen doesn’t smear all over Kon’s suit, too. “Though, the party kind of sucked anyway, so at least she gave me an excuse to bail.”

“And that’s twice now you’ve bailed on a party and used me as a superpowered Uber ride,” Kon points out, but he can’t keep the grin out of his voice.

“Okay, again, I did not call you. You literally just showed up.”

“Please remember to give me five stars.”

“You’re getting no stars. You were clearly stalking me.” Tim shifts a bit, tipping his head back to look past Kon’s arm. “Okay, maybe one star. For the view.”

“Well, I aim to please,” Kon says. It is a good view: a network of city lights, patchy through the clouds, giving way to the broad darkness of the Atlantic. Definitely a better sight than an old bunker or a run-down corner of Gotham’s marina, and Kon had made Tim shut his eyes when they flew over Kansas a few weeks ago. Kon feels a bit satisfied that he’s able to pull off a nice rescue this time, one with elements he now knows Tim might actually appreciate.

Which—he wasn’t stalking, for the record. He wasn’t even the one who found Tim on Tiktok! Though, yes, Kon had done his own fair share of googling, because even after the whole yelling-at-Clark thing got resolved he still wanted to make sure he had all his facts straight. He learned that Tim’s mom is dead, but his dad is in a long-term coma (prognosis: not good) and apparently Tim going to live with Bruce Wayne back in July created a bit of a stir on New Jersey Twitter for a few days. It even made a few local papers at the time (though he knows Lois would scoff at Gotham Weekly being considered a newspaper), mostly centering around Bruce Wayne taking in another kid (apparently Tim was number four, though the press didn’t seem to know much about Cassandra Wayne) and rehashing speculation about whether Bruce was truly ready to open his home to more children after the tragic death of his second son three years ago. Kon quickly found it all more than a bit tasteless, but that didn’t stop him from finding Tim’s instagram page and scrolling through that for way too long. There wasn’t much on there, like, substantively, and not a lot of pictures of Tim himself—not that Kon was looking, except he totally was—but Kon could still tell Tim has an eye for photography.

So holding Tim now, as Tim looks at the glittering stretch of coastline below them, Kon can’t help but wonder, based on his totally-not-stalking, if Tim is thinking about how he’d photograph this.

Or maybe, Kon amends as he hears a flock of gannets half a mile away wheel around to fly toward them, Tim is wondering how to de-Ivy himself. Priorities.

“Okay, so,” Kon says. Tim tilts his head back up, nose almost bumping Kon’s cheek. “This pollen situation.”

“I need a decontamination shower,” Tim says, sounding disgruntled about it. “But I’m pretty sure the moment we touch back down we’ll have, like, thirty seconds before I’m the number one wildlife attraction again.”

Kon decides not to tell him about the multiple birds headed their way just yet. No need to stress Tim out even more. “Actually, I might have another idea. Not sure if this shows up on my trading card, but I can do this thing called tactile telekinesis.” He slips one arm out from under Tim’s knees and waggles his fingers, as if to demonstrate the concept of tactile. One of Tim’s eyebrows twitches upward. “Kind of like this movable force field? Ish? But I can go pretty micro with it, so I’m thinking I can just lift the stuff off—”

Tim’s hand darts out and grabs Kon’s wrist. “No,” he says, “no lifting. Ivy said the pollen was meant to be airborne. If you detach it and it disperses too fast for you to control then you’ll just be covered, too.”

Kon frowns. That’s…a good point. He’s pretty sure he could still round up the molecules and pull them into a ball, but if not then they’d be back to square one, only Kon would also need a decontamination shower. Maybe he could bring Tim to the Tower? Tell him to keep his eyes shut? But he’d have to spend a few minutes keying in a guest code and scanning Tim’s biometrics, which probably would cause at least some sort of stir with the local wildlife, and also Kon isn’t 100% sure they cleaned up after last week’s training session…

“We could break into Hood’s lair,” Tim is saying, almost to himself. “He’s got his own little setup. Or I’ve got contacts at the GU labs. Or, ugh, you could call Batman and maybe he’ll be cool about it, but let’s keep that at the end of the list for now—”

They’ve left the gannets behind, but two other flocks of seabirds a mile out seem to have taken up the chase. Kon is getting ready to turn back toward land when the obvious Plan B hits him. “Or I can dunk you.”

“—unless absolutely—what?” Tim says. “You can what?”

Kon slows, keeping an ear out for more birds in the vicinity. “I can dunk you in the ocean.”

“What,” Tim says again.

“To wash the stuff off,” Kon explains. “Then it’s not airborne.”

“No!” Tim says.

“Why not?”

Tim pokes Kon’s chest, which obviously does very little. “So many reasons! Mostly shark related!”

“I can out-swim sharks,” Kon says confidently, and veers south toward warmer waters, aiming for somewhere shallow with enough moonlight that the change in scenery isn’t a shock for Tim. “Okay, hold your breath—”

They plunge underwater, Kon shifting his grip on Tim so they both go in feet first. The water is still cold, but bearable, and Kon opens his eyes once they’re fully submerged. He can tell it’s working, shimmery powder already loosening from Tim’s shirt and swirling away into the water around them, illuminated in the beams of moonlight that cut through the surface before disappearing just as abruptly.

It only lasts a few seconds; Kon keeps his hands on Tim’s waist to hold them both steady, Tim keeps his eyes squeezed shut, his hair floating around his face, and the pollen disperses. Kon reaches out with his TTK to help the process along, careful to only move the pollen and not brush a phantom touch against Tim’s skin, but Kon feels him shiver anyway. A couple small fish swim up, bumping curiously against Tim’s cheek before moving on to chase the last of the shimmers. Tim scrunches up his nose as they swim past, and it’s cute, Kon thinks almost absentmindedly, and then he thinks, oh.

And then he thinks, oh.

It’s not new, exactly, but the first three times he met Tim were kind of high-stress situations; Kon had other priorities in the moment. Sure, Tim was cute, but he was also kidnapped/miserable/having a breakdown, and Kon was Superboy trying to fix things. Plus, Tim was a civilian and Kon was a superhero meeting him incidentally, so even if Kon did feel like flirting it wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

Now, though, he’s pretty sure he just fixed things, Kon is a superhero who has been consistently losing to Tim at WordCrash for the last two weeks, and the two of them being here feels anything but incidental.

Kon lifts them out of the water, supporting Tim with TTK while giving him a quick once-over with heat vision to instantly dry him off, a handy trick Kon finally figured out two months ago when he overturned a water bottle on his bed and was too lazy to find a new blanket. (The trick is only half-handy on himself, though, because he can dry his front but can’t really reach the back of his suit.) The process leaves Tim’s hair fluffy and free from its careful styling earlier, which only adds to the little thrill zinging up Kon’s spine right now.

“Jesus Christ,” Tim sputters, wiping at his face even though he’s already perfectly dry. There’s a bit of crusted salt at his hairline, and Kon wants to reach out—physically, not with TTK—and rub it away, but Tim finds it himself and scrubs at his face with his palm, glowering at Kon. “Not even a count to three, huh?”

Kon winks. “Had to take the pollen by surprise.”

Tim rolls his eyes, then peers at the water. “Is it actually gone? Neutralized?”

“Let’s see.” Kon settles Tim back into his arms and casts out his hearing. There’s a bit of a stir below them, a quick gathering of shallow-water creatures that’s already breaking up. Otherwise nothing seems to be reacting to them; it’s just Tim and Kon and the distant crash of waves. “Yep. Looks like my brilliant plan totally worked, and we didn’t even get chased by sharks.”

“By sheer luck.”

“It’s okay,” Kon teases. “I would’ve protected you.”

He catches it because he’s listening for it—the slight uptick in Tim’s heartbeat. “Protected me from a peril of your own design, sure,” Tim mutters. He clears his throat, looking back at Kon. “But, um. You were right, that actually worked. So. Thank you.”

Kon grins, Tim’s approval causing something warm and delighted to unfurl in his chest, and Tim’s heartbeat picks up a little faster. Kon can feel it, too, the gentle thrum of Tim’s pulse where Kon’s hand is curled around his side. Kon doesn’t usually hold people this close—not for this long without something else going on. Jon hugs him, and Ma and Pa and Lois pat him on the shoulder easily as anything, and Clark is fond of the occasional hair ruffle. He spars with his team and Bart drapes himself over Kon on the couch and Kon has made out with Cassie, which was definitely, ahem, prolonged close contact, but Cassie never really needed to be held. And—he’s carried Robin home plenty often now, but that’s in uniform, which is different. Sure, Rob’s suit might look pretty skintight in places (a lot of places), but the material is sneaky Bat tech that offers subtle resistance even to super strength. Which Kon is glad for, considering how often people shoot or swing various weapons at Robin, but it also means that Kon hasn’t ever just…had his hand flat against Rob’s side mid-flight and been able to feel the shift of his breathing, the warmth of his skin through just a few layers of fabric. Which totally is not even the point right now, it’s just—for comparison’s sake, holding Tim in this prolonged moment of calm is. Something. The last time he was this close and quiet with someone, he realizes, it was also Tim, those moments back in the woodshop before Tim fell asleep. This has that same sense of stillness, of the rest of the world folding itself away, but now there’s a distant soundtrack of crashing waves and Kon is smiling and Tim is in his arms tentatively smiling back, safe in the wake of a silly rescue and now just here.

“Do you have to go home right away?” Kon asks.

Tim blinks. “No,” he says. “I don’t think so. I should text, um, Bruce that I’m okay, but I…don’t have any plans other than the ruined party.”

“Wanna hang out?”

Tim looks at him, then at the dark swells below them, the moonlit beach. “Here?”

For a moment Kon is tempted to say yes—the beach looks inviting in the moonlight, and the air is balmy even without the warmth he’s generating with his field. But he shakes his head. “I think I can do better than this.”

Tim arches an eyebrow. “Better, huh?” he says, almost like a challenge, and Kon’s grin widens.

◇

Four years ago Superman swooped in to stop a giant robot from falling on a city block in Lisbon. On that city block was a food truck whose owner witnessed the whole thing, and now any superhero bearing the S-shield gets free churros and farturas every time they cross paths. Clark has taken Kon by the truck a few times, especially in the early days of Clark making an effort to spend time with Kon on purpose, so Kon makes it their first stop. Partially because, yeah, he’s showing off his superhero perks a bit, partially because he heard Tim’s stomach growling halfway across the Atlantic, and mostly because they’re literally the best late-night snack Kon can imagine.

Tonight the truck is on the outskirts of a holiday fair that’s in the process of emptying out when Kon lands. The lone employee in the truck notices them, does a double take, then gives Kon a one minute gesture before ducking away from the window. Kon waves back and sets Tim on his feet, ready to use some TTK to make the dismount go smoothly, but Tim finds his balance right away and Kon’s hand just ends up hovering at the small of Tim’s back. He watches as Tim blinks and scans the area, gaze flickering across the various vendors in the process of packing up, and up to the distant rooftops silhouetted against the deep night sky. Tim’s shoulders relax infinitesimally as he does, and Kon congratulates himself on guessing correctly—he has a limited pool of Gothamites to draw from, most of them being Bats, but he figured Tim might like a city at night more than that remote beach or bright daylight on the other side of the world. Besides, Tim’s already dressed for a night out.

Though, outside of Kon’s TTK wind bubble—less practical on the ground—Tim isn’t exactly dressed for a winter night out; the tip of his nose is already pink in the distant fair lights, and Kon can see his breath fogging in front of him. He must’ve left a coat back at the zoo, but that’s easily remedied. Kon shrugs off his jacket and settles it around Tim’s shoulders.

“I didn’t think about the—huh?” Tim swings around to blink at him.

“You look cold,” Kon says.

“I’m okay,” Tim says quickly, almost automatic, but he’s already curling one hand around the hem of the jacket.

“As the superhero here, it’s literally my job to not let you freeze,” Kon says, winking again, and decides he really enjoys seeing Tim get flustered like this. “I don’t actually need it, anyway, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Tim hesitates for another moment, then mutters something about mother henning and threads his arms through the sleeves. The jacket is big on him—not as big as Red Hood’s was, not comically big, but big enough that it’s obviously not his own, even without the fact that it’s layered over a perfectly tailored suit. Tim’s nose isn’t the only part of his face that’s pink now. “If you’re so worried about the cold, why are we in Lisbon in the middle of the night? Looks like we already missed the party.”

Kon spares a moment to be impressed that Tim has already figured out where they are, and says, “Don’t worry, this is just a pit stop.” He lightly places his hand against the small of Tim’s back again—against Kon’s own jacket, familiar soft leather under his fingertips—and Tim leans into him for a split second. Kon doesn’t bother fighting down another smile as he steers Tim to the food truck, recounting a slightly embellished version of the giant robot story. The smell of cinnamon and fried dough hangs in the air, warming it, and when they reach the window the employee is loading churros into a paper bag.

“O mesmo de sempre, né?” they ask. They’re young, short-haired, cheeks and neck flushed from the heat of the fryer inside the truck. Kon recognizes them from the last time he was here with Clark; they’d spoken rapid-fire Portuguese to Kon like they were testing to see if Superman being a polyglot was just a fluke, and seemed pleased when Kon answered in kind. (He didn’t tell them that he wasn’t actually like Superman in this regard—that Clark mastered language by learning at high speed, but he still learned, while Kon had his language settings pre-loaded before he opened his eyes. That Kon had overused certain phrases he picked up from TV his first few months, English still shaped strangely on his tongue as he tried to make the words feel like his. But at least having a few thousand Duolingo owls in his brain made for a good party trick sometimes.)

“Isso,” Kon says now as they set the bag on the counter. “Peço desculpa se estamos a atrasar o fecho.”

“Só um bocadinho,” they tell him, waving away his concern with one hand and shaking open a second bag with the other. “De toda maneira, recebemos um bonus se tivermos que ficar mais tarde para atender um de vocês, então estás a fazer-me um favor.”

Well, nice to know eating churros can count toward his good deed tally, if they really get a bonus when a super swings by. Speaking of— “Oh,” Kon says, rummaging through his thigh pouch. Clark always leaves a little tip in the jar. Kon usually carries an assortment of currencies—Robin’s idea for standard mission ancillary supplies—but, damn, he left that billfold at the Tower a few nights ago. All he has are a few US $20s and the Titans emergency card. He holds up the bills. “Posso pagar com isto?”

The employee raises an eyebrow. “O teu namorado já deixou gorjeta.”

Kon blinks. He hadn’t seen Tim move, but there is indeed a fresh hundred-euro note in the tip jar. Kon and the employee both turn to Tim, who is very intently studying the chalkboard menu on the side of the truck.

“Did you just—have a hundred Euros on you?” Kon asks.

Tim shrugs. “Just in case.”

“In case what?”

Now Tim does look sideways at him. “In case a teenage superhero decides to take me on a spontaneous trans-Atlantic churro run, obviously.”

Kon feels like he should be boggling over the rich people-ness of it all, but he’s a bit distracted by the deepening flush on Tim’s cheeks. Also distracted by namorado, and hoping Tim doesn’t know a word of Portuguese, while at the same time kind of hoping he does.

“Qual é a cena dele?” the employee asks Kon.

“Ele, uh, é americano,” Kon says.

They raise their other eyebrow.

“E ricalhaço,” Kon adds.

“Ah.”

A third bag gets added to the stack in Kon’s hands, and the employee snaps a photo of him posing with his arms full for the truck’s Instagram page, and then they’re off again, the employee leaning out the truck window to watch as Kon hooks one arm around Tim’s waist and takes off into the sky.

They don’t go too high—Kon doesn’t want Tim to get lightheaded. But there are some low-hanging clouds scattered through the night sky, so he settles them just underneath one, where they won’t be immediately visible from the ground but they’ve got a view of the glittering night landscape spread out below them. Up here Kon pulls out one of the mylar emergency blankets from his pouch—he could hold Tim up with just his TTK, but people tend to get freaked out when sitting on nothing at all and the clouds are a bit too thin and wispy for ideal cloud sculpture-ing, so Kon spreads out the blanket and spoofs some support underneath, keeping a careful TTK perimeter all around them as well.

“Voila,” Kon says, plopping Tim down on the blanket and arranging the bags of baked goods between them. “Sky picnic.”

“Sky…picnic,” Tim says. His heart rate is still slightly elevated, but Kon thinks that’s more about the situation than the height, because Tim doesn’t look scared at all. He’s watching Kon with the same expression he’s had since Kon flew them to Europe, equal parts puzzled and amused and alert, like he’s waiting for something.

“Do you have a better word for it?” Kon asks, spreading his arms to indicate the whole scene, illuminated by the thin moonlight filtering through the clouds. “Blanket, food, the great outdoors. That’s a picnic, Tim.”

Tim’s mouth twitches. “You got me there,” he says, the amusem*nt winning out for a moment. “If you start singing Whole New World, though, I’m jumping.”

The threat is kind of undercut by how he peers over the edge of the blanket, lips parted, quiet awe written across his face.

It’s unique to Kon, to his TTK, that he can do this: create this little bubble, a tiny setup in the air with snacks that won’t get blown away, that moves as fast as a plane through the cloud cover or drifts with the wind or even stays perfectly still without disturbing his companions. He’s done this with Cassie before, sometimes Clark, and once with Kara—talking about things that seem too big on the ground but a bit easier, a bit further away, from up here in the clouds. Or not talking at all and watching the world just to watch, not because they’re doing recon or rushing by on the way to a mission. He tried a sky picnic with Bart once until Bart got restless, and he’s never suggested it to Rob, because early on he got the sense that Rob is more comfortable on the ground, in an environment he can control. Kon doesn’t know what that’s like—even with other Kryptonians, Kon’s always flying under his own power. He’s never relying on someone else entirely in midair, and he doesn’t think he can blame someone for not loving the idea.

But now Kon thinks he might ask Rob if he wants to hang out in midair sometime; maybe Rob would be okay with it, if it’s with Kon. Nothing really surprises Robin, but maybe he’d be a little awed, like Tim, even if Robin played it cool. Kon really should ask. It feels important to know, suddenly.

He realizes he must’ve spaced out a moment, distracted, because when he pulls himself back to the present Tim is looking at him again. “This is a Disney-free zone,” Kon says belatedly, reaching for one of the bags. Already their little bubble smells like cinnamon and sugar. “Come on, try one while they’re still hot. And don’t worry about falling or anything, I’ve got you.”

“I know,” Tim says. He keeps looking for another moment, oddly intense. Then he takes a bite of churro and his eyes widen. “Oh sh*t, these are really good.”

“Right,” Kon says. “A top five superhero-ing snack for sure.”

“Of course you have a top five,” Tim says. He pauses to lick sugar off the pad of his thumb, and Kon thinks maybe the churros were a mistake after all. “Okay, let’s hear them.”

“Uh,” Kon says, the wires between his mouth and his brain hopelessly scrambled for a moment. “Uh. Chicken nuggets, obviously.”

Tim nods without missing a beat. “High in protein.”

“Exactly,” Kon says, and they’re off. The topic of snack criteria (durability, portability, taste, and fuel efficiency) lasts them the rest of the way across Portugal, and that somehow segues into Tim ranking the best gas station foods across the state of New Jersey and Kon explaining the finer mechanics of the fact that he can, technically, eat rocks (not tasty or nutritious, though undeniably durable, so 1/4 on the snack scale). As they cross from Spain to France Tim laughs himself to near tears over a story about Kon accidentally eating a bowl of display apples at one of his early press events, which led to Kon neutralizing a small explosive hidden in one of the fake apples by accident. With his teeth. (“I didn’t know that one,” Tim wheezes, wiping one eye. “Super chewing. Oh my god.”) Kon likes that Tim lets him tell it as a funny story, because it is funny, and people tend to assume a bunch of stuff when they learn these not-so-human things about him, like that Kon must be embarrassed or ashamed or permanently confused. But it’s just funny, and Tim just laughs, sitting crosslegged on a floating mylar blanket and wearing Kon’s jacket and looking at Kon with this smile and this helpless fondness and Kon wants—

He really wants Tim to keep smiling at him, for starters.

They’ve long since finished eating by the time Kon flies them over Paris, one of his favorite stops on this leg of the night sky picnic tour. Tim seems to agree, leaning over the edge of the blanket again to see the city spread out below them, streets woven together like a web of light even at this hour. “Wow,” he breathes.

“Have you ever been?” Kon asks.

“Hmm?” The mylar crinkles as Tim leans further. “Yeah I, uh, studied abroad here for a bit.”

“Ah.” Kon probably should’ve figured.

Before he can feel too disappointed, though, Tim flashes him another smile and says, “Never seen it from this angle, though. Plane windows don’t really do it justice.”

This, Kon can work with. “Well, I can get you an even better view, if you want.”

He holds out a hand. Tim doesn’t hesitate before taking it. With a little wave—for show, yes, all right—Kon rolls up the blanket and paper bags so he can fold them away in his pouch, and drops lower. Now there’s nothing below them but air and their own feet, the city unspooling in every direction as Kon angles them closer, and it’s natural to draw Tim in, tucking an arm around his waist. Tim goes easily, pressing against Kon’s side, threading his own arm behind Kon’s back.

“Okay, yeah,” Tim says. “That is indeed even better.”

“Another perk of being a superhero,” Kon tells him. “We can follow through on our spectacular promises. It makes us extra dashing.”

“Oh, does it,” Tim says. His face is angled away, but Kon can tell he’s still grinning—can hear the shape of it in Tim’s voice, can feel the tremor of suppressed laughter where Kon’s hand presses against Tim’s back. Tim shifts a bit, but doesn’t grip tighter, just drapes his arm more easily over Kon’s shoulder. Most civilians cling to Kon in flight, squeeze their arms around his neck or claw at his jacket, instinctively terrified to find themselves surrounded by open air. Tim doesn’t do that. He never has, Kon realizes. Somehow, Tim has always trusted Kon not to let him fall.

“Yes,” Kon says when he remembers he’s in the middle of something. “Yes, dashing, objectively. So what I’m saying is, it would be perfectly, you know, normal if you felt…”

“Dashed?” Tim suggests. “Is that where you’re going with this?”

“I was going to say something more like ‘swept off your feet,’” Kon admits.

He feels it. The tiniest hitch in Tim’s breathing. “Oh.” Tim glances back down at the glittering sprawl of Paris below them. “That’s. You did do that. Though, technically…” He turns his head and finds Kon’s gaze. Holds it. “I’m the one who jumped.”

It’s Kon’s turn to catch his breath. That moment flashes to the front of his mind: Tim, backlit by the archway and leaping into midair, reaching for Kon like a sure thing. Like he knew without a single doubt that Kon would catch him.

Their faces are already almost touching; it’s so easy to lean in.

The kiss is soft, barely there, Tim’s mouth warm and brief under Kon’s as Kon lifts his other hand to cup Tim’s cheek, and—

Tim makes a small, startled noise.

Kon breaks away immediately, loosening the TTK field in case Tim wants to pull back. “Was that okay? It’s cool if not, sorry, I—”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Tim says in a rush. He doesn’t pull back at all, their faces still close, but just far enough that Kon can see Tim’s eyes are very wide. “It’s definitely okay. It’s just.”

He pauses, mouth pursing a little. Kon’s gaze dips down, then back up. “Just?”

“You really want to kiss—me,” Tim says.

“Yeah?”

“Me, Tim.”

“You, Tim,” Kon tells him, a little bewildered. “Was I too subtle? I didn’t think I was being subtle.”

“No, you…definitely were not,” Tim says. “But I wasn’t sure—sometimes you do that, the whole Superboy charm thing, and I don’t know how serious you are.”

Kon does do that, the Superboy charm, the flirting and half-joking co*ckiness both for fun and because it seems to be what people expect of him. Sometimes he does it with his friends, who know the reasons and layers behind it, and sometimes with strangers, who are distant enough to only see the idea of him. But Kon tries to imagine a world where he sets out to make someone like Tim—weird, prickly, kind, bizarrely funny and yeah, really cute Tim—blush over and over without meaning it, even a little, and immediately rejects the idea. “For the record,” Kon says, “I’m serious.”

“Oh.” Tim blinks. The dazed expression on his face gives way to something almost like wonder, followed by a tiny grin that somehow outshines the whole city below. “Then what are you waiting for?”

“Well, I was waiting for you to—”

He doesn’t finish before they’re kissing again. This time it’s Tim leaning in, Tim reaching out to twine his other arm behind Kon’s neck and pull. Kon lets himself be reeled in, closing the last distance between them until their bodies are flush in midair, chest to chest, Tim’s face tilted up into his. Tim’s mouth is hot against Kon’s, parting easily as soon as Kon kisses back; not the gentle brush of lips Kon had attempted to introduce the idea, but a kiss-kiss, like Kon arrived at the concept to find Tim already here, ready and willing and impatient.

Something sharp and delighted shivers down Kon’s spine at that—the proof that Tim likes him enough to want to kiss him like this. That Tim likes him enough to have been wanting.

Kon settles one hand on Tim’s hip and slides the other up Tim’s back, his neck, cradling the base of Tim’s head and curling his fingers in the hair behind Tim’s ear. Tim makes a tiny sound low in his throat, his pulse thundering under Kon’s fingertips. Kon narrows his focus for a moment, letting the immediate sounds fill his senses: Tim’s pounding heart, both of their unsteady breathing; the slide of skin on skin, the creak of leather as Tim tightens his arms around Kon; the low hiss of wind tumbling around the TTK field. Tim is, Kon realizes, trembling slightly—not like he’s cold or afraid, but like a live wire, like there’s a thrum of energy under his skin that Kon imagines he can almost hear the way he can hear the hum of the power grid below them if he tries. Tim is also a good kisser—Kon tamps down on a noise of his own when Tim lightly drags his teeth across Kon’s lower lip, and he finds himself wondering what kind of people Tim has kissed in his life to know how to do that. Pictures Tim at some fancy boarding school, kissing some faceless uniformed boy in a mahogany-shelved library like something out of a movie, or maybe kissing some faceless girl in the foyer of his parents’ echoey penthouse, all the time in the world to figure out what to do and how to do it.

Kon breaks apart long enough to say, “Hey, Tim,” maybe intending to ask something stupid like How does kissing Superboy compare to these people I made up for you in my mind; how does kissing Kon-El compare to kissing Superboy—but gets distracted by the sight of Tim’s mouth in the brightening moonlight, the way it’s already red and swollen, and instead he leans in to kiss the corner of Tim’s lips, then the flutter of Tim’s pulse under the hinge of his jaw.

“Ngh,” Tim responds eloquently, then, “What were you going to—?” before Kon drifts back to his mouth and the conversation is effectively tabled.

Tim returns to kissing with a single-minded focus, somehow hooking the toes of his shoes in the buckles of Kon’s boots so he can leverage himself up to Kon’s height, pressing himself closer. Kon can feel every crease and ridge of his own jacket between them, can feel the warmth of Tim’s body even through the layers of his suit. The moon is out in full force now, clouds breaking apart around them, and Kon drifts toward the city, instinctively seeking more light even as his eyes slip shut again. He’s aware of each breath Tim takes, of each breath he takes himself. This happened with Cassie sometimes, but in a different way; now instead of being hyper-conscious of his whole body, of trying to match her breaths as he mapped where he ended and she began to keep himself boyfriend-shaped, Superboy-shaped, he just feels like he wants to breathe. Wants to be as present as possible.

But not present enough, apparently, because he doesn’t notice the small object flying toward them until it’s close enough even for human hearing to pick up.

In his defense, he’s being responsible! Even while distracted, he’s been filtering his hearing for things the size of passenger jets and alien spaceships (just in case) and extra heartbeats, things that might present an immediate danger; this thing—remote-controlled drone, he pinpoints as he breaks off the kiss and swings around—just slipped under his radar.

“What?” Tim asks sharply, tensing under Kon’s hands just as Kon spots it. Kon’s vision goes red at the edges—ready to fry the thing, a gut reaction to an unexpected robotic device getting too close—and then his vision goes dark entirely. It takes him a split second to realize Tim has clapped his hand over Kon’s eyes. “Wait, wait, civilian drone,” Tim is saying, hand already dropping away, but the brief shock of it is enough to have Kon reining in the heat vision.

He blinks and quickly scans the drone and, yeah, no weapons, just a little camera blinking at him from between flour whirring propellers. It’s a good thing Tim stopped him; every time the team tangles with civilian drones in controlled airspace the paperwork is a headache and a half.

Still: “Shoo,” Kon tells it, pulling Tim back in and flying them halfway across the city. He can hear it following vaguely in their direction, slow but annoying. “Sorry,” Kon says. Tim has loosened his arms, one hand slipping down to rest on Kon’s forearm. He looks somewhere over Kon’s shoulder, like he’s watching for the drone to come back, but he’s still close enough that Kon is practically speaking against his temple. “I don’t know who’s even flying drones right now, but that does…happen, sometimes. Perils of wearing the suit on a date.”

Tim’s gaze flicks back to meet his. “I see, ” he says. His eyes are so dark, pupils blown wide, and his mouth curves into a half-smile. Kon can see splotches of color high on Tim’s cheek, and something pleased and a bit proud curls in Kon’s chest, knowing he’s the one who put them there. Kon lifts one hand and carefully brushes a windblown strand of hair off Tim’s forehead. It’s a bit tacky from the dried saltwater, but soft against Kon’s fingers. Tim goes still, tracking the motion with his eyes until the last moment when he turns his head the tiniest bit, almost as if he’s leaning into the touch.

“Rome is also pretty at night,” Kon says. He sounds inexplicably winded to his own ears. “Or Buenos Aires, or—oh, we might be able to catch sunset over Singapore if we want to—”

There’s another sharp buzz. Not a drone this time, but coming from Tim’s pocket. Kon cuts off as Tim’s brow furrows, and Kon loosens his arm a bit to let Tim dig out his phone. Kon had been under the impression that Tim’s phone was on silent—he’s pretty sure he saw Tim text Mr. Wayne a thumbs up emoji before deliberately switching it to Do Not Disturb as they touched down in Lisbon. By the sudden tension in Tim’s shoulders, Kon’s pretty sure Tim’s also caught off guard.

“Is everything okay?” Kon asks.

Tim stares down at his screen for another few seconds. “Uh,” he says. “Looks like we’re, um, trending.”

“We’re—what?”

“Well, I already was, apparently,” Tim says, swiping through a few different texts. Kon isn’t at a good angle to see much, but he does see a message from BW with the word situation and press before Tim switches over to Twitter. “From the zoo thing. I think a Tiktok went viral? And then—ah, people saw me on the churro truck Instagram—okay, yeah, that’s not too…oh.”

“Oh,” Kon repeats, not sure how to read Tim’s tone. Before Tim can answer, though, Kon’s own phone buzzes in his thigh pouch; two quick hums, the alert for if someone on his team or in the Kent family has texted him more than three times while his phone is on silent. Kon digs it out with a bit of super speed.

Jon
Uhh hey conner
Now ur on tiktok too not just from the zoo
I didn’t watch !!
But i did see u on a live
Just so u kno in case dad calls

It occurs to Kon all at once, and he groans. “The drone,” he says, “was it…?”

“Yep,” Tim says, still scrolling. “It sure was. Streaming live. Wow, there are gifs already. Like really low-quality ones, because that camera was barely better than a GoPro, but, hm. Yeah.”

Kon wants to find a wall and bang his head against it. Preferably some sort of alien metal wall so he doesn’t just put his head right through. “I am so sorry.”

“No, no,” Tim says. “I mean, I’m the one who was already trending. So it’s my fault too.”

“Yeah, but…” Kon bites his lip. “Listen, is this—are you going to be okay? Like, Mr. Wayne, he won’t be mad at you for…you know…”

“Well he certainly won’t be thrilled,” Tim says mildly, typing something so fast that even as Kon’s stomach drops he distantly wonders if Tim has the metagene for speed texting. “Nor will his PR team, though this is hardly the worst weekend scandal they’ve had to deal with.” Tim glances up and seems to register something on Kon’s face. “Oh—no, this isn’t outing me or anything. I mean, we haven’t talked about it talked about it, but Bruce knows. Enough. And even if he didn’t already know, it’s not like he’d have a leg to stand on. That’s not the—that’s not part of the equation here, I swear.”

“Okay,” Kon says, and wonders if he’ll ever be able to really relax about Bruce Wayne and the possibility of Tim being scared of him. “That’s…good.”

Tim studies him for a second. “Will you be okay?”

“Yeah,” Kon says immediately. This, at least, he’s sure enough about; there are probably plenty of things he could do that his team or Clark or the Kents wouldn’t like, but kissing a boy is not one of them. “Yeah, no, all good.”

Tim nods, like he expected that, and opens his mouth to say something else. Before he can, though, Kon picks up on another drone closing in on them—a different one, its motor a slightly higher pitch.

He zips them another mile west. “Okay,” he says, “I don’t think they’re leaving us alone tonight. We could…we could still relocate, if you want…”

His phone buzzes again in his hand; Tim’s lights up a few seconds later. Tim glances down and grimaces. “Better not tonight,” he says. “Probably shouldn’t give anyone else the chance to pick up the livestream before we get this figured out.”

Tim sounds so focused about it, almost bloodless, so Kon pushes down the tangle of unpleasant emotions building in his own chest. There’s a certain level of media attention that comes with being a superhero—a daytime hero dressed in bright primary colors, at least—but this isn’t Superboy pulling a cat out of a tree or throwing out finger guns for the cameras after sending an alien spaceship back through its own wormhole. It’s Kon’s personal life being tossed up online like it belongs to everyone, and it smacks a little too much of the time when Kon had no personal life to speak of. Also, it sucks that it happened now, because they’d been having—a good time. So, that’s also a bummer. But it’s not like Kon is going to act all devastated about it in front of Tim. “Yeah, no problem,” Kon says.

Tim turns his focus back to Kon for a long moment. “We’ll get this sorted out,” he says with a surprising weight to it, like he’s promising Kon something instead of placating him. “Seriously. Give Bruce twelve hours, max.”

“Okay,” Kon says again. It is nice, at least, that Tim doesn’t seem too excited about the attention either. The tangle in Kon’s chest loosens a bit. “I’ll take you home. I mean—drop you off. Drop you off at home.”

Tim’s eyes widen a fraction before his expression evens out again, but Kon totally caught it. “Yeah,” he says, a little strangled. “Yeah, good plan.”

Once back across the Atlantic, Tim directs Kon to drop him on a small, secluded path north of Gotham. Beyond a scatter of trees and an honest-to-god wrought-iron fence there’s a distant mansion, a few windows lit up, and Kon can hear about four cars idling beyond the gates on the far side of the property. “The paparazzi won’t bother coming over here,” Tim says. “I’ll sneak in through the back.”

Oh, that’s Mr. Wayne’s mansion. Kon vaguely wonders how many of the Kents’ farmhouses could fit on the first floor alone. If Tim ever gets lost trying to find the bathroom. “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you closer?” he asks. “This place looks like it has its own zip code.”

“Nah,” Tim says. “That’d defeat the whole stealth angle. I’ll be fine, I’m practically a pro at sneaking in this way.”

Huh. “Then keep the jacket for now,” Kon says, setting Tim on his feet. “So you don’t freeze on the journey.”

Tim brushes a hand over the sleeve of the jacket, then tilts his face back to look at Kon. The moonlight is far more muted here on the ground under the Gotham gloom, but Kon can still see Tim’s expression turn heated a moment before Tim rocks onto his tiptoes and kisses Kon again, brief and hard, both hands cradling Kon’s face before he breaks away and steps back.

“You should go,” Tim says. “Before I change my mind about sunset over Singapore. I just—Kon—I need a day. Just a day, because I want to do this right and I didn’t account for the press factor so I need to figure out exactly how to—but. Tomorrow night, 9:00. After—I have a thing, I can’t skip out on it again. But after that, meet me here. And then if you still want—if you still want to see me again, the next date’s on me.”

Titans training should wrap by eight. Kon can do that. “Okay,” he says. And if he sounds a little breathless again, there’s only Tim and the trees to hear it.

◇

Direct message: impulse & sb

[Saturday, 10:22pm ET]
impulse
heyyyyyy
anything u want to share 😏😏
aka please share i have been waiting so so long for this moment

sb
you didn’t even know tim existed until 3 weeks ago??

impulse
please i have been waiting 3 weeks* for this moment

◇

@Superwatch
We know who we want to sweep us off our feet! Superboy’s epic date night itinerary includes churros and the City of Love—check out what else these Tiktok detectives have put together.

@PopBase
Superboy caught locking lips over the Paris skyline after highly publicized New Jersey rescue earlier tonight.

@BuzzfeedSuper
Seven times Superboy was a total queer icon 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈

@TeenVogue
Who is Superboy’s new crush, Timothy Drake? Here’s everything we know so far.

◆

“So,” Bruce says without turning around, “this is not ideal, to say the least, but it could ultimately work in our favor.”

He doesn’t sound angry. A bit distracted—Tim can see he’s half-dressed for patrol, or perhaps half-undressed from dealing with Ivy, skimming through various feeds at the computer as Tim enters the Cave—but not angry. Tim hadn’t been lying to Kon about that, not really, but there’s still a difference between Bruce caring about Tim trending for ‘kissing a boy’ reasons, and caring because Tim made it Bruce’s problem, and Tim hadn’t entirely 100% ruled out the latter possibility.

“Okay,” Tim says carefully from the bottom of the stairs, managing to keep his voice steady. Between the abrupt end of the night and the irrational nerves and the whole kissing his best friend/impossible crush in midair thing Tim’s been working overtime to keep any semblance of cool. “What’s the strategy here?”

He deems it fine to move closer and stand behind Bruce’s shoulder. “First of all,” Bruce says, minimizing a window, “the original video has been taken down, as have most reposts.”

Tim nods. He’d only seen it for a few seconds—and the video wasn’t much longer in total, most of it from a distance as the drone closed in, the two of them only recognizable due to a bright moon and Kon’s uniform and the pure coincidence that Tim’s zoo rescue blew up enough for people to connect the dots. Even as Tim Drake, he’s not used to having his picture taken when he doesn’t expect it; it’s not like he can turn off the part of his brain that catalogs security cameras and cell phones and reporters at all times. So seeing the video had been…weird, and made worse by the fact that Kon had also clearly been uncomfortable with it for reasons Tim could probably guess but obviously couldn’t ask about yet as Tim. In short: the first thing he feels hearing that the video is gone is relief. That makes it easier to shift into a more analytic mode, like they’re simply discussing a case. “You don’t think that will be suspicious? The video disappearing within an hour?”

Bruce tips his head in Tim’s direction, as if acknowledging that Tim raised a good point, but says: “The video will show as being flagged for copyright violation, so the average viewer will assume the Justice League simply has fast-acting lawyers. For anyone with the resources and motivation to look closer, they will see it actually was removed by an entity entirely separate from the League, which should send them on a wild goose chase trying to find a connection between the entity and either you or Superboy, which will ultimately lead to a number of dead ends. By then any interest in the story will have blown over, especially if we play our cards right with the media.”

Tim is fluent in Brucespeak—when it’s about a case, at least—so he catches the odd phrasing immediately. “What entity? Not Oracle?”

Bruce presses his lips together. “We had a volunteer.”

A voice crackles through the computer speakers just as Bruce finishes speaking. “Got the little bastard,” the voice says. “It was indeed some 37-year-old Brit on holiday. Definitely doesn’t have EASA clearance, so have fun with that. Fake citation or additional fabricated misdemeanors, what do you think?” Then: “Did you mute me again? Seriously?”

Tim leans forward and unmutes the call window in the bottom left corner of the screen. “Hi, Ghost-Maker.”

“Ah, number three,” Ghost-Maker says. “You’ll be happy to know I located the drone and liberated it from its owner’s possession as of ninety seconds ago.”

“Like—physically?” Tim asks, feeling oddly touched.

“I was in the area. And before your boss says anything, yes, its former owner will be fine, other than experiencing an unpleasant hangover when the sedative wears off. I won’t hear a word about methodology when he’s the one who so desperately needed my help.”

Bruce just shrugs. Considering he’s—Tim scans the monitor closest to him—fabricating backdated license violations for Sean Collins, age 37, Tim figures he isn’t too worried about the moral high ground this time. “Hmm,” Tim says to the computer. “He said you volunteered.”

“Well, of course I did. I was better equipped than he was, and I like when Bruce owes me favors. More to the point, you’re my favorite of his little birds and I’m happy to enable you.”

“Stop picking favorites,” Bruce says.

“Oh, so Superman can have a Nightwing and Talia can have a whole spawn but I can’t claim one for myself?”

Bruce presses his thumb to the crease between his eyebrows. “That’s not how this works.”

“Hey kid, what do you think of the call sign Vulture? That would be beautifully on theme.”

“I’m not really in the market,” Tim tells him. “But thank you for your help.”

“Hear that?” Ghost-Maker says, unfazed. “That’s how to be properly gracious.”

“Thank you, Khoa,” Bruce says.

There’s a brief pause. “Yes. Well,” Ghost-Maker says. “I’ll be in touch about that favor.” The line disconnects.

Bruce lets out a small sigh, the tiniest loosening of his shoulders, and minimizes the license infraction window. Tim watches as Bruce seems to hesitate, then angles his chair toward Tim.

“So,” Bruce says. “As I mentioned, the video is gone. No one will be able to analyze it or reproduce it for further data. However, the story itself is not so easily contained.”

Tim’s hands twitch, so he tucks them behind hisback and clasps them together so Bruce won’t see him fidget. “I’m sorry I didn’t think about the media attention after Ivy’s attack. That’s on me. But.” He clasps harder and lifts his chin to meet Bruce’s eyes. “I’m not sorry about the kiss.”

Bruce blinks. “I’m not…upset about that,” he says. He doesn’t sound like he’s lying. Or like he’s telling the truth, but it’s true only because he’s irritated or annoyed instead.

Still, like ripping off a band-aid, Tim says: “But you’re not happy.”

Bruce’s eyebrows draw together briefly, like he has to think about it. “Would I prefer you hadn’t gone flying off to another continent after being exposed to an unknown substance? Yes. Will I bench you if you do that again without undergoing proper decontamination procedures? Also yes. Speaking of—” Bruce stands, motioning for Tim to follow, and leads them to the med bay. There he gets out a standard toxin test kit, prepping it while Tim leverages himself onto the edge of one of the cots and frees an arm from Kon’s jacket on autopilot. “But am I angry that your privacy was violated? No. Not with you, at least. I’m also not entirely surprised, given the heightened media scrutiny around all of us lately, which leads me to my earlier point.” Tim watches as Bruce draws a vial of blood, deftly switching it out for another without jostling Tim’s arm at all. He’s had a lot of practice, Tim thinks. “One option is to try to bury the story as much as possible. Shut down all mention of it, provide a blanket no comment statement, and let it run its course.” Bruce presses a folded cut of gauze to the crook of Tim’s arm, deft enough that Tim doesn’t even see the blood well up. “Another option is to, perhaps, lean into it.”

It takes a second to click into place. “Like you do,” Tim says. How many times has Bruce Wayne getting rescued by Superman made the rounds on Twitter? Been picked apart on Reddit and laughed at on Tiktok? “Build a narrative. Timothy Drake is someone who gets rescued, not someone who does the rescuing.”

“Timothy Drake,” Bruce says seriously, “is someone who has saved countless lives, including my own. But to the public…yes.” He finishes wrapping the bandage around Tim’s elbow, but doesn’t let go of Tim’s arm for another moment. “So far you’ve been mostly sheltered by your age. For the public, children are interesting for their proximity to adult tragedy.” Bruce says this matter-of-factly, without a hint of pity, and Tim is grateful. “If I had it my way the media wouldn’t be able to touch you, but you’re older now. You’re more than an extension of the adults in your life. I’m saying—you can choose, now.”

And Tim can see it come together in his mind, the kind of persona that could unspool from this one story: Tim Drake, jet-setting rich kid, acting out in his parents’ absence and soaking up his new foster father’s tendency to rub elbows with superheroes and celebrities. It’s strategic, too—it’s far easier to investigate corruption in Gotham’s upper crust when you’re on the invite list already. When people underestimate you. More than that, it’s easier to avert suspicion with a civilian identity that’s specific and well-known rather than a blank slate.

But there’s something more important he has to do, before any seeds can start taking root. Tim straightens his posture. “Whatever we do with Tim Drake,” he says, “I’m telling Kon. I know Kon will play along with whatever story we tell, but it’s not fair to keep him in the dark anymore.” He swallows. “My team, too. But Kon first. That’s what I choose.”

He’s clasping his hands again, one arm still bare to the chilly cave air, the other warm under three layers. He’s so busy mentally calling forth every other argument he’s prepared that he almost misses it when Bruce pulls back and says, “Okay.”

Tim jerks, gaze snapping back up. “...Okay? That’s it?”

Bruce starts packing up the sample kit. “It was going to happen anyway. You’re right, after tonight it is more strategic for you to be honest. I’ll inform the others so they can prepare accordingly.”

“So,” Tim says, frantically searching for the but, the catch. If his parents agreed to something so easily there would always be a flip side—a tradeoff where he has to give up something more valuable, or at least the heavy implication that, sure, he can have his way, but he’s fully on his own if it goes wrong. “So, you’re really fine with it? With them knowing?”

“You know the answer to that,” Bruce says evenly. “But if you’re going to do it anyway, it’s better to coordinate information as a team. Also, I’ll get to point to this as a counterexample the next time Dick or Stephanie call me a despot.”

Tim stares at him, stunned. “I should’ve gotten us caught making out in public six months ago.”

Bruce pauses. “You and Superboy were making out six months ago?”

“No,” Tim says, still trying to reconcile the fact that this is actually happening. “I’m just saying, if I’d known it would change the situation, I might have—considered it. Earlier.”

A beat of silence, in which Bruce rubs his temple in a way that manages to look relieved and consternated all at once. “It didn’t,” he starts, then frowns. Sits down in the faded wingback chair Alfred had moved to the med bay last year. Tim vaguely remembers Bruce sleeping in that chair two nights in a row when Tim had a run-in with some knockoff fear gas that didn’t do much except make him nauseous and sleepy for a few days. Now Bruce clears his throat. “It didn’t change the situation,” Bruce says. “That is, my reasoning remains the same. But I also know that I can’t actually stop you at this point.” A small, hopeful pause. “Can I?”

“No,” Tim says quickly.

Bruce nods. He hunches forward, elbows on his knees. It makes him a bit smaller, a bit less Batman, despite still wearing the kevlar leggings and boots. “I’ve told you it’s a matter of safety,” he says.

“I know,” Tim says. “I swear. I trust Kon, and my team. If I thought—”

Bruce holds up a hand. “It’s not that. That is—yes, the less people who know, the safer we are. But I’m trying to say…it’s not just about that. I have trouble explaining this part; it always comes out wrong. I think the first time I tried was the first time Dick called me a despot, actually.” He snorts, quiet and wry. “I’ll try to do better this time. What it really comes down to is this: I want you to have something to return to. I want your civilian identity to be a haven—I don’t want Robin to define you. If you ever stop being Robin, I want you to still be able to be Tim. If Tim Drake is compromised, it’s harder for you to have that option. And if Bruce Wayne is compromised, too, it compromises my ability to keep you safe. I want you to be safe. But I also have another reason, and this is the selfish part. The part I couldn’t explain right last time. Which is: if Bruce Wayne were compromised, it would be much harder to keep you here with me, as someone I can help in all of your identities. As my family. Not impossible—I would never let it be impossible. But it would make it harder, and that’s what scares me, more than the rest of it combined. Because I want to keep you, Tim.”

And Tim—doesn’t know what to say. All of his previously prepared arguments and talking points vanish, leaving him bare and scrambling and feeling a bit like he’s suddenly forgotten sixteen and a half years of knowing how to breathe. His face feels hot, and he angles his head away, staring at where his hand curls over the edge of the cot, half-obscured by Kon’s jacket cuff.

“Tim?” Bruce says quietly.

Tim swallows once. Twice. “Sorry,” he says. Then, without really meaning to: “But. You have Damian now.”

“Yes,” Bruce says carefully.

“So, I mean,” Tim says, then isn’t sure where he’s even going with that. It’s not like Damian really changes all that much. Gotham CPS isn’t going to shift his placement because of that. It’s the same deal: Tim staying as Robin. Tim staying out of reach of foster care or distant relatives who are more interested in the contents of the dwindling Drake estate than in Tim himself. Tim making it to eighteen when Bruce will probably lend him money for college until Tim can access the estate trust at twenty-one and then. Well. He has a whole plan on his personal computer, spreadsheets and lists compiled like one of his case files, but the point is there is always an and then. Tim is always moving on somewhere.

Except. The plan doesn’t account for Bruce saying he wants to keep Tim.

“Like,” Tim tries again. “I mean—keep me for how long?”

“As long as you’ll let me,” Bruce says immediately. “As long as I’m alive, and even after that, if the very expensive lawyers I have managing my estate do their jobs.”

Tim wipes a hand over the back of his mouth, still not making eye contact. “But I’m not…I mean. My dad…”

“If Jack Drake made a full and miraculous recovery tomorrow, I would be—I would be happy for you,” Bruce says. “It also would not change anything I just said. Though of course I would…well. My point is, you’ll always be someone I want to protect. You don’t have to live under my roof or be legally mine for that to be true.” When Tim can’t say anything for another long stretch of seconds Bruce adds, looking a little desperate: “Tim, you’re my Robin. We’ve already transcended legal technicalities, don’t you think?”

Tim can’t help but laugh wetly at that. “Okay, fair.”

“And even if you weren’t Robin—hypothetically,” Bruce says when Tim opens his mouth, “you’d still be Tim. You understand what I’m saying, right?”

“I think so,” Tim says. It’s a bit jumbled, honestly, mostly due to his own scramble to adjust his expectations. He already knows he’s not getting to sleep tonight until he unpacks every single word, and that’s after he figures out exactly how he’s going to explain everything to Kon. He might, upon further consideration, not end up sleeping at all tonight. “That’s.” He swallows again. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” Bruce tells him.

“Thank you for using your words, then,” Tim says, dragging himself back to more familiar ground. Robin teasing Batman. “And full sentences, even. That was very impressive. I’d rate the despotism levels at 30%, max.”

Bruce huffs, pushing to his feet, clearly as relieved as Tim is to no longer be struggling through that conversation. Tim’s whole body feels in turn numb and warm, except his arm, which is still cold. He shrugs the suit and jacket sleeves back on and trails Bruce back to the computer.

“Spoiler and Batgirl are patrolling,” Bruce says, pulling up Oracle’s report log. “But there’s time for us to follow up on the two leads for the Porter case, if you’re up for it.” From the carefully neutral way he says it, Tim knows this is also an offering: a chance for Tim to distract himself from any lingering anxiety or frustration over the media attention via fieldwork. Then Bruce glances sideways at him. “Unless you have other unfinished business tonight? I’d prefer if you gave me at least twelve hours to make sure everyone is looped in, but if it’s happening sooner than that let me know.”

He means Kon, Tim realizes. Telling Kon everything. “Tomorrow,” Tim says. “I told him to meet me tomorrow night. I have to figure out exactly what to say. I had a whole plan, but I didn’t account for, um. The Paris thing.”

“Hmm,” Bruce says. “Have him over. I’d like to talk to him as well.”

“No offense,” Tim says, “but absolutely not. That’s like. A fiftieth-date kind of thing. If ever.”

Bruce raises an eyebrow. “Conner and I have already met. Multiple times.”

“But not as. Not with.” Tim puts his hands over his face. “Just let me get through this part first.”

When he peeks through his fingers he sees Bruce is smirking a little. Tim resolves to coat the entire batarang supply in industrial-strength glitter the next chance he gets.

“Well, he’ll have to retrieve his jacket at some point at least,” Bruce says, still dryly amused. “Alfred certainly won’t let you return it without proper dry-cleaning.”

Oh, god, Tim is still wearing Kon’s jacket. His hands go back over his face.

There’s the barest sound of movement in front of him, and the brief sensation of Bruce’s hand on his shoulder as Bruce heads for the lockers. “Suit up, then,” Bruce says. “We’re wasting prime lurking hours.”

“Despotism levels at 40%,” Tim calls, but can’t keep a smile off his face. It stays there as he gets changed, carefully folding Kon’s jacket into his locker. His locker, the space in the cave that has been set aside for him since he elbowed his way into being Robin. Into Bruce’s life. And now, apparently, Tim Drake is someone that Bruce wants to keep. Kon, too, likes Tim now. Tim. And Tim knows Kon likes Robin well enough, so together, the sum of Tim’s various parts might actually make him someone worth having.

Tim presses a domino over his eyes, and dares to hope.

◆

tdrake9891
[Instagram post: A picture of city lights from above, glittering from one edge of the frame to the other.]
Caught a pretty good view last night…

◆

Tim does end up getting some sleep after all via an accidental nap at noon, and wakes to a call from Dick telling him the afternoon’s training is canceled in favor of Tim’s team backing up the older Titans on an urgent case involving some sort of wannabe demon king trying to turn Manhattan into a hellgate. Luckily Dick is too busy updating Tim on the situation as he pilots them to New York to bring up last night, but he does toss Tim a contraband Red Bull with a wink. Tim considers throwing it back on principle, but he does in fact need the caffeine.

And it’s kind of nice, actually—not the whole not-even-legit-hellgate situation, but diving into a mission. It’s his first time in the field outside Gotham since the whole Damian reveal, and like on patrol last night it’s almost a relief to focus and push himself and let Robin take over for a few hours as they apprehend the demon cosplayer and dismantle his genuinely dangerous occult artifacts that seem to have a mind of their own. It’s better than meditating, Tim thinks, when it comes to dealing with his nerves about later tonight.

(Still, even through the Robin of it all, a mass of jittery, anticipatory energy zings under his skin when Kon—jacketless, also tired-looking—catches sight of him across a smoking bit of Central Park and brightens. Tim lets Robin slip for a moment to wave, a quick waggle of his fingers, and Kon winks before diving back into the fray.)

Kon finds him once everything has pretty much wrapped up, the elder Titans dismissing Tim’s team with a good work, guys and a few jokes about it being a school night, as if they weren’t running their Tower like a college dorm at age fifteen or whatever. Tim is checking over the last of his gear when Kon lands next to him, boots kicking up the light sprinkling of ash coating this side of the park.

“Need any help?” Kon asks. His hair is windswept and backlit by a street lamp, and when Tim glances up all he sees is Kon’s silhouette, slimmer without the customary jacket but still close enough that, for just a moment, he eclipses the whole city. And Tim can’t help it, okay, because the last time he saw jacketless Kon framed against a city at night was like twenty hours ago and then Tim had kissed him, multiple times, so—of course his heart skips a beat.

It takes him a moment to replay Kon’s question, and Tim clears his throat, smacking the side of the infrared binoculars (batnoculars, he hears in Dick’s voice) he’s holding. “Yeah, actually—get me to that roof over there?”

Kon doesn’t question it, just hooks an arm under Tim’s and zips them on top of one of the apartment complexes across the street. Tim brings the binoculars up and scans the park, adjusting the calibration until he’s sure they’ve reset properly. Kon waits through the process, and when Tim stows the binoculars and looks over, Kon’s already looking back, a small grin on his face.

“What’s that look for?” Tim says, wondering if his bangs got singed again.

“Good to have you back,” Kon says simply. And even though it’s only been a few weeks since he’s seen Kon as Robin, Tim knows what he means—even before Damian, Tim’s had less time to spend with the team the last few months. Between the custody upheaval and his dad still in the hospital and Gotham’s never ending…Gotham-ness, things have been more scattered than usual.

“Good to be back,” Tim says, and means it so much his voice almost catches. Because this does feel different, more so than showing up to training after missing a few weeks. By now Bruce has informed the other Bats about the situation and crafted a media statement, and soon Kon will know, and Tim will get to see him as Tim and as Robin and there will be that much less distance between the far-flung parts of his life. Less distance between him and his team. His team, and Kon.

Tim almost does it—almost tosses his whole plan and tells Kon right now instead of waiting until they’re supposed to meet later. But there are still people around, the Titans patrolling the city for after-effects and the all-around movement of a few million civilians going about their evening plans now that the city is safe again, and Tim hasn’t scouted this area for possible surveillance, and—he has a plan. He’s so close. He thinks it will go over better as Tim revealing Robin than the other way around—he might have rehearsed a little reveal where he pulls out his mask and puts it on, because it seems like the kind of thing best supported with a visual, and the masks are harder to get back off with the same kind of dramatic timing. Point is, he’s going to tell Kon in private where no one can interrupt them, and then invite him to the manor (he has exacted a promise from Bruce that Batman will already be out on patrol by then, and Dick will be over once the Titans mission wraps up to keep Damian busy in the Cave) for hot chocolate and further questions and meeting Alfred, who will help ease the whole billionaire Bruce Wayne shock, and then Tim will very casually suggest getting late-night pizza and then have Kon fly them somewhere where they can make out for like. Two hours, minimum.

If Kon still wants to, that is.

“Impulse and Wonder Girl were talking about getting dinner,” Kon is saying, clearly oblivious to the fact that Tim is right now at this moment remembering the way Kon’s mouth feels on the underside of his jaw. Tim blinks, hard. “You think you’ll join?”

Tim makes a small sound in the negative, trying to keep the grin out of his voice when he says, “I have plans.”

“Oh, yeah,” Kon says. “Me too, actually. In that case, want a ride back to Gotham?”

Tim glances down the block where Nightwing is still busy wrangling the press. Getting back sooner means extra time to look over his action plan and he doesn’t have to face Dick’s inevitable teasing for a bit longer; Tim is so kissing Kon extra for this later. “That would be great.”

It’s habit, by now, for Kon to alight on one of their usual rooftops and drop Tim off in the shadows. This time, though, Tim feels Kon hesitate before setting him down.

“What?” Tim says, pitching his voice low in case Kon was picking up on something in the vicinity. It’s Gotham, after all. “Is something wrong?”

“What?” Kon echoes. “Oh. Sorry, I was just thinking.” He pauses, settling Tim on his feet, and then says, “What’s it like, when I fly you places?”

Tim blinks. “You mean, compared to other forms of transportation?”

“No, like, what does it feel like?” Kon says. “Does it stress you out?”

“No,” Tim says immediately.

“Really?” Kon says. It’s dark here, darker than in New York, but Tim can see the edge of the hopeful expression that steals across Kon’s face. He doesn’t know what to make of it.

“Of course not,” Tim says. “Why, do you think it should?”

“Well, you’re…Robin,” Kon says. “You’re…” He gestures around them.

“An urban creature?” Tim guesses. “A rooftop dweller?”

“You like to have control of your environment,” Kon says in a way that would maybe be a backhanded statement from someone else, but Tim knows that Kon genuinely just understands this about Tim. Also, if Kon meant it as a dig he would’ve said something like, You have, you know, those total control issues, the way they used to bicker when the team was new and their friendship even newer.

“Kon,” Tim says, “I regularly swing through the air on a grapple line, which one could argue is even less safe than flying. And if you want to get metaphorical about it, robins are, famously, birds.” Kon laughs at that, and Tim grins with him. “Besides, all that aside, I—you know I trust you, right?”

From the brief pause before he speaks, Tim guesses that Kon does know this, but still likes that Tim said it. “Yeah,” Kon says, rubbing the back of his head. “Yeah, I know. I just was thinking about it, and I realized I’ve never been the fly-ee, so, thought I’d ask.”

“Hmm,” Tim says. He checks the clock on his wrist panel—yeah, he’s got time. “I see. And you trust me, right?”

“Duh,” Kon says.

“Okay. Come here.”

Kon moves with a bemused look as Tim tugs him to the edge of the roof. Tim spares just a moment to scope the skyline—he knows exactly where they are, and exactly how much cover they have at this time of night. “All right,” Tim says, and unhooks his grapple gun. He winds his other arm around Kon’s waist, reeling him so Kon is secure against his side.

“Rob—?” Kon starts.

“No cheating,” Tim tells him, and jumps.

The first moment of freefall is simultaneously the best and worst part. It’s pure exhilaration, and no matter how many times he jumps he’ll still never be used to it, something in his hindbrain shrieking in panic every single time his stomach drops away. In that first split-second Kon stiffens against Tim out of what has to be pure surprise, the only reason his flight instincts don’t kick in immediately, and Tim tightens his hold. I got you.

With a hiss and a telltale tug the grapple latches onto the next roof, and they’re off.

Kon lets out a strangled whoop on the first upswing, tightening his grip on Tim until it’s just this side of bone-creaking. “Holy sh*t, holy sh*t, holy sh*t,” he chants in Tim’s ear, and Tim laughs into the wind. Grappling is different from flying. It is, in Tim’s opinion, better; there’s a subtle hike in adrenaline between a swoop and a swing, and as handy as Kon’s TTK is for high-speed wind resistance, there’s nothing like the rush of air at the apex of a curve. Kon, it seems, is not immune to it whatsoever, and Tim can’t blame him. He’s had more experience with gravity—or lackthereof—than most people, but he can remember all of his firsts. The first time Tim yelled for Superman to pull him and an injured Bruce from a fight. The first time he nailed a consecutive grapple swing in training, and again in the city. When Kon first scooped Tim up mid-battle and dangled Tim by his ankle, one eyebrow arched, and Tim was too full of adrenaline and indignation to catalog what else he was feeling besides the rush of gravity dropping away. Kon can’t be used to gravity acting on him like this, half a second behind his expectations, and as they keep swinging his whoops turn into half-wild laughter.

It’s not for long—a minute or two of city lights blurring by, of Kon clinging to him, before they reach the the destination Tim chose, another dark rooftop where they’re unlikely to be spotted. “Brace,” Tim gasps, and reduces the grapple retraction so they just barely crest the edge of the roof. It’s not the most graceful landing, but they both stay upright as they stumble to a stop.

“Oh my god,” Kon says, swaying a little when Tim relaxes his grip and lets him go. Kon leans forward and props his hands on his knees, even though Tim is 99% sure Kon doesn’t get dizzy that easily. “That was—holy sh*t.”

Tim grins and rolls his shoulder. He’s carried civilians and other Bats before—even carried Jason, once, and more notably an injured Bruce for about half a mile—but it’s still a workout. And he was showing off a little. “Cool, right?”

“That was nuts.”

“So’s flying,” Tim says. “But it was also fun, because I didn’t drop you. Because you trust me.”

Kon looks up, his eyes gleaming in the watery moonlight that manages to break through Gotham’s haze. “So much fun,” he says fervently.

“So,” Tim tells him. “Case in point.”

Kon straightens and runs a hand through his hair, still looking at Tim. “You are not normal,” he says, with so much affection in his voice that Tim has to laugh again, even though his cheeks hurt with it by now.

Kon is smiling when Tim reopens his eyes, and Tim is close enough to see the way the shadows fall on his face. Without really thinking Tim reaches up, his gloved fingertips brushing the corner of Kon’s eye. “You have—laugh lines,” he says, and it comes out soft.

“Huh,” Kon breathes, looking dazed. He lifts his hand, fingers a millimeter from Tim’s. “Is that bad?”

“No,” Tim says. Kon was frozen the first few years of his life, existing out of step with the rest of the world before his aging kicked in. Now he’s changing in small, subtle ways, keeping pace with everyone. With Tim. “No, it’s…good. It’s great.”

“Great,” Kon echoes. This is the last time we do this while I’m just Robin, Tim realizes. For better or worse—and Tim has a feeling it’s for better—they’ll never have another conversation like this where Kon doesn’t know what Robin looks like without the mask.

A small snowflake tumbles between them, followed by another. Somewhere below a church bell starts to ring, signaling 8:00. Batman will be starting his early patrol, probably grumbling as he does but honoring Tim’s request for privacy, which means it’s time for Tim to go back and make sure everything’s ready and then—

“Listen, I—” Kon starts, the same moment Tim says, “I should probably—”

They both laugh again, quiet this time. “You—you said you have plans,” Kon says.

“Sure do.” Tim realizes his hand is still brushing Kon’s temple and drops it, stepping back, finding the edge of the roof on instinct. “See you soon,” he adds, reckless.

“Yeah,” Kon says, watching him with wide eyes. “See you—yeah, okay.”

As Tim swings away he allows himself one more grin, this one just for himself as he turns toward home.

◆

An hour later Tim stands on the path behind Wayne Manor, Kon’s jacket folded over his arm and his Robin mask tucked into the pocket of a lined balmacaan, which he is wearing along with a knit scarf per Alfred’s insistence. Tim had protested a bit at the time—he’s not planning to be out that long—but now that he’s here he sends a silent apology to Alfred, because it is cold. And Kon is late.

Not drastically, and not mysteriously—Tim is not panicking, because it has only been nine minutes and Kon sent a text saying sorry, he’s on his way. So Tim scrolls through the media update package Bruce sent this afternoon and lets himself jitter his leg just a little. He’s trying to figure out if he can in fact jitter his leg discreetly under this kind of coat (game changer if so) when there’s a soft whoosh and Kon is touching down a few feet away.

Tim quickly looks up and pockets his phone, smiling. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Kon says. He’s hovering the tiniest bit, something Tim knows he does when he’s nervous. Like Tim’s jitters. He looks like he did when they parted except his hair is in even more disarray, like he went and did a few loops through the stratosphere and then unsuccessfully tried to smooth it back down, and his gaze keeps skittering from Tim’s face to Tim’s coat and scarf. And okay, Tim knows he looks kind of like a Neiman Marcus mannequin right now, but that will be funny in a minute, once Kon knows he’s seen Tim covered in alien slime and in sweaty workout gear and, most recently, dunked in the ocean. “Sorry I’m late, I had to…I had to figure something out.”

“You’re hardly late,” Tim says. He slips a hand into his pocket, the domino mask brushing against the backs of his fingers. “Now that you’re here, though, I—”

At the same time, Kon says, “Do you think I could—”

Tim stops, making a go on sort of noise in the back of his throat.

Kon tugs at one of his gloves. “Before…um, before anything else, I should probably say something.”

It’s snowing a bit harder now, flurries shifting to fluffy, beginning-of-winter snowflakes. Tim feels one land on his eyelash and blinks it away. “Sure,” he says.

Kon nods once, and opens his mouth. Closes it. Something tight passes over his face. “I am really, really sorry,” he starts, and for a moment Tim is just blankly confused. Sorry for being late? It’s only ten minutes, and he texted, so there’s hardly reason for Kon to look this devastated—

Oh.

It’s like Tim’s insides are swiftly and nauseatingly replaced with lead as Kon takes a deep breath. Oh. It’s—of course, it’s—it’s not even humiliating that this is happening, honestly. What’s humiliating is that Tim somehow didn’t see this coming. That Tim thought—of course. Of course.

“I think,” Kon says, now fiddling with the band of his glove, smoothing it over and over. Tim focuses there, and not where Kon is alternately trying to meet his eyes and look somewhere over Tim’s shoulder at the same time. “I think I maybe got carried away yesterday? And I don’t—I don’t want to…promise anything, or lead you on, or something. And it’s not that I didn’t have fun! I had so much fun, like, that was—that was great, you’re really great, Tim. I like you a lot, I just. I was thinking about it, and I don’t think it’s fair to…do it again. Not right now. Which, I know that sucks, that sucks of me, so I’m trying to, like—be up front—” He breaks off. “I’m sorry. I didn’t really plan this out, so I’m f*cking up big time.”

The words have sort of been washing over Tim like a tidal wave, but he recognizes that he’s probably supposed to respond in some way. “Oh,” he says. “No, that’s. It’s fine. I didn’t.”

He doesn’t know what else to say. His hand is still resting against the mask in his pocket, I’m Robin right there on the tip of his tongue, technically irrelevant to whether or not Kon wants to date Tim Drake. But he can’t say it past the hot embarrassment clawing at his throat, pulsing behind his eyes. He wants to ask for a minute to think, to turn around so Kon can’t see his face, and immediately feels even more humiliated for needing that. He should’ve known. He should’ve known.

“Tim?” Kon says quietly.

Tim draws in a long breath. Another. He summons his mother, summons Brucie Wayne, summons normal, boring, see-through Tim Drake, and manages a vacant smile. “It’s fine,” he says. “I get it. Thanks for being honest.”

Kon looks a bit lost, in the corner of Tim’s vision. “I’m really, really sorry. Again. You’re—it’s not you, really, it’s—”

“Kon,” Tim says quietly. He can’t stop this from happening, but he can at least spare himself the indignity of hearing that phrase completed.

Kon winces. “Okay, I know how that was about to sound, but seriously. It’s not…I don’t know what the right thing to say here is, but I promise I wasn’t lying yesterday. I really—I swear I had a great time. I just…”

“You changed your mind,” Tim says, even. “It happens. We weren’t even dating, so you don’t owe me anything. I appreciate the courtesy anyway.”

Bruce, Tim thinks distantly. He’ll have to tell Bruce to factor this into the media strategy. He’ll have to tell Dick no more jokes, which will be excruciating, and he’ll have to—f*ck, he’ll have to tell Bart, because when Tim does reveal his identity it’s going to be horrifically awkward for a while. And he’ll do it, because he promised, but he needs to re-strategize. Needs to take this into account to make sure it has the minimal negative effect on team dynamics. Needs to—god, what had he been thinking—

“If you need me to do anything,” Kon is saying, “about the press, like, to get them to leave you alone, just tell me. Or I can figure it out, you don’t have to tell me anything, I just don’t want to make it worse.”

Tim shakes his head. The movement registers belatedly, like he’s operating a split second ahead of his mind. “No need,” he hears himself say, and tries to shove himself back into his body. His face still feels too warm against the stinging cold night, and there’s a heavy weight draped over one arm. The jacket. Right. “Thanks again for the save yesterday. Here’s your jacket. It’s been dry-cleaned, but do let me know if anything’s amiss.”

“…Okay,” Kon says, taking the jacket when Tim holds it out. “I’m sure it’s great. Um, do you want me to take you back to the house?”

“No,” Tim says, maybe a bit too quickly, a bit too sharply. Brucie Wayne, he reminds himself. Janet Drake. “No, thank you. I obviously made my own way here, I can make my own way back.”

“Are you sure?” Kon says. “It’s just, it’s really cold, so—”

“I would like to be done with this conversation now,” Tim says, and to his horror his voice shakes on the last word.

That seems to do the trick, though, because Kon blanches and draws back. “Right, yeah,” he says. “Just, um. Okay. Thanks for cleaning the jacket. And I’m…I really am sorry, Tim.”

Tim nods tightly. Kon looks back at him for another long moment, and Tim isn’t sure how Kon manages to look exactly as miserable as Tim feels, but, mercifully, Kon doesn’t say anything else. He just tucks his jacket against his body and lifts off, disappearing into the sky.

It’s a sight Tim is used to, by now, but he never imagined it could possibly hurt this much.

◆

Tim does not make his way back to the Manor. Instead he walks three-quarters of a mile down to the street and calls an Uber to his parents’ penthouse. Most of its contents have been moved to a secure storage facility now that Tim’s no longer living here, per the company lawyers’ recommendation; Tim had also downgraded the security when he left, so that just in case someone did try to break in they’d find nothing but a regular alarm system and a bunch of empty drawers and cabinets.

Or, right now, a bunch of empty cabinets and one sixteen-year-old boy.

He’s sitting on the steps in the foyer, staring at his phone on his knee. His vision keeps slipping out of focus. The screen is dark—no one has noticed the change in plans yet. The alarm is supposed to ping his phone when he comes in so he can cancel it, but no alert comes. Not even the high-end private security system is doing what Tim expected today. He really just got everything wrong, didn’t he?

f*ck. Tim brushes his phone away, hearing it clatter against the steps, and presses his forehead to his knees. He’d at least had the foresight to shove his mask into his left boot rather than risk it falling out in the Uber, so with that squared away and the fact that he’s all but guaranteed to be alone here, it’s fine that his composure slips. It’s fine that his hands are shaking where he curls them around his shins, and that the air in here is chilled and so empty it makes every shuddery breath Tim takes seem twice as loud. It’s okay, because there’s no one else to hear it, so he can fall apart for a minute. One minute, and then he’ll start figuring this out. He just needs some time. A day or two. A week, maybe. He’ll find a way to make this okay with the team and he’ll find a way to explain the situation to Bruce even if it makes him want to die and maybe someday he’ll even find a way to look back and laugh about this with Kon. Haha, remember that time you thought you wanted to kiss me and changed your mind? What a riot.

More importantly, he’ll learn from this. He’ll know better next time, if there is a next time for something like this, and he won’t expect…he’ll just know better.

For now, though, he presses his stinging eyes harder against the denim of his pants, and tells himself to breathe.

He hopes to be alone for a while longer, but anticipates a few different interruptions—Alfred calling his phone, Bruce or Cass simply appearing through a window, or even an attempted break-in, because that’s the kind of luck Tim is having tonight. He does not expect the main door buzzer to sound, so he jolts when it rings through the foyer speakers, harsh and grating.

At first he just stares vaguely in the direction of the speaker. There’s a doorman downstairs, but they’re off duty early on Sundays. It’s probably someone trying to visit a neighbor, pressing the Drake unit by mistake. The buzzer sounds once more, quick and impatient, and then goes quiet. Tim contemplates it for another few seconds, then drops his head back to his knees.

A minute later, there’s a knock.

Now Tim sits up, blinking hard. Not for a neighbor, then—this unit has its own elevator bay. Obviously not someone visiting his parents, and not a guest for Tim, either, since as far as anyone knows he isn’t even here, unless—

Unless. Kon knows about this place. Kon doesn’t need to use the front door to get in the building, he’s seen how to come in the back way, but he might have buzzed in if he wanted to give Tim the chance to refuse him. Or if he felt awkward about it now. The odds are astronomically slim, but if he stuck around long enough to notice Tim didn’t go back to the Manor…if he wanted to talk again for some reason…

Tim lurches to his feet and crosses the landing. He doesn’t just yank the door open, though—he’s Robin, and also he was raised in Gotham, so obviously he peers through the peephole first.

He tells himself the hollow disappointment he feels is, once again, his own fault.

It’s not Kon on the other side. Of course it’s not—did Tim really think Kon was going to show up at Tim’s parents’ gutted penthouse to tell Tim that he’s, what, changed his mind again? No, it’s someone in a brown UPS uniform, holding a slim package and glancing impatiently at his phone.

“Hello?” the delivery guy calls. Tim drops down from the peephole and tries to summon the energy to open the door. The package is probably still meant for someone else in the building, and the guy doesn’t deserve to be held up on his route because Tim can’t get it together to tell him so.

Tim cracks the door open. “Hi,” he says. His voice is rough in his own ears. “Sorry, I think you have the wrong unit.”

The guy frowns down at the package. “This is the Drake apartment, right? Security told me it was the top floor.”

Huh. In that case, it probably is the Drake address on the package. Maybe this is something his parents ordered months and months ago—one of their private museum dealings, or maybe even a holiday gift for someone his mom scheduled in advance. She did that, sometimes, always to this address, because it was the one they were most likely to be at in the winter.

“Yeah,” Tim says. “Um, I can take it.”

“Great,” the delivery guy says. “Just sign for it quick. Scanner broke though, gotta do it old school.” He passes Tim a clipboard and pen, shifting the package to his other hand. He’s bundled against the cold outside, wearing a thick hat and gloves. Tim’s bare hands are still cold from his ill-advised journey across the city, and he tries not to grimace at the feel of something sticky on the pen as he moves to sign the form.

Then he pauses, pen hovering over the paper, because that’s not his name on the recipient line. It’s not his mom or dad’s name, either. It’s not even a proper signature form.

“Why do you have a note for—” Superboy, he doesn’t say, because his tongue is suddenly numb inside his mouth. His fingers tingle, too, and a low ringing starts to build in his ears as he looks up.

The delivery guy has pushed the edge of his hat back enough for Tim to see his face. “Hi, Timothy,” he says. “Do you remember me?”

For a moment, Tim honestly doesn’t. He stares, frantically trying to place the guy even as his vision goes sideways. His hand is fully numb now, too—a coating on the pen, he realizes. Some sort of fast-acting paralytic. The clipboard slips from his fingers. He feels his knees hit the ground as if from a great distance.

Hiking boots, too fresh and new to be part of the uniform, step closer to Tim. Dark spots swim at the edge of his vision and he fumbles with the buttons of his coat, trying to reach his keychain, but his hands are too clumsy to find his inner pocket. His phone is over on the stairs, useless, and Tim is here on the floor of his parents’ home, also useless.

It’s there, craning his neck back to look at the man and struggling to stay conscious, that his mind flashes back to a bunker, to another cold floor and a broken thumb and a stinging pain in his cheek, and it clicks.

“Checkered Shirt Guy,” Tim slurs, right before everything goes dark.

◆

Direct message: sb & robin

[Sunday, 10:31 pm]
sb
hey
are you in the middle of bat business right now
totally fine if so but if not, could we talk?
don’t jump to conclusions it’s nothing bad
i think. haha
but next time you have a minute give me a call?

[Message failed to send]

Chapter 5: the basem*nt

Chapter Text

The fifth time, he tries not to call.

He really, really tries.

◆

About a year into his official tenure as Robin, a few months after Bruce stopped flinching at the sight of him when they’d both been quiet in the cave too long and right around the time Dick started visiting Gotham regularly again, Bruce updated Tim’s training roster to include interrogation protocol. It was not, as Tim had sort of expected, a series of sessions about withstanding torture so he wouldn’t give up vital information. It was, instead, exactly what it said on the tin: protocol review. Bruce sitting crosslegged on the training mats, Tim across from him—the place Bruce tended to talk most freely, Tim had found. On the mats, in the cave, wearing leggings and a t-shirt, not Batman or Brucie or Bruce Wayne. Just Bruce, talking to his Robin.

“In a scenario like this, the plan is not necessarily for you to withstand anything,” Bruce told him. “It’s not a test of strength. The plan is for you to escape the moment you can. If that’s not an option, the plan is for you to appease your captors, or distract them, or trick them into focusing on something else. Say anything you must to give yourself an opening. Appear meek rather than brave if that’s what you have to do—it’s your judgment call. Whatever keeps you safe until I come for you.”

Tim had wanted to ask the obvious follow-up questions—What if you can’t find me? What if you’re too busy, or there’s something more important, is there a Plan B?—but something about Bruce’s intent expression made him nod instead, and he just made a mental note to compose his own Plan Bs. Besides, there was still some training-training that followed: a few days running through every escape trick in both Bruce and Dick’s repertoires, writing a research report for Bruce on Lima syndrome, and reviewing old case files of the times someone thought they could interrogate Batman or Nightwing about their secret identities, or the somehow more numerous occasions Bruce Wayne and/or Richard Grayson had been kidnapped for corporate espionage reasons, of all things. (Dick: “I swear, the worst part about getting civilian-kidnapped is still having to write the Bat report after.”)

And after the field trip kidnapping, where Tim thought he had picked the right strategy only to have it shatter apart the second day, Tim had reviewed everything again. He had drawn on his own training, the weeks in Paris and the research he did on his own. He wrote a second report for his private file with three alternate scenarios he could have enacted to escape sooner. He has a nearly perfect record of escape as Robin, and slipped away from two different civilian kidnapping attempts in the early days of his dad’s diagnosis without even having to alert the Bats.

Point being, Tim is supposed to have a plan for something like this. He’s supposed to know how to twist interrogation dialogue, needle sympathy from his captors, lay false trails of information while working himself free, all while tracking the minutes since he pressed his emergency alert. He’s supposed to be three steps ahead of the situation.

Except this, whatever it is, isn’t an interrogation. Checkered Shirt guy hasn’t asked him a single question. He’s just—

Just—

The pain lifts suddenly and Tim gasps, wheezing and coughing in an almost embarrassing fit as his lungs remember how to breathe. He’d curl in on himself if he could, but his arms are cuffed pretty securely around a metal chair and also his body isn’t totally cooperating at the moment. The best he can do is force his eyes open and watch for whatever comes next.

In front of him, Checkered Shirt takes a step back. “Interesting,” he says, inspecting the rod he’s holding, which moments ago was pressed against the ball of Tim’s shoulder. Tim’s arm still twitches in its bindings, once, twice, sparks of pain crackling through the whole limb and fizzing out at his fingertips. The rest of his body isn’t feeling too great, either; whatever this tool is, it hits everywhere all at once. “I thought that one might do it.”

Do what? Tim thinks wildly, but clenches his teeth against the question. That’s not the right tactic—he knows this, he needs to strategize, but it’s hard when his thoughts keep scattering every time Checkered Shirt lifts that rod.

Tim thinks he’s been awake for around ten minutes now, give or take. The first few minutes were syrupy-slow, dragging himself to hazy consciousness with more than one false start as he pieced together where he was. The details kept slipping his mind the moment he tried to grasp them; he’s not sure how long it took to remember he’d been drugged, was still probably a bit drugged, but that accounts for the give or take. It was another few minutes before he was able to retain enough information to get his bearings: some sort of dimly-lit room, with bulky shadows lining the walls and a pervasive, earthy smell filling his lungs. Drafty air cold enough to see his own breath. A high-pitched whirring that isn’t just in his own ears. Sound of movement at his seven o’clock, at least one person just out of sight. Arms wrenched around the back of a metal chair, handcuffs biting into his wrists, ankles secured to each leg with single zip ties. Chair on a circular metal platform of some sort, right smack in the middle, which experience and pure gut instinct indicate is never a great sign. No phone, no shoes, no keys, no coat—no emergency alert button in reach. By the time he woke up his hands were numb and getting number, no chance of wriggling out of the cuffs without some convenient splinter or other makeshift lockpick in reach, which, no luck on that so far.

His best bet, he’d decided, was to go up—subtly work his ankles free, leverage his legs onto the chair to stand and lift his bound hands over the back, then twist his legs back through the loop of his own arms so his hands were bound in front. He could fight like that, or at the very least get his hands on something useful.

He’d just managed to shift the zip tie on his right ankle to where he could pinch the fastener of the tie between the chair and his leg—next step apply pressure to weaken it, next step snap—when the noise behind him shifted. Something clattering, rolling, and it took Tim’s fuzzy vision a few seconds to see it was a workbench being wheeled to the edge of the platform. Behind the bench, locking its wheels in place, was—right.

Checkered Shirt guy. Of all people.

They’d looked for him, of course, after that whole thing a year and a half ago. The two hired muscle (and they were, in fact, brothers) couldn’t give them much beyond a description that corroborated Tim’s and a contact of a contact that was a dead end. Bruce investigated every remotely similar ransom situation the few years previous and also in the time since, but couldn’t find a connection. The ransom money paid out by the Creedys and the Harrows and the Mandevilles had disappeared from the account almost instantly, funneled into the f*cking blockchain (Barbara’s phrasing) where the trail went cold. Their working theory was that the guy escaped but got spooked by reports of Superman showing up and was out cutting his losses on an island somewhere.

Well. There went that theory.

Tim had watched Checkered Shirt step out from behind the bench, straightening. Checkered Shirt’s posture was alert but relaxed, and he was wearing a black winter jacket with what looked like a gray shirt underneath, but Tim decided to stick with the original name for him anyway. When Checkered Shirt met Tim’s gaze he didn’t seem surprised that Tim was awake, just gave him a short nod like they were coworkers bumping into each other in the break room. No gloating, no Look who’s finally decided to join us, no pulling out his phone and demanding he call his parents.

Tamping down a trickle of unease, Tim said: “If you’re looking for another ransom, I think you’ll have better luck this time around.”

This time around the person to call was Bruce. And Bruce would pick up.

“Is that so,” was all Checkered Shirt said, turning back to the bench. Tim caught a flash of something hooked to his belt, thin and metallic, and then as he moved Tim could see the bench as well. There were only three things on the surface: Tim’s phone, a propped-up iPad open to a static image of—Tim blinked hard—his parents’ penthouse foyer, and a thin, foot-long white rod.

Checkered Shirt did not pick up the phone. Instead he picked up the rod, fiddling with the base—the handle, it looked like—until it seemed to flick on. Soft blue light danced unsettlingly up the shaft, accompanied by a faint crackle.

Tim’s unease grew. He had time to think okay, maybe not a standard ransom situation, and then the end of the rod jammed into his ribs.

He lost time. It wasn’t quite electricity, but something rippled—ripped—through him, lighting his nerves on fire in wave after wave. His lungs seized up with it, spasming, and by the time the rod dropped away he was dizzy and gasping and could only think, what the f*ck.

This was when Checkered Shirt should have started in on the questions. Said something like, That was just a taste. Don’t worry, if you cooperate you’ll walk away just fine. If not…well, you know what to expect. Tim would know what to do with that. Instead, Checkered Shirt frowned, said, “Hmm,” and jammed the rod against Tim’s shoulder.

Now Tim fights to get his breathing back under control. His jaw aches and his ears are ringing at a pitch that would be painful if he wasn’t, well, already in a lot of pain, so he misses whatever Checkered Shirt murmurs to himself next. He does not miss the way Checkered Shirt’s gaze sweeps over him again, expression disturbingly analytical. Tim wastes a few seconds trying to figure out what the rod even is—something that takes effect without singeing the thin material of his shirt, something that mimics electricity but worse, something affecting the muscles or the nervous system or possibly inducing a psychosomatic pain reaction?—before deciding that’s not the most pressing issue at the moment. The most pressing issue is figuring out why Checkered Shirt is using it in the first place.

“What,” Tim says, chokes on it for a moment when his lungs give a belated spasm, and then pulls himself together. He can still get this back on script. Figure out the delay in calling Bruce. Work on Plan B as he goes. The zip tie on his right side is a few minutes from the breaking point, if he can keep that rod at bay long enough. “What do you want?”

Checkered Shirt doesn’t stop studying him. Just says, simply: “I want you to scream.”

That’s—not exactly on script. “Like—in general? Is that it?” He hears the bafflement in his own voice too late. Too close to Robin mocking a mob brawler, to the next words being You could’ve tried asking politely first! He reels it back in, back to Tim Drake. “If—if this is about a ransom, I promise all this is overkill. You can just make the call.”

“I’ll also accept sobbing, or begging,” Checkered Shirt says, as if Tim hadn’t spoken at all. His gaze settles on Tim’s stomach. “It just has to be real. If you want extra credit you can scream for Superboy specifically, but I’m not picky.”

“Scream for—?” Tim starts, dread already spiking, and then the rod lands just under his sternum.

Checkered Shirt almost gets his wish. Tim clenches his teeth around a startled, breathless whine, jerking against the chair, pain radiating up his chest, through his stomach, some sort of flameless burn spreading inside him until—

A sigh, and Checkered Shirt lowers the rod again. “I really don’t want to have to turn it up,” he says, unclear if he’s talking to Tim or just talking to himself again. “We never calibrated for human physiology. But you didn’t leave me much time to prepare, so you’ll understand if I err on the side of more effective.”

Tim can hear every word, but they aren’t stringing together in a way that means anything yet. He’s still clinging to what Checkered Shirt said before the last shock—jolt—whatever it was. For Superboy specifically. Superboy. The package that wasn’t addressed to Tim. The iPad currently displaying a camera feed of the Drake foyer.

“Oh,” Tim says. His voice is distant in his own ears. “This isn’t a ransom. This is a trap.”

Checkered Shirt hums, peering down at something on the rod’s handle. “Very good. You were quicker on the uptake than the others, I remember that. If you survive this you might make a valuable research assistant.”

“I don’t think I’m the one who has to worry here,” Tim says frankly, mind scrambling to latch on to any information Checkered Shirt will let slip. He has to switch tactics. This isn’t moving along a ransom situation, it’s figure out the trap and thwart it. “You’re the one targeting Superboy—you know he has friends, right? He has Superman. Why risk it? Are you that mad that Superboy crashed your party last time?”

“Quick on the uptake, but still underestimating me,” Checkered Shirt says. He adjusts a small dial on the rod and checks his watch. His posture is relaxed—anticipatory but not wary. “Superboy’s associates won’t be an issue, especially now that you’re here. You weren’t originally part of the equation, but I have alerts for Superboy, of course. I keep track of my projects. So I saw pictures of his paparazzi stunt this weekend, and imagine my surprise when I recognized the other boy in the pictures.”

Tim shifts his ankle again, pinching the zip tie as hard as he can against his right ankle bone, ignoring the bright, fierce pinpoint of pain. “We were in the news twenty-four hours ago. I’m supposed to believe you were just, what, sitting around ready to kidnap some random person at a moment’s notice?”

Checkered Shirt gives him a small, bland smile, rotating the rod in his hand. Tim can’t help but track the movement, and he knows Checkered Shirt notices. “But you aren’t random, are you, Timothy? It was my doing, the two of you together. You weren’t supposed to survive that kidnapping, but he rescued you. I had a professor, once, who said: ‘Every mistake is an opportunity in disguise.’ Hated him, but he was right. Because you lived, and somehow charmed—or bought, I assume—your way into Superboy’s affections, you did in fact present an opportunity. A way to get to Superboy directly. It’s far easier to kidnap a teenager than invent a supervillain or targeted natural disaster in order to get Superboy’s attention. And I had already done my research, back when I selected you for the first ransom. I only had fourteen months to catch up on, and you’re not terribly interesting. The most exciting thing you did was get yourself taken in by your local billionaire. Even then, you returned to your parents’ apartment every once in a while, always alone.” He gives Tim a look that could have been called pitying, if it weren’t so empty. “I didn’t expect this phase to move so quickly, I’ll be honest; I only redirected your security system this morning. Still, it would have been so simple to lure you back there if you hadn’t gone yourself. You only hastened the timeline.”

A chill shudders down Tim’s spine, and not from the cold. This sounds like full-on obsessive behavior, like a certain category of rogues who usually set their sights on Batman and Nightwing because they think they own them—or they think they should. “Who are you, really?” Tim says. He twists his leg harder. Almost there. “What do you want with Superboy?”

“You’ll see,” Checkered Shirt says. “When you do your part.”

Tim sets his jaw. Bruce may not have trained him in withstanding torture, but Tim has learned from Lady Shiva. He’s personally experienced four variations of fear toxin. He’s held his own against Killer Croc and Bane, or at least come crawling out more alive than not. He’d stopped flinching when Jason Todd entered a room long before he stopped feeling the need to. He knows control. His own limits. He can hold out until Checkered Shirt gets frustrated, or has to eat, or pee, and then Tim can finish breaking the zip ties and find a way to ping Oracle and then the clock on this whole thing will run down fast.

And more than that, stronger than any training or experience, is the bone-deep fury that someone thinks they can hurt Kon. Can use Tim to hurt Kon. It doesn’t matter what happened earlier tonight. Whether Kon thinks Tim Drake is worth his time anymore or not. Tim—Robin—will not lead him into a trap.

He lifts his chin, covering the movement of his leg as he braces for the final push. Time for a rich kid’s false bravado as a shield for real action. It helps that the rage behind his glare is very real. “You won’t get anything from me. I’m not engaging in this ridiculous game.”

“I already have everything I need from you.” With his other hand Checkered Shirt holds up Tim’s phone, unlocked to his civilian settings. “And you’ll play along soon enough.”

Tim bares his teeth. At his ankle he feels a silent snap, and he has to stop himself from turning his snarl into a grin as he immediately starts working the other zip tie. “I wouldn’t count on it. I’m from Gotham, remember? Our school bus drivers are more intimidating than—”

This time the rod lands under his chin, biting into the soft skin, and his vision whites out.

When Tim comes down again his mouth is full of blood—bitten cheek—and his whole head throbs, an almost fizzy numbness flooding through his jaw in the sudden absence of pain. He struggles through another wheezing breath, wincing at the familiar sensation of torn muscles around his ribcage.

“Ah,” Checkered Shirt is saying. “There does seem to be a localized paralytic effect. That last placement may have been counterintuitive; my mistake. But as we discussed, that’s the beauty of mistakes in a setting like this. The opportunity to learn from them.”

Tim tips his head. Clumsily spits a mouthful of blood on the metal floor—evidence, he thinks, hazy, if he moves me—and finds his tongue. “Funny how you still haven’t gotten what you want,” he half-slurs, “considering how many opportunities you keep having.”

Something spasms across Checkered Shirt’s face, dark and dangerous before it settles back into that arrogant neutrality. “Perhaps,” he says, lowering the rod, “I have been neglecting the basics.” He shifts closer, gaze sweeping contemplatively over Tim again, lingering on his arms. Knees. Shins. Extremities, Tim realizes. Places especially easy to strike, tied up like this.

Checkered Shirt looks lower, down to Tim’s ankles, and Tim opens his mouth. Distract him. “Are you sure we can’t just—”

It’s no use. Tim clocks the exact moment Checkered Shirt notices the broken zip tie—his eyes flick back up to Tim’s face, narrowing. Tim has time to think at least my mask is hidden in my other sock, and then he kicks. It’s not the nut shot he would’ve liked, but his range is limited, so he lands a pretty solid blow to the knee. A twofold victory: Checkered Shirt stumbles back and collides with the edge of the rolling table in a very satisfying way, and Tim has a chance to twist the second zip tie into place and—

A blow to his head. He sees it coming a split-second before it lands, enough to turn so it’s a glancing strike rather than a full-force hit, but Checkered Shirt’s fist is still wrapped around the rod so something sharp slices across Tim’s hairline. It’s followed immediately by a blooming pain, a slick rush of heat down the side of his face—f*ck head wounds—and between frantically blinking the blood out of his right eye he misses Checkered Shirt’s next movement, which is to grab the back of Tim’s chair and pull.

Tim goes down hard. For all of Dick’s lessons on how to fall, there’s not much he can do in this position; his right arm hits first and takes the full weight of his body, the ridges of the chair digging into his inner arm, his hip. For a dizzying second he thinks his shoulder might have dislocated on impact, but he can still clench his hand behind him when he tries, so—so probably not, and even if he did, it’s okay. He can work with this. If he can get his arms over the back of the chair from here, he’ll have enough range of motion to—

A fresh flare of pain. Tim blinks again and makes out the outline of Checkered Shirt standing over him, one foot grinding down just above Tim’s loose ankle, trapping his whole lower leg flat against the floor. Tim tries to tug free, kick again, but there’s no leverage, not like this. Checkered Shirt rocks forward, intensifying the pain. “That’s right,” Checkered Shirt says through his teeth. “You’re a little escape artist. I thought upgrading to handcuffs would suffice, but perhaps I didn’t do enough to discourage you before. That’s another thing my inane professor used to say: ‘Second time’s the charm.’”

He lifts his other foot. Tim has just enough time to understand what’s coming, enough time to choke out “Don’t—” before Checkered Shirt’s boot slams down on his shin.

Tim sees it happen before he feels it. It’s the kind of pain that hangs just out of reach for a moment before crashing in sharp and fast, his vision tunneling in its wake. There’s something about the suddenness of it, the simplicity, the way the pain radiates with his heartbeat, the way his lower leg is bent where it shouldn’t bend and still pinned under someone else’s shoe. The way he knows, immediately, that it will no longer hold his weight.

It takes him a moment to realize the distant, strangled cry came from him.

“Good,” Checkered Shirt says. “But I think we can do better than that.”

The world spins and Tim is upright again, listing sideways in his chair and barely breathing. Checkered Shirt crouches in front of him and the rod is back, the blunt end of it digging into the dead center of the break, and Tim just—blacks out.

When he comes back to himself his throat is raw, itchy like he’s been coughing, and the satisfied look on Checkered Shirt’s face fills in the rest.

And then he activates the rod again.

And again.

Checkered Shirt was right; with the rod busy lighting up the nerves in Tim’s broken leg, his lungs are free to scream.

Finally. Finally it stops for more than a few seconds, and Tim can breathe but he can’t catch his breath. His eyes burn, cheeks wet with tears, hairline prickling with sweat. In front of him Checkered Shirt’s blurry form is straightening, pulling Tim’s phone from his pocket. The screen clicks on, a bright slash of light doubling in Tim’s vision.

“I think that’s enough of a warm-up,” Checkered Shirt says, as if from a great distance away. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

◇

So. The first thing is, Kon is in love with Robin.

The second thing is, Kon is like. Really, really in love with Robin.

The third thing is, Kon is a giant, monumental, super-powered idiot who somehow missed the memo on that until today.

Which—he loves Rob. Of course he does. And he loves Cassie and Bart and his whole team, honestly, in this all-encompassing way that he isn’t sure is normal or not by human friendship standards, but he doesn’t really care. And he already knew Robin was brilliant and cute and capable and Kon felt something about that, obviously, but he just hadn’t realized those feelings for Robin also included I suddenly need to make out with you on a roof like right now, and also I’d do anything, literally anything, to get you to smile at me like that again and holy sh*t I think I—

What he’d rationalized, in the few hours he’s had to ponder (aka panic), is that he just hadn’t known to look for it. He’d realized he had a crush on Cassie pretty quick because other heroes and the media saw them together and went ooooh, Wonder Girl and Superboy, which kind of clued him in on the whole thing. That was before they really knew each other that well, and by the time they broke up his crush had settled into that deeper friendship-love. He’s never done it in the reverse—loving someone first, then being in love with them. But now that he’s clued in, it’s so obvious. The way Robin is the first person on his mind when he wants to talk to someone. His silly little daydream about the workshop. Sitting in the dark for hours listening to Robin sleep on his shoulder and some small part of him wishing they could just stay there all night. Why his brain lights up when their knees brush under the table, when Robin pins him on the sparring mats, when Robin trusts Kon to catch him mid-battle. Why the idea of Robin knowing about Tim—someone definitely in crush territory—made Kon inexplicably nervous. Because he really does have a crush on Tim, weird and kind and incredibly cute Tim, but Robin is—Robin. Kon’s best friend. His team leader. His favorite person, whether Kon knows his real name or not. And, apparently, someone Kon has been fully head over heels about for like. A long time now.

And that was that, really. Because even if Rob doesn’t like him back, Kon can’t do…whatever he was on the precipice of doing with Tim now that he knows he’s in love-in love with someone.

Maybe if he got over Robin long enough to date Tim, he’d fall in love with Tim too. Kon thinks that’s possible.

But he isn’t naive enough to think he will ever just get over Robin.

So after he left Robin on a Gotham rooftop, Kon flew away to have a small crisis in the middle of a cloud, and then returned to Gotham to have one of the most uncomfortable conversations of his life to date. And he knows he did the right thing, he just wishes he’d figured it out sooner. Before he knew what it felt like to kiss Tim in the night sky over Paris. Before he knew how Tim’s face looked in the split second between being hurt and trying to hide it.

Superboy might have a bit of ego as part of his charm, but Kon isn’t actually egotistical enough to think he broke Tim’s heart or anything. Tim seemed to like him, but they hadn’t had time to be much of anything to each other yet. Which doesn’t mean Tim didn’t care or that it doesn’t suck, but Tim will be okay. Kon believes that.

He’ll miss him, though, if Tim doesn’t want to be friends again. He’ll miss playing WordCrash and hanging out with one of the few people to ever see Kon as a person first and a superhero second.

Now Kon stares at his black phone screen, a blank rectangle against the sea of stars that is the Kansas sky tonight. His leg jitters against the sloped silo roof. He’s been up here for a few hours—back home but not all the way, too keyed up to even think about going to sleep but too distracted to do anything productive. He’d messaged Robin a little while ago. Not even to tell him about any of this, necessarily, he just—he really wants to talk to Robin. About anything, about nothing. He thinks he might vibrate out of his skin if he doesn’t, and seriously, how in the world did he not realize before now?

His text hadn’t gone through right away. It’s not out of the ordinary for Rob to lose service, especially in Gotham, but something has Kon’s teeth on edge tonight. Nerves, probably. Does Robin already know? Did he figure it out before Kon did? Kon feels like surely his love must have been written across his whole face back on that roof. But maybe—

His phone buzzes, lights up. Kon sits up so fast the world blurs around him, but—it’s not Robin.

[Sunday, 1:16am ET]
hood 🔫
I don’t want to know a single detail but can you tell Tim to at least text someone
You guys apparently bailed on hot chocolate, which is both rude and baffling
And it would be in everyone’s best interest to get that sorted before B gets back

Super Annoying
i’m not with tim. sorry

hood 🔫
Uh huh
You don’t have to cover for him and his terrible plans at this point, we all know the deal
Remind mr. protocol that “check in if you cross state lines” applies to EVERYONE

Super Annoying
look, you should probably talk about this with tim instead

hood 🔫
Wait.
You’re serious?

[Incoming call from hood 🔫]

“Listen,” Hood says as soon as Kon answers the call. There are faint traffic noises in the background, quickly muted after the sound of a door latching. “He knows how it looks when he shields his devices. Everyone else is trying to ‘have boundaries’ here, but I say boundaries are a privilege you lose if you’re rude to Alfred. You’re really not with him?”

“I told you, I’m not,” Kon says, pushing down the squirming discomfort in his gut that everyone seems to expect Tim to be with him. Which is a fair expectation, considering their very public date. And the fact that Tim was apparently expecting Kon to come in for hot chocolate, and instead Kon…well. Kon should probably let Tim be the one to explain all that when he’s ready. Kon has screwed things up for him enough. “Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you right now.”

“Should’ve known you’d be even more insufferable about that now,” Hood mutters. “Let’s try to move on for one iota of a second, okay? Because I thought—I mean, they assumed he was just sneaking off with you. So did you not—?”

Kon’s phone buzzes with a new message. He pulls back to check the screen, heart leaping again—but it’s not Robin this time either. It’s…huh. He puts the phone back to his ear. “Well, Tim just texted me, so seems like his phone is working just fine. Sorry, I…yeah. You should talk to him instead.”

“For f*ck’s sake,” Hood says, and the line disconnects.

Kon settles his phone on his knee and stares at his lockscreen for another moment before reopening his texts.

[Sunday, 1:18am ET]
Tim Drake
917 Broderick Ave #29
;)

Which…okay. Kon remembers the address—he’s been there, it’s Tim’s I’m-living-with-my-uncle-who-doesn’t-exist penthouse in Gotham—but he can’t figure out why Tim sent it to him. With a winky face. And nothing else. That is, it obviously looks like Tim is inviting him back over, this time to his other home, but Kon has near-perfect recall; he can picture the exact expression Tim had four hours ago when Kon left, and it was pretty far from a wink.

is everything ok? Kon types, then deletes, because that feels like a question he shouldn’t be allowed to ask right now. He gets halfway through are you sure you want me to come over again before deleting that too. Maybe this is Tim trying to say he does want to be friends. Or that he really doesn’t, but he decided he wants a chance to chew Kon out about it first. Maybe Tim feels embarrassed—maybe Kon made him feel embarrassed—about the whole thing and wants to smooth things over, and will only be more humiliated if Kon ignores him. Maybe Kon is overthinking this and Tim makes out with superheroes all the time and Tim’s horrified reaction was at how bad Kon’s speech was and not at losing—not that he lost anything, but—okay, Kon really is overthinking this.

Well, only one way to find out and not potentially make things worse. And if Tim does just want to yell at him, Kon figures he probably owes him that.

Kon just really hopes Robin texts back soon before Kon does something drastic, like ask Clark for advice.

◇

He enters through the roof, just like over the summer, except he doesn’t have a charcuterie board tucked under his arm this time. The penthouse landing is empty when Kon slips through the stairwell door, only for the elevator to ding a split second later.

There is, Kon has learned, varying amounts of lead in way too many Gotham structures, because the elevator shaft is pretty much opaque to him. He can tell it’s only one person inside—Tim, he thinks, which is a fair assumption considering this is a private landing, and then the doors slide all the way open and a stranger steps out. The guy is young, possibly still a teenager, wearing a weathered jacket and heavy boots, speaking into a phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear as he tugs off his gloves. He spots Kon immediately and raises an eyebrow, still talking. “Hang on, dickface. Superboy’s here. Yeah, I told you I just—no, I’m not going to hand him the phone—I’ll call you back.”

He hangs up and looks at Kon expectantly. Kon sweeps his eyes over the guy again—no camera, so probably not paparazzi. There is a gun carefully hidden under his jacket, and two different knives stashed in his boots. Kon tenses. “Excuse me,” he says, shifting so he’s between the guy and Tim’s door. “What are you doing here?”

The guy huffs. “I was in the area already and figured I’d check. Let me guess, you just happened to be ‘in the area’ too?”

“I was invited,” Kon says, feeling oddly defensive. “Who exactly—?”

“Christ,” the guy says. “If everyone is tearing their hair out just because he was scheming up some gross surprise for you, I’ll end him. I’ll tell Alfred about his illicit Red Bull stash in my fridge.”

Alfred. The name pings in Kon’s mind, most recently from a conversation he had a minute ago. Alfred knows Tim. This guy knows Alfred. This guy also has a gun and an impatient expression and—holy sh*t, a streak of white in his bangs. “Oh,” Kon says, blank in his surprise. “You’re—Red Hood.”

Red Hood rolls his eyes. “Uh huh. Maybe try not to shout it while I’m in civvies, Super Genius.”

“Right,” Kon says, trying to weather his shock that someone Bat-adjacent is so casual about letting Kon see him without a mask, in what looks like semi-casual clothes. Hood clearly isn’t trying very hard to hide it. (And he’s so young. Why did Kon not know he was so young? Does Tim know who he is under the mask? Obviously, since Hood is here dressed like this. Did—Kon feels a cold rush of confusion—did Tim maybe mean to send that text to Hood instead?) “That’s—okay. So you’re also here to see Tim.”

“I told you.” Hood moves toward the door. Kon lets him go after a moment’s hesitation. Yeah, they’ve already established Hood isn’t a threat to Tim, but this whole thing feels off. “I’ll just make sure he’s in one piece, wring his neck a little—that’s a joke, by the way—and get the hell out of…”

The penthouse door swings open at his touch.

Hood’s shoulders tense instantly, one hand drifting to hover over the hidden holster. “Superboy. Is there anyone else here?” he asks without turning from the doorway.

Kon does a quick scan. He doesn’t hear any other heartbeats. “Just us.” He pauses. “Just us. Tim’s not here, either.”

Hood grunts and steps inside, scanning the dark foyer, posture still guarded like he’s expecting something to burst out at them. From what Kon knows of Gotham, this is probably a reasonable concern. Kon follows—if there is some sort of danger, he should probably throw himself in front of the regular human, even if that regular human is a maskless Red Hood—but nothing happens; the foyer remains empty and still. It’s really empty, more so than the last time Kon was here. No more framed paintings on the wall, no console table with mail on it, no patterned rug stretching down the hall. The lack of furniture doesn’t seem to faze Hood, but he still frowns deeply, finally coming to a stop and turning to face Kon in the middle of the floor. “You said he invited you here?”

“…Sort of,” Kon says.

“Are you being unhelpful on purpose, or were you just programmed that way?”

Kon feels his lip curl. “I just don’t know if it’s any of your business.”

Hood looks heavenward. “Okay. I thought we already had this conversation, but okay. I’ll say it again: I am not going to hurt Tim.”

“If I thought you were, you would not have made it past the landing,” Kon tells him.

“Right. Great. So now that we’re on the same page, can we just—you can see why this might look a bit—concerning, right? We thought he was with you. He doesn’t check in. We can’t find him. His phone is offline somehow. Then it turns out he’s not, in fact, with you. So if you could maybe find it in you. To be specific. That would be helpful. So we can all move on with our night.” Hood drops his gaze back to Kon. “Please.”

Hood’s actually worried, Kon realizes. One time, a few months ago, Robin had patched into the Bat comms while running system tests from the Tower. Kon was catching up on his own reports in the computer room—because that’s where Rob was—and could hear the tail end of an argument between Red Hood and Nightwing through the speaker. Nightwing sounded exasperated, saying something about not needing to check for a concussion, and Hood was clearly angry, saying, If you’re too brain-dead to handle yourself then I’ll come deal with you personally, see if it’s still ‘no biggie’ after that, you stupid f*cking—

Kon wasn’t sure what his face did in response, but Robin had caught Kon’s expression over his shoulder and waved a hand, unbothered. That means he’s concerned, Robin said. He basically expresses emotion like a tiny purse dog. You know, snarly when anxious.

I heard that! Hood’s voice had snapped. Kon saw Robin smirk, small and sharp, in the monitor reflection before he switched back to Oracle’s channel.

So Kon’s willing to bet this snappishness, followed by this stilted, sharp-edged sincerity from Hood, means that Hood thinks there’s reason to be anxious. That the sense of unease now taking root in Kon’s chest might be founded in something other than guilt. Kon takes a deep breath and opens his last text from Tim, holding it out for Hood to see.

Hood leans in, relief flickering across his face only to be chased by disgust. “He sent a winky face?”

Kon pulls the phone back, face hot. “It could’ve been a typo.”

“Oh my god. He booty called you.”

“I don’t think—”

Hood scrunches his nose, still talking. “No, this doesn’t track. The guy’s cringe, but he’s got follow-through. He wouldn’t send you here just to stand you up.”

“Maybe he’s still on his way,” Kon says, willing his cheeks to cool down. “Maybe he forgot about, you know, the super speed.”

“Ha ha,” Hood says, deadpan, as if Kon was making a joke. “So he’s sending us in circles on purpose, or…” Hood scrubs a hand through his hair. “Or. Okay. He’s not here. He’s not at home. He’s obviously not with you. Did he mention anything about sneaking off to San Francisco?”

“Why would Tim go to San Francisco?” Kon says slowly.

“What do you mean, why….” Hood trails off, staring at Kon for a beat too long. “Did Tim not have a…conversation with you, before you split tonight?”

Kon loses his battle, flushing again. “We didn’t, um. We didn’t really talk that much.”

“Okay, I said I didn’t want to know details—”

“Not like that,” Kon says hastily. “I mean. We talked, but only about—the thing is—” There’s no good way to avoid explaining this now. Kon winces. “I want to be his friend, just. Not like, dating. At this point.” Because I’m in love with Robin, he doesn’t add, because it doesn't seem like something to confess to Red Hood before he’s had a chance to talk to Robin himself. “And then I left. So Tim might be mad at me right now. That’s probably why he asked me to come here. Not, um, whatever you’re thinking.”

Hood keeps staring. “Oh, sh*t,” he says. “He didn’t tell you. Because you f*cking broke up with him first.”

“Tell me what?”

Hood doesn’t seem to register the question, turning in a half circle to survey the foyer again. “Okay, this might…yeah, maybe he bolted. Licking his wounds somewhere. Which, I know I don’t have any moral high ground here, but Jesus Christ, if you were stringing him along this whole time just to—”

“I wasn’t,” Kon breaks in. “I wasn’t trying to. I didn’t realize until today that—I didn’t mean to.”

“Great, I’m sure that’ll make him feel better. Actually, do not tell him that, he’ll find thirty different ways to internalize it incorrectly and—hold on. No. Wait.”

“I don’t think we’re going to talk about it again,” Kon says. “Not unless he wants to—”

“No, shut up.” Hood strides across the room, peering down at something by the door. Kon turns too, and sees it—in this empty foyer, there’s a little, incongruous package sitting just to the left of the threshold. They had to have passed right by it when they walked in. Hood prods the package with one—gloved again—hand as Kon does his own scan; there’s something slim and metallic inside, but no trip wires or explosives or unidentified liquids or powders or gas canisters that he can see. “You said you just broke up with him? Just now?”

Kon winces. “I wouldn’t technically call it a breakup.”

“Answer the f*cking question, Superboy,” Hood says, and there’s a new edge to it.

“A few hours ago,” Kon says shortly. “Around nine.”

“Where?”

“By his house. Mr. Wayne’s house.”

“Well,” Hood says. “Care to explain why there’s a package addressed to Superboy here?”

Kon is next to Hood in an instant, crouching by the package. It is, in face, addressed to him—to Superboy, neatly typed above 917 Broderick Ave. There’s no return address.

“Booby-trapped?” Hood guesses.

Kon shakes his head. “I don’t see anything suspicious inside.” Not even a pocket of nothingness indicating a lead compartment, and he’s close enough to sense any unshielded kryptonite. “What are the chances Tim left this for me?”

“I don’t know,” Hood says. “How f*cking bad was your breakup speech?”

“It wasn’t a—never mind. It was normal. Normal bad.”

“Then sure, maybe he left you a mopey Enya mixtape. Or…”

Or it’s not from Tim. Kon sets his jaw. “One way to find out. Move back.”

Hood meets his eyes for a brief moment, then does as Kon says, crossing to the kitchen entryway. Kon rips off the packing tape and opens the box.

As soon as he does, a phone starts ringing inside.

“Well,” Hood says, “that’s never a good sign. There’s gotta be—” He makes a little double clicking sound with his tongue, just like one of Robin’s signals for hidden camera, and shifts back, scanning the walls.

Kon stares at the phone. It’s nestled in a bunch of packing peanuts, an external battery pack strapped to it but nothing else. The ringtone is jaunty and loud in the empty hall even without Kon’s enhanced hearing. Unknown caller, says the screen.

It still could be Tim, he reasons. Tim is rich enough and weird enough to orchestrate some sort of…prank? Last word? Petty revenge caught on film? It would track with the winky face; it would not track with the serious way Tim promised to protect Kon from the media, or the distant, resigned look on his face when he realized what Kon wanted to say tonight. So even before Kon slides the bar to answer the call, he knows it won’t be Tim on the other end. “Hello?”

“Hello, Superboy,” an unfamiliar voice says. Male, if Kon had to guess, a bit reedy, mid-Atlantic accent and nothing else distinctive about it. There’s another voice in the background, muffled, inarticulate. “Good of you to finally answer.”

“Who is this?” Kon says cautiously. He stands, briefly meeting Hood’s eyes and shaking his head.

“Oh, we don’t need to do that part. Let’s skip right to the point,” the guy says. “I took something of yours. If you’d like to see it again, you will pay very careful attention to what happens next.”

Kon’s sense of unease blooms into full-blown goosebumps. “Something of mine,” he repeats. Across the room Hood murmurs “Got you,” peering up at something above the front door. Kon follows his gaze—it is indeed a camera, tiny and round and half-hidden by the doorframe. Hood makes a quick sign with one hand behind his back—stall—and pulls out his phone with the other. “There are easier ways of contacting me, you know. I have an official P.O. box for fanmail, actually, if you want the address—”

“Tell your friend there to drop his phone,” the man says. “You will drop all communication devices as well.”

“Wouldn’t that be counterproductive? Seeing as I’m talking to you on a communication device.” Kon watches Hood type something one-handed and tries to cast his hearing through the building—the block—to see if this man is somewhere nearby, but it’s hard to split his attention when he’s also listening to the phone itself. He switches to breaking down the sounds coming through the phone speaker, but can only discern the man’s breathing, the second, oddly muffled voice, and a quiet whir that sets his teeth on edge. “Why don’t you explain exactly what you have of mine first?”

“If you like,” the man says all too easily. “I won’t lie and say he’s in perfect condition, but I—”

He breaks off with an odd, startled hiss, and then someone else cuts in.

“Superboy,” the new voice gasps, rough and urgent. This one Kon does recognize, because Kon is standing in the Drake family’s empty apartment and as soon as Checkered Shirt said he, Kon knew. It’s Tim. That was the other sound in the background, Kon realizes with a swoop of nausea. Tim trying to talk—the man must have had his hand over Tim’s mouth. “I’m fine. Whatever you do, don’t listen to—”

Tim cuts off with a sharp cry of pain. “Tim,” Kon says, clenching the phone hard enough that it creaks against his ear. Across the floor Hood freezes. “Stop,” Kon hears himself say. “Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, stop!”

“First, tell your friend to drop his phone,” the man says. There’s more of an edge to his voice now, a hint of anger peeking through. “Tell him to stand in the middle of the room, right where I can see him. You as well, Superboy. Or…”

Tim’s cry becomes a choked scream. It’s the kind of scream that raises the hair on Kon’s neck, that hurts just to listen to—the kind of sound Kon has never heard from Tim, not even when he was poisoned with fear gas. Kon blurs across the floor, snatching Hood’s phone and dragging him to the center of the foyer. Hood’s phone clatters into the corner when Kon drops it, Kon’s own phone and spare Titans earpiece joining it an instant later.

“Hey—” Hood starts, but stops the moment he catches sight of Kon’s face. He stills under Kon’s hand.

“I did it,” Kon says into the phone. “I did it, okay?”

Another agonizing moment, and the scream stops. He can hear Tim breathing raggedly, like he can’t get enough air, and Kon doesn’t think he’s ever felt like this—so frozen and useless, all his superpowers amounting to nothing but directionless adrenaline and a fist of fear clenched in his chest. In front of him Hood’s expression has gone dark, his gaze sharp on the phone in Kon’s hand.

“So you did,” the voice says. “Keep him there. Do not contact anyone else. Do not activate any signals. Do not call for Superman. Are you following?”

“Yes,” Kon says through his teeth. “I’m following. You want my attention, okay, you got it. Why don’t you tell me where the hell you are so I can pay you a visit?”

“We’re getting to that,” the guy says, back to that infuriatingly calm tone. “Do you know what you just heard, Superboy? Surely you remember. There wasn’t an official name for the prototype, but someone called it ‘compliance training’ and the nickname stuck—this one little tool, meant to reel you in if you stepped out of line. It’s built for Kryptonian nerves; we never tested its full capability on pure humans, but it seems I might have the opportunity now. It all depends on what you do next.”

And—Kon does remember. He remembers in snippets, from behind glass: a thin rod and clinical discussions of current and pain receptors and incapacitation procedures. Compliance training. They never used it on him—they were still experimenting, maybe, or they didn’t think they’d need to yet, or he just got out before they could—but he remembers the sound. The soft crackle under that ever-present whine.

Kon’s gaze drops back to the package. 917 Broderick Ave, it says, but this time Kon sees the unit number is on its own line. And it’s incorrect.

#13.

Distantly, very distantly, Kon feels the fury in his chest solidify into ice-cold fear.

“What do you want me to do?” he says numbly.

“No,” Tim chokes out. “Superboy, don’t you dare, it’s a trap—”

“I’ll let you find him,” the guy says, right over Tim, “if you come to us the moment I do. Alone. We’ve only worked up to quarter capacity so far tonight.” A jolt, a cry. Kon lurches, directionless. “If you take more than ten seconds I’ll double the voltage. If you bring anyone with you, I’ll see what maximum capacity does after all.”

“Listen to me,” Hood is saying at the same time, facing Kon. Away from the camera. “Listen, Superboy, he’s—we can—just work with me on this.” He slips something in his ear, so quick Kon—still reeling—almost misses it, angling further away from the door and tapping out a quick pattern against the shell of his ear. Morse code for 4-0-4, another signal Kon recognizes from Robin. Someone’s missing. With his other hand Hood snaps his fingers to get Kon’s attention, mouthing: Keep them on the line—

But Kon can only stare, and listen to what the voice says will happen to Tim if Kon doesn’t follow directions, because this is Kon’s fault. How else would someone know to target Tim Drake to get to him? It’s Kon’s fault for getting caught making out in the sky in full uniform, for forgetting that spontaneous dates and ill-advised crushes are things for normal teenagers, not for Superboy. Forgetting that just because Tim treated Kon like a person doesn’t mean everyone sees him as one.

It’s a trap, Tim said. Of course it is. But what choice does Kon have?

The voice continues, steady over the phone speakers. Kon can still hear the crackle behind it. Another bitten-off gasp of pain. “Are you ready, Superboy? Are we in agreement?”

“Yes,” Kon whispers.

“Oh, f*ck,” Hood says. He jerks forward, arm raised like he could do anything to stop Kon. “Kid, just wait—”

“I’ll narrow it down for you,” the guy says. “We’re within a hundred miles of your location. Now: listen.”

The high-pitched whine on the other end of the line goes abruptly silent, and then Tim screams. A split second later the phone hisses and smokes, screen going black in Kon’s hand, and Hood is saying something else, quick and urgent, but Kon doesn’t absorb a word. He holds Hood at arm’s length and throws out his hearing—nine seconds left. Tim is hurting somewhere, and Kon has to figure out where, he has to be good enough—eight. Seven. There are people screaming in Gotham, couples arguing in the dead of night and a drag race happening on one of the bridges and someone learning the worst news of their life at the downtown hospital right now and none of them are Tim. He goes wider, stretching past the urban tangle around them. Six. Please, he thinks. Please. Find a friend. Find a—five—

There—

“Superboy,” Hood shouts as the fried phone clatters to the ground. Kon feels Hood try and fail to grab his jacket again but Kon’s already moving, as fast as he can, breaking through the building wall and into the night sky and across the river half a second later—four—past Metropolis—three—past a weathered For Sale sign outside a familiar farm in Delaware—two—

Kon bursts into the farm’s equipment shed just as his internal countdown hits zero. He hits the floor right in the center, denting some sort of metal platform. Usually he would have paused outside, given himself a second or two to scan and assess, but he didn’t have a second, and Tim was still screaming.

He has enough time to see them: a man Kon doesn’t recognize lowering a glowing rod, and Tim bound to a chair in front of him, curled over and shaking. And then the man lifts something in his other hand, a little silver remote, and hits a button.

Kon starts forward, but before he can move there’s a yank in his gut, like the floor has been abruptly swept out from under him, except Kon doesn’t usually subscribe to gravity. But the floor isn’t there and neither are his feet, his arms, his torso, the floor or the man or Tim—it feels like he’s been suddenly flung in a million different directions, gone from Kon-shaped to a formless nebula, all zillion trillion pieces of him hurtling through space until—

He re-forms. At first his surroundings are a streak of color and sound before snapping into existence, the man and the chair and Tim blurring into place in front of him as Kon’s feet hit metal again. Tim isn’t screaming anymore, so Kon doesn’t waste time, launching himself toward the man with the intention of pile-driving him until they hit the next surface, or maybe the one after that.

Except. Kon’s feet leave the ground for barely a moment, and then he trips, crashing to his hands and knees. And it stings, pain flaring in his palms, the metal unyielding under him. His limbs are too heavy as he scrambles up, stumbling, and worse, so much worse—the limit of his body is his body. His TTK is gone, like a missing sense, a phantom limb that doesn’t respond when he flexes it. “What,” he breathes, and then hears Robin’s voice in his head chiding him to look, to observe, so he does. They’re in a totally different room, no longer a shed with a Kon-sized hole in the ceiling—somewhere underground, going by lack of windows, and it’s strangely dark, or Kon’s senses are just deadened enough that information comes through in a trickle. The metal under his shoes is glowing faintly—some sort of teleportation, Kon guesses, except he doesn’t feel the telltale fizz of magic, so what—

The light on the floor is fading, but there’s another glow, he realizes. A red one, coming from five floodlights ringing the platform, pointing inward. Red sun radiation.

He registers the shuffle of feet too late, senses still reeling. The man crosses the platform toward Kon, unclipping something metallic and curved from his belt, that little rod-like tool still aloft in his other hand. He has short-cropped hair, maybe brown, and a nondescript black jacket, and Kon still has no idea who he is. “I suggest you hold still for this part,” the man says.

Yeah, right. Kon might be de-powered, but he doesn’t go down easy—Robin has made sure of that, making the team spend entire training sessions sparring without powers, running through basic techniques of hapkido, jiu-jitsu, baguazhang, boxing, and free-for-all grappling that’s basically “anything goes as long as you’re moving at baseline human speed and power.” So when the man swings the rod, Kon immediately turns into the strike and jams his knuckles into the bundle of nerves above the guy’s elbow. The guy swears, the rod clattering across the floor as Kon stumbles back. It’s not perfect—there’s a huge difference between choosing not to use his strength or flight or TTK and not having them at all, and Kon’s limbs feel heavy and sluggish, responding on a split-second delay as he ducks the next grab and lurches around to put himself between the guy and Tim’s chair. “You okay, Tim?” he says, not turning to look no matter how much he wants to.

A scrape, like Tim’s yanking at the chair. “Superboy,” he says, voice raw and edged in panic. “He’s got—I think that’s—”

The man lunges. Kon isn’t willing to dodge again and put the guy closer to Tim, so he takes the hit, stumbling back. Blocks another, but then the guy grabs his arm and twists. Gravity finds him again with a vengeance as Kon slams into the platform. A boot comes down flat against his chest.

Don’t end up on the ground if you can help it, Robin’s voice lectures. But if you do get knocked down, take them with you.

You got it, Rob, Kon thinks dizzily, and hooks his arm behind the guy’s knee, rolling with all his weight to bring the guy toppling down on top of him. And, f*ck, that might’ve cracked a rib—his bones feel so f*cking brittle—but the guy is also wheezing like he landed wrong, and Tim is shouting something as Kon keeps rolling, forcing the guy onto his back and pinning his thigh under Kon’s knee, his wrist under Kon’s hand, and Kon bars his forearm against the guy’s windpipe. Ten seconds to knock someone out. Ten more seconds and then he can check on—

The guy’s free arm comes up. Not with much force, more like he’s trying to locate Kon than hit him, but Kon is so focused on keeping the guy pinned that he misses the flash of silver until it’s too late. Not the weapon, the compliance training, but something else. Something thin and cool to the touch that snaps around Kon’s throat before he can shove the hand away.

Kon jerks back, hand flying to his neck. It’s a—it’s a collar, he realizes blankly, smooth and nearly flush with his skin. As his fingers brush the metal there’s a soft shck of panels sliding open. He looks down—

The world tilts—

His palm, facing the collar, lights up as a faint green glow joins the red.

“There we go,” the man says softly, or maybe just from really, really far away. “Finally back where you belong.” And Kon—

Kon feels like he’s being pulled apart again, every cell in his body recoiling at once, and then he doesn’t feel anything at all.

◇

He wakes facedown on the metal platform, surfacing back to consciousness with a nauseating jolt. A jolt, and then—pain. It slams into him, a bright, sick wave that never quite crests, radiating from his neck. The collar, he remembers, and instinctively lifts his hands to claw at it only to come up short, his hands secured behind his back. His thoughts spin as he tries to orient himself, but he can’t seem to think past the kryptonite around his throat; it feels so cold it burns, like a static, impossible fire. Kon makes a small noise and curls up on his side. Between the red sun and the kryptonite collar his whole body feels like a spiderweb-cracked glass, one wrong move from shattering entirely. He’s experienced kryptonite before, but this is—it’s so close, he can’t get away, can’t get it off—

It takes him too long to notice someone is calling for him. No, not someone—Tim.

“Superboy,” Tim’s voice says, quietly, urgently. Kon tries to follow it past the disorientation and the deadened senses; he can barely hear anything, just his own breathing and a faint rattling somewhere and that goddamn high-pitched electrical whine. But as the shock of waking fades, he can focus enough to make it out. “Superboy,” Tim whispers again, and Kon anchors himself on it as he opens his eyes.

“Tim,” Kon mumbles. It’s barely coherent, his cheek still pressed against the floor, but his vision clears enough to make out Tim’s legs, and then the rest of him, still in the chair a few feet away.

Tim lets out a shaking breath, closing his eyes for a moment, and then he meets Kon’s gaze. Kon should probably sit up, but any strength he has left is filtering in even slower than his senses, and there’s an ache pulsing in the base of his skull that tells him moving is really not going to be fun.

“Yeah,” Tim says, and there’s the tiniest crack in it. “Yeah, I’m here. Are you—how are—report. Please.”

There’s something sort of funny about that, some flicker at the edge of Kon’s mind, but it’s too fleeting to catch. “I’m…alive,” he manages. He shifts slightly, distant discomfort joining the fray as he puts pressure on his bound hands. As he does he realizes his legs are lashed together too, plastic ties that he’d normally snap without thinking wound around his ankles. The tie binding his wrists feels like the same thing, too tight to wiggle out of even if he dislocated his thumbs. “Are…are we alone?”

Tim shakes his head, one sharp movement, and looks somewhere behind Kon. “He stepped out, but he’ll be back,” Tim murmurs. Kon watches the shape of Tim’s mouth and desperately misses his usual hearing. He wants to hear Tim’s heartbeat right now, assure himself that Tim’s actually okay. From this angle Kon can see blood smeared across Tim’s brow, more on his chin and upper lip. His arms are pulled back too, restrained somehow. There’s also something about the way Tim’s holding himself in the chair, favoring his right side, but Kon can’t scan for injuries, either. All he can do is clench his jaw against a wave of dizziness as Tim continues: “Door requires a keycode to open. He left a few minutes ago, right after you—passed out. I don’t know what he’s doing, exactly, but I have to assume he’s got surveillance in here. So, assume he can hear anything we say.”

That’s useful information. Or will be, if Kon can figure out what to do with it. And he has to—whoever this guy is, he knows what he’s doing, and he’s connected to Cadmus somehow. Kon has to get Tim out of here. That’s the most important thing, a beacon in his disoriented, kryptonite-hazed thoughts: even bound and de-powered, Kon is still Superboy, and Superboy has to save Tim.

He shifts, bracing his elbow against the metal, and when he doesn’t immediately pass out again he slowly pushes himself upright. Tim watches, eyes wide and wary, and Kon tries to keep a swell of nausea off his face. He doesn’t want to scare Tim, though that ship has probably sailed by now. “Are you okay?” Kon says, quiet and strained but at least coherent.

A brief, unreadable expression flits across Tim’s face. “I don’t think the rod caused any critical short-term damage,” he says, which is kind of what Kon was asking and kind of not. After a moment’s hesitation Tim adds, like it’s an admission: “And…my leg is broken.”

“Broken,” Kon repeats, because, sh*t. “How broken?”

Tim grimaces. There’s a sheen on his forehead, a red glimmer under the lamps, and his hair is plastered to his temple on one side. Kon’s not sure if it’s wet with sweat or blood. “Pretty…pretty broken. I can manage, but it’s not. Optimal.”

A bolt of fury finds home in Kon’s chest, quickly followed by shame. He squeezes his eyes shut, forcing himself to breathe once, twice, before opening them again. “I’m sorry,” he says. Tim makes a small sound of protest, but Kon keeps going. “I should’ve been more careful.”

“It’s not your fault,” Tim says. His voice is so rough Kon has to stop himself from wincing. “I’m the one who should have known better.”

Kon swallows. He supposes it’s fair for Tim to regret their kiss, but he still can’t let Tim blame himself for this. “No,” Kon insists. Just talking makes him feel winded, but Tim’s shoulders seem to relax a fraction every time Kon speaks. “This is…about me.”

“I got that part.” Tim frowns a little, though not at Kon—more like he’s thinking, focus slipping down to the ties around Kon’s ankles. “The guy’s certifiably obsessed. I just—I can’t figure out his angle yet. Why he targeted you.”

“I know why,” Kon says. He doesn’t want to explain this, doesn’t want to lay his origin story bare when he doesn’t have the capacity to soften it with jokes, but he needs Tim to understand what they’re dealing with. “I was—it’s complicated—but I was. Made. A few years ago, in a lab. He’s connected to that somehow. He was…there.”

Tim doesn’t recoil, or demand to know exactly what Kon means by made, if it matches the worst of the speculation about Superboy. “Oh,” he says darkly. “That tracks. He called you his project.”

“I was…a lot of people’s project,” Kon says.

Tim’s jaw tightens. “The mad scientist angle, then. So he’s got at least a basic knowledge framework to back up his end goal, whatever it is. And he’s prepared. He had that noise thing going before we even arrived, sawed off the generator key so it won’t power down. Lots of contingencies—an overthinker, like m—like. You know.”

Red sun lamps and “compliance training” and a kryptonite collar—yeah, Kon sees what Tim means. “Do you know where we are?” Kon says. His throat feels like it’s on fire inside and out, and it’s such a small thing, but he wishes he could just lift his hand to touch it. To reassure himself his skin is still intact.

Tim’s gaze shifts to the computer setup. “I saw coordinates—he has a remote to control the platforms. We’re a few miles east of Trenton, I think. The first coordinates looked like somewhere in Delaware—”

“The farm,” Kon breaks in. “Where we met.”

“The…oh. Of course, god, that’s so obvious. Because he’s—it’s the same guy. The third kidnapper, that’s him.”

That explains the farm, but also causes a bit of a traffic jam in Kon’s brain. What was a rogue Cadmus scientist doing kidnapping rich kids from Gotham last year? What does that have to do with this? Kon turns his head, instinctively seeking more information. His impression in those first few moments was right—they’re in some sort of basem*nt, the metal platform taking up about a quarter of the floor. The red sun floodlights are still in the same spot, affixed to heavy freestanding poles equally spaced around the platform and hooked up to a tangle of cables. Beyond the lamps he spots a whining generator against the far wall—the same kind from the farm when Tim was kidnapped, which makes sense now—that means shouting for Superman is off the table, and a multi-monitor computer setup by the lone door, the screens currently locked. Concrete walls, no windows, the only light coming from the monitors and the red sun lamps and emergency LED strips bordering the floor. The air smells metallic, cold in his lungs with every breath.

Tim doesn’t have a jacket. He’d been bundled up earlier, a long coat and a bulky scarf, but now he’s in a thin knit shirt, soft-looking but not warm enough to stop small, rolling shivers every few seconds.

“So—first location was the farm,” Tim is saying, still peering in the direction of the computers. “He got you there. And then…” He taps the socked toe of his foot—what must be his good foot, the non-broken one—against the metal floor. “Transported us here. Zeta technology, I think, converted to use platforms. I watched him cue the original platform to self-destruct, so it’ll be hard to trace us here, even when someone finds that, but maybe…I mean, it’s still experimental, so, I don’t know for sure…”

Little zips of lightning flash in Kon’s vision when he blinks, pulsing along with his heartbeat. “How do you know about zeta technology?” he croaks.

Tim’s gaze snaps back at him, expression intent. There’s a purple bruise swelling around his eye; Kon hadn’t noticed at first, distracted by the blood. “He’s listening,” Tim says again. “He’s listening, okay? So, I don’t.”

“Then what—”

The pain in Kon’s head finally spikes, eclipsing whatever he might have said next. He whines, involuntary, curling in on himself as the basem*nt is lost in a rush of static. f*ck, he can’t—it hurts—somewhere far away there’s a scrape, a pained noise that’s not his own, and he thinks Tim might be trying to move the chair. He shouldn’t move the chair, not with a broken leg, Kon should tell him not to…not to…

“Superboy,” Tim whisper-calls again. You know my name, Kon wants to say, say my name, please, and he hasn’t even finished thinking it when he realizes Tim is doing it on purpose. Protecting him. That they might be trapped here, that Tim may be hurt and Kon may be useless, but Tim won’t give another piece of Kon to the man who kidnapped them both.

God, Kon thinks, f*ck. He’s getting Tim out of here, no matter what it takes.

When Kon’s vision clears again he sees Tim’s eyes are shining, but his expression is set, determined. “I’ll fix this,” Tim says.

“I think that’s…supposed to be my line,” Kon pants.

“You just—stay conscious, okay?” Tim blinks hard. “We’ll figure this out. I just have to…damn it, I wish I could take…” His eyes widen slightly. He leans forward, lowering his voice even further. “After he—with the collar—he searched you for weapons and electronics. He took your flashlight, but he left everything else.”

Kon glances down at his unclasped thigh pouch and tries not to shudder at the thought of the Cadmus guy pawing through it. Tim’s right—he still has two packets of fruit snacks, his emergency blanket, and a pen inside. The fruit snacks would probably come in handy if the guy left them alone here much longer, but Kon has a feeling that isn’t the plan.

When Tim doesn’t say anything else, Kon looks up. Tim mouths something, but between the red glow and the way his vision is still fuzzy at the edges, Kon can’t quite figure it out. Something short. The…

“The…” He remembers, again, that the guy’s probably listening. The pen? he mouths to Tim.

Tim nods and tips his head back as if to indicate his own bound hands. From this angle Kon can see a dull gleam of metal at Tim’s wrists; cuffs, not ties. But Tim’s fingers uncurl slightly below the cuffs, as if to say, here.

Okay. It takes a bit of twisting to reach his pouch with his hands tied, but Kon slips the pen—just a regular pen, plastic ballpoint, the kind Robin likes—from the pouch and slowly shifts, pulling himself closer to Tim. Tim does his best to turn the chair around to meet him, and Kon can see the way his breathing stutters with each movement.

Just as Kon is lifting his hands behind him there’s a click across the room. Tim goes tense, head snapping up to look over Kon’s shoulder. A second later Kon feels the metal vibrate with approaching footsteps.

The pen disappears from his hands with a fleeting brush of Tim’s fingers. Kon drops his arms, covering the movement by letting himself half-collapse against the side of Tim’s chair. Tries not to throw up while he’s at it. His head brushes Tim’s leg, a bright flare of warmth against his temple.

“How sweet,” the guy says mildly, crossing the platform. He’s got that rod again, but it’s not on, not glowing. His gaze catches on one of the fruit snack packs that spilled when Kon fumbled for the pen. “I’ll be feeding you, don’t worry. I take care of my investments.”

He stops in front of Kon and crouches. The whole place looks weird, washed in red, but Kon can see the guy is pale, unremarkable, brown hair and a thin nose and nondescript black clothes. Not too old, maybe thirty. Face still not ringing any bells. His left palm is wrapped in a thin bandage, pinpricks of blood poking through the gauze in a little half-circle. At first Kon thinks it’s Tim’s blood somehow, and then he recalls the man’s little hiss on the phone, Tim’s suddenly un-muffled voice, and feels a vicious surge of pride beyond the kryptonite haze.

“What’s the plan now, then?” Tim asks. Kon imagines he can feel the hum of it where his forehead rests on Tim’s thigh. “You say you protect your investments, but Superboy can hardly move with that thing on his neck. Kind of feels like overkill. Like maybe you don’t trust your own security measures.”

The guy ignores him, taking hold of Kon’s chin, turning Kon’s face side to side like he’s inspecting him. Kon tries to pull away and only succeeds in unbalancing himself, ending up in a heap at the guy’s feet. A moment later fingers curl in Kon’s hair, tipping his head back, drawing him upright so Kon has to scramble to follow or risk wrenching his neck. Black spots swim in his vision at the sudden movement.

“You’re older,” the guy says. Kon can’t read the tone, but it sends something cold shivering down his spine. “I can see it—every new imperfection on your face. Like a toy taken from its packaging and given to a bunch of toddlers.”

Tim makes a disgusted noise, cutting him off. “Right, because that’s not creepy at all. You really are just like every other pathetic wannabe who has some sick obsession with a superhero. How well has that worked out for any of them, again?”

This gets a reaction, the guy’s eyes flashing. What the hell—what the hell is Tim doing? Does he want to get hurt again? “Wannabe,” the guy repeats, shot through with scorn. His fingers loosen from Kon’s hair as he stands and steps toward Tim, and Kon’s head dips for a moment, too heavy to hold up. “I don’t want to be him, you stupid boy. I own him. He wouldn’t exist without me; what I do with my creation is my right.”

“No thanks,” Kon rasps, struggling to lift his head again. He doesn’t have a plan—he just wants to keep the guy’s attention away from Tim. “Nice god complex and all, but I’m full up on pseudo-parental figures at the moment.”

The guy pivots back, lip curling. Behind him Tim might be glaring at Kon, but the effect is sort of lost under all the blood. “Yeah, good luck in family court with that one,” Tim says before the man can get a word out.

Kon can play this game; he’s good at being annoying. “This is super excessive just to…get a father’s day card.”

“Not beating the creepy allegations,” Tim adds.

“Guy wants to own me and he doesn’t even call on my birthday.”

“No child support, no visitation.”

“Never even…took me to the dentist,” Kon gets out.

“Did he even contribute genetic material?”

“Ew.”

“Too far?”

“Too far.”

“Be quiet,” the man hisses. His gaze has been flicking between them like he can’t decide where to focus, a muscle twitching in his jaw. His hands are eye-level for Kon, and he sees the guy’s grip tighten on the handle of the rod, sees his thumb shift to a dial as his shoes turn to face Tim.

“How do we know you’re even telling the truth, anyway?” Kon says, loud, leaning forward to put himself in the guy’s way as much as possible. “Like if you’re so important, why don’t I remember you?”

It works. The guy turns fully to Kon, knuckles white. The angle puts him right in the path of one of the lamps, turning him into a silhouette limned in red. “Because the most important moments of your existence occurred when you were an insensate bundle of potential,” he hisses. “Before you were touched by anything outside the walls of your tank, when there was only work to do, not to undo. I was there for your inception, there when you hadn’t even opened your eyes, when you were still a perfect specimen—only for my esteemed employers to attempt to alter my memories rather than extend my position. I had to see ‘Superboy’ on the news.” He shakes his head. “You may not remember me, but I remember you, Thirteen, and your old masters were fools to let you go. I won’t make the same mistake; there’s so much more to learn.”

“‘Extend my position,’” Tim repeats before Kon can sort through that, before the crawling sensation sets into his bones. “What were you, like, an intern?” The guy jerks his head to look at Tim again, and Tim’s eyebrows shoot up at whatever he sees in the guy’s expression. “Oh my god, you totally were an intern. Like, not even a project lead. I bet you didn’t actually create anything, and that’s why you have a chip on your shoulder the size of the Daily Planet. Hey, how unhinged about eugenics do you have to be for Cadmus to send you packing as an intern?”

The guy shifts, lifting the rod until it hovers just under the hollow of Tim’s throat. Kon freezes; Tim doesn’t react except to narrow his eyes slightly. Almost like a challenge.

“They lacked vision,” the guy snarls. “Or rather, the powers that be didn’t want to share my vision, didn’t want to admit their progress rode on the back of an underpaid grad student. They thought they could take my contributions and squander Experiment 13’s full potential by letting him loose half-formed. By settling for Superboy. And it isn’t eugenics, it’s—”

“Xenobiological hybrid DNA manipulation, sure, whatever,” Tim says. “Still sounds a lot like garden-variety eugenics when you talk about it, though. Do you take constructive criticism? Try toning down the whole I created a perfect specimen thing.”

“I’m not perfect, anyway,” Kon says. “I snore. Maybe next time make a specimen who doesn’t snore.”

“Enough.” The guy’s voice echoes in the empty space. He’s breathing hard, clearly irritated. “Who are you to disparage my work? A millionaire brat who has never worked for anything more than his allowance, and a half-finished clone who makes a mockery of his existence on the national stage.”

“Harsh,” Kon says. God, his throat hurts. “I’ll have you know I’m famous worldwide.”

“And I don’t have an allowance,” Tim says. “It’s more of an investment portfolio.”

“Besides, aren’t you disparaging your own work by calling me—” Kon starts, and then the pain crests again with all the grace of an electric shock. He cuts off with a wheeze and, horrifyingly, a small whimper as his neck spasms against the collar. A second later fingers hook under his jaw, forcing his face up again.

“Interesting,” the guy says, studying him, gaze taking over Kon’s throat. “I worried I hadn’t smuggled in enough kryptonite, but clearly I made the collar too strong. Or perhaps you’re just weaker than I assumed.” Kon yanks his head away, but the fingers only follow, turning into a bruising grip on his jaw. “Ah, ah,” the guy says. “I think we’re done with this little show of defiance now. There’s no point. You have no idea how long I’ve been preparing for this—what happens next is a foregone conclusion.”

“I might, actually,” Tim says loudly. “I might have an idea.”

Cadmus guy’s eye twitches.

“I was trying to figure it out,” Tim continues. Kon can only see him out of the corner of his vision, a blurred shape leaning forward in the chair. “That Metropolis kidnapping, how it all connects. That part was easy, honestly: What do you need first, when launching your supervillain startup? Capital. The ransoms—that was your seed money. And I admit I was stumped on the next step, until you mentioned smuggling kryptonite. Those boxes on Carmichael Creedy’s yacht. That alien metal being funneled through Gotham Harbor. It had trace elements of kryptonite in it, that was all over the news when it got busted by Red Hood. But some shipments made it through—to you, right? You were the unknown buyer, because if you were preparing to hold Superboy, you’d need kryptonite.”

The fingers drop abruptly. Kon’s sense of balance reaches its frayed limit and he tips sideways, catching himself on one elbow with another dull spike of pain. From this angle he can’t see Cadmus guy’s face anymore.

He can, however, see the way Tim’s left foot is twisting against the plastic band around his good ankle as he speaks.

“Lucky guess,” the guy says, a warning clear in his tone.

But Tim keeps talking, drawing the guy’s attention. His eyes are bright, the sharpest they’ve been since Kon woke up. “So you had kryptonite. You had an evil lair, clearly, and some leftover toys from your internship. But you needed a way to transport Superboy there without anyone else following you, so you needed—the zeta. S.T.A.R. Labs, that break-in a few weeks ago, the same day all those fear gas attacks happened. You took advantage—no, wait. You orchestrated the attacks as cover for the break-in. To steal zeta technology. That’s how you built these platforms. Too bad S.T.A.R. wasn’t looking for interns, huh?”

“How do you know all this?” The warning sharpens to a dangerous level.

“I read the news,” Tim says in a way that makes it clear he’d be waving a hand if he could. “The only thing I haven’t figured out is how Poison Ivy factors in. Was last night another distraction? Were you connected to the plant smuggling operation?”

“Stop babbling,” Cadmus guy snaps. “I have no association with that pseudo-botanist.”

“Huh. I guess that one was a fluke,” Tim says. “Also: rude. I invite you to say that to her face and see what happens.”

A click; the rod lights up in the guy’s hand. “I think I preferred you when you were screaming.”

“There you go being creepy again,” Tim tells him. “Like, that’s probably the creepiest thing you could have said right there. Speaking of creepy: this basem*nt. You talk a big game about all your scientific plans, but this place is not equipped to be a full lab. And you left this zeta platform intact, which means—ah. There’s a third location. But why not just bring us directly, unless…there’s something else you’re planning to do first. Something you’re worried can be traced, so you have to burn this spot too. What is it? What are you waiting for?”

“You know,” the guy says, “if you weren’t so f*cking annoying, I’d see if you were looking for an internship.”

And then he swings the rod low, cracking it against the knee of Tim’s broken leg. Tim makes an awful, breathless sound, curling over in the chair, and Kon feels his own body jerk and recoil, trying to push himself off the ground and slamming against the limits of his weakness.

The guy steps back, rolling his wrist. “As it stands, I just need to wait until I can properly dispose of your body. My zetas prefer living matter; the dead rabbits I tested on these platforms tended to get pulled apart in transit, and I’d rather not deal with the mess.”

“No,” Kon says.

“I didn’t ask your opinion,” the man says coldly, turning away.

Kon just reacts, twisting to shove his legs in the man’s path. “Don’t be—don’t be stupid,” he gasps. His mind is full of blank white noise, an all-encompassing panic that he’ll pass out again any moment and when he wakes up he’ll be somewhere new and Tim will be gone forever. “If you kill him, you lose your leverage. I’ll fight—every day, I’ll fight you every single day if he’s dead, I swear. I swear. But if he’s okay. If you let him live. I’ll cooperate.”

Cadmus guy pauses. Shoes turn, rubber on metal, as the guy crouches in front of him again. “Only so long as he’s useful to me,” the guy says softly. “And he’s useful only so long as you are, Thirteen. So you need to be useful to me until I’ve learned everything there is to know about you. Every last detail. Until I know you better than anyone. Better than you know yourself. Is that the agreement?”

Kon understands: he’s not going to be leashed, not going to be forced to do this guy’s bidding by magic or mind control or blackmail. He’s not going to be a weapon; he’s going to be an experiment, running tests over and over until everything about him is used up. He’s never going to see the sky again.

He nods.

The man lets out a small huff, like that was mildly amusing, and stands. Kon follows his gaze to Tim, who lifts his head. Fresh tears run down Tim’s face, but his expression is nothing short of fury.

“At least I have methods to keep you quiet at my laboratory,” the man says. “Infuriating as you are, you’re right—I do have one last step. Something to keep the whole Justice League occupied while we move to our final location, thanks to my foray into the Gotham smuggling scene. It’s fascinating what kind of black market exists just across the river. Have either of you ever seen Joker toxin in action?” His mouth curves, the first real hint of anything other than anger to break his calm. “I complete a single wire transfer, and a dozen independent contractors in a dozen cities will release toxin into the water supply. The fear attacks a few weeks ago will be child’s play compared to this.”

He turns away, stepping easily over Kon’s legs. “There will be no more distractions once our real work begins,” he says, not looking back at them as he crosses the platform. “Enjoy your last minutes of conversation while you can.”

The guy steps between two floodlights, heading for the computer, and that’s where Kon stops tracking. He turns back to Tim and strains against the ties at his wrists, his ankles, the plastic cutting into his skin again even though he knows it won’t work. “I’m sorry,” he gets out, fingers curling uselessly against the metal floor. “Tim, I’m so sorry. I’ll—someone will come save you, someone else will come, I’m sure they will. I’m sorry I can’t—”

“Superboy,” Tim says quietly. “Hey.”

Kon stops, trying to catch his breath. His head is so heavy; it’s all he can do to keep it up, to see Tim’s face.

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” Tim continues. He glances quickly across the room, then back to Kon just as fast. There’s something new in his expression, an intensity bleeding through the anger and tears. Something else, too—an incongruent softness as he meets Kon’s eyes. “I wanted to tell you something, and I didn’t. I almost missed my chance. And maybe if I had just—I don’t know. Maybe this would’ve gone differently. So, I’m sorry I’m late.”

“No,” Kon says immediately. “It’s not your fault, Tim, I should have been—”

“You like pineapple on your pizza,” Tim says.

“—able to…what?”

“You have a grudge against Disney,” Tim continues nonsensically, and something in the back of Kon’s mind is going wait, wait, scrambling to keep up. “You wanted to know what it was like to be flown. And I promised,” Tim says. “I promised—before the end of the year. That I'd tell you. No matter what B said. So. So.”

Tim shifts his feet together, face sheet white as he uses the knee of his broken leg to push the other hem of his pants up a few painstaking inches.

It takes Kon a split second to see it—something peeking out over the line of Tim’s sock. Something thin and black and utterly familiar, because Kon would recognize the shape of Robin’s domino mask anywhere.

“My name is Tim Drake,” Tim whispers. “That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

There’s static in Kon’s ears, nothing but white noise and the low pulse of his own heartbeat. He stares, and stares, and then wrenches his gaze back up to Tim’s face as the pieces fall into place all at once, a dozen moments lining up like tumblers in a lock. Tim in that cellar, looking at Kon and saying You came like they already knew each other. Tim, tipsy on Kon’s back, going still when Kon said You hurt my friend. Tim sobbing in the woodshop and dismissing it as biochemical blowback. Tim leaping off that archway, knowing Kon would catch him; Robin leaping into the night, saying See you soon. Between that: Tim with his arm around Kon’s waist and Paris stretched out below them, saying, You really want to kiss—me, saying, Me, Tim, like there was someone else he could possibly be. And—god—the way Clark got so weird when Kon brought up Tim Drake’s fake uncle. The way Red Hood and Nightwing teased Tim, the way Tim let Impulse hug him on that roof, and the way Tim had looked at Batman and Superman in the Kents’ workshop. The way Hood said Did he mention anything about running off to San Francisco? like Kon was supposed to know what that meant, and then, Oh, sh*t. He didn’t tell you. The way Tim knew about Zeta technology. Report. The way he antagonized his captor like it was old news, and said I’ll fix this like it was a promise he could keep.

The way Tim Drake trusted Superboy, easy as breathing.

Robin’s name is Tim Drake. That doesn’t change anything immediately, as Kon’s mind wraps and re-wraps around that information. They’re still here in this concrete room under red sun lamps; Kon still has a kryptonite collar and Tim’s leg is still broken and their kidnapper is still about to hurt so many people just to have the chance to keep hurting them. All of that is still true.

But for the first time since picking up the phone in Tim’s apartment, Kon feels a bright, searing burst of hope.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Tim murmurs. “I know it’s not—ideal. But I needed you to—” He cuts off, his eyes widening slightly. “To…catch.”

Before Kon can respond—before he can start to untangle the absolute mess of feelings lodged in his throat—Tim drops a hand to his side—his hands are free—and a moment later something tiny and silver skitters to a stop against Kon’s knee. It takes Kon another moment to realize what it is: the metal spring from the ballpoint pen, one end unwound and straightened to create a makeshift wire tool.

Tim unlocked his handcuffs with a ballpoint pen, Kon thinks somewhat hysterically. Because he’s f*cking Robin.

Kon has no idea what expression is on his face when he looks back up, but the corner of Tim’s—Robin’s—mouth quirks up for the barest moment. And then Robin lifts his unbound hand and makes the team sign for distraction.

It’s like everything comes into focus, lights and sounds sharpening, the center of Kon’s being resettling into his own chest. He’s not Superboy, trapped; he’s Superboy, on a mission, and he’s got his marching orders. He moves, scooping the wire into his own hands, and gets to work.

One of the other things Robin insisted on adding to their training rotation, back when their team was new and Robin’s focus on the training rotation seemed kind of intense and annoying (and it was, but then Kon realized it was because Robin cared and was just weird about expressing it, so it became intense and annoying in a good way), was how to pick various handcuff locks and untie complicated knots without looking. Like with sparring, Bart wasn’t allowed to vibrate through them and Cassie and Kon weren’t allowed to just break them. The lessons had varying success, and they certainly didn’t measure up to Bat standard because Robin was either a mini Houdini or spent hours and hours practicing where the rest of them did not, but the theory was there. Last fall Robin added a few more items to the sessions, one of them being plastic zip ties—how to work at the plastic over time to crack it or, if possible, how to use a needle or wire to depress the tiny ratchet pin and pull the tab free. At the time Kon remembers thinking briefly about the kid he rescued from the farm cellar, how he’d snapped two zip ties off Tim Drake’s hands and had to be careful around Tim’s broken thumb as he did. If he’d known how to open the ties gently he might have done that instead. That’s what he kept coming back to during the lesson—that knowing this trick meant he might one day save someone from a little extra pain.

Now, as he maneuvers the spring in his shaking hands, as he finds the pin and feels the tie go loose around his wrists, he thinks: that’s exactly what he’ll be doing.

He makes quick work of his legs, sparing the smallest wince as his extremities prickle and cramp with the new range of motion. His limbs still shake when he puts weight on them, but now that the ties are off he can at least move, even if standing is out of the question. Cadmus guy is still at the computer, so Kon doesn’t pause, quietly dragging himself to the opposite edge of the platform, right to the base of one of the red sun lamps.

This is a temporary location, apparently. They were meant to be here for less than an hour. They were also not supposed to be able to slip their restraints. Consequently, it seems Cadmus guy didn’t bother to bolt the freestanding lamps to the floor.

That works to Kon’s advantage, when he grabs one of the poles as high as he can reach and sets the dead weight of his body against it, sending the whole thing smashing to the ground.

Cadmus guy whips around. “What the hell are you doing.”

Distraction: achieved. Kon struggles to sit up, shards of broken glass glittering around him like scattered jewels in the light from the other lamps. Like a zillion tiny red stars. Cadmus guy makes a low, aggravated noise, grabbing the compliance training rod off the monitor station and stalking toward him. Glass crunches beneath his shoes.

Kon backs up as much as he can, which isn’t far. Little shards dig into his palms as Cadmus guy towers over him at the edge of the platform. “Stop moving,” Cadmus guy says, mouth twisted like he bit into something unpleasant. “I worked so hard to do this without further damaging you, and now—look at the mess you’ve made. We don’t have time for more useless antics.”

There’s a joke to be made here, something about kids disappointing their parents, but black spots are already gathering at the edge of Kon’s vision and for once he doesn’t have the spare energy to mouth off. He kicks weakly, catching the guy’s knee. He can’t put up much of a fight, but he doesn’t have to. He just has to stall.

Cadmus guy barely stumbles back, doesn’t pause his next action at all, which is to switch on the rod. It glows, and then he’s crouching down, looming close and proper now, chin and neck eerily underlit for a split second before he jams the rod into Kon’s ribs.

Kon seizes, or close to it. All of his muscles lock, and somewhere in his mind he knows this hurts, knows this is bad, but everything beyond the sick ache of the kryptonite has been muted since the collar snapped on. It feels like something distant and deep is rending apart inside him, a base, panicked instinct in his body trying to counter it and failing; he knows his lungs are frozen and his body would be scrambling away if he could move, but that information just batters against a wall in his brain over and over until the rod lifts. And then he’s gasping, one hand scrabbling at his chest as if to make sure he’s still whole. There’s a warmth on his upper lip and something in his throat he can’t seem to swallow down, and the aftermath is almost worse, the twitching muscles and desperate breathing and the knowledge that it could happen again and he can’t stop it.

Good thing he doesn’t need to stop it.

“Now that’s interesting,” the guy says, like they’re having a conversation, like there isn’t a wild, hungry look in his eye as he tilts his head over Kon. “In humans this seems to only simulate pain. But it was designed to target you on a molecular level—a shock to the alien parts of you in every cell, to force you to divert immediate energy to heal. Nothing but a full-body stun under normal circ*mstances, of course, it’s only meant to be temporary, but with that collar…the effects seem to be compounding.” His eyes gleam. “I wasn’t planning to use it on you unless necessary, but if you insist on being difficult…well.”

He didn’t plan to use it on Kon, but he did use it on Robin. Over and over again.

Kon’s mouth is dry as hell, but he doesn’t let that stop him; he works his jaw and spits right in the guy’s face.

It has, as Robin would say, the expected result.

This time when the rod lifts away Kon can’t do anything but wheeze, curled up on the metal, glass grating like sand under the side of his head.

“You really are weak,” Cadmus guy says. “We’ll have to figure that out—what your true limits are. How to improve upon them.” He sets the rod aside, letting it roll carelessly across the floor like Kon is no longer a threat and he knows it, and pulls a bundle of fresh zip ties from his pocket. Kon can barely flinch away; it feels like some fundamental piece of him has been wrenched out of place, some fastener removed and he’s slowly coming unraveled. When he breathes it turns into a cough, awful and wet, something metallic bubbling in the back of his throat. “We can even use your boyfriend as a baseline,” the guy continues, “since you insisted I keep him. But for now I have more pressing matters to—”

“Aaaaand done,” Tim’s voice breaks in, carrying across the platform. Cadmus guy’s hands go still on the ties, his head whipping around as Tim says, “Wow, you called this Operation Mary Shelley? Way too on the nose, if you’re still taking notes.”

Cadmus guy shoots to his feet. “How did you—when—what are you doing?”

Tim is at the computer station, braced on his good leg with his hands poised on the keyboard. Kon’s vision wavers in and out with each blink, but he can see Tim smile over his shoulder, blood on his teeth, face washed out in the glow of the monitor. “I rerouted the wire transfer to a friend of mine. She’s real techy—once she sees this, she’ll find her way to your other accounts soon enough. So the whole Joker toxin scheme’s DOA, and I’d suggest changing all your passwords. Not that it’ll help at this point, but it’s still good practice.”

“You’re lying,” the guy breathes, but he’s wrong. Kon can hear it in Tim’s voice—this isn’t a bluff. He actually redirected the transfer, stopped Cadmus guy’s grand scheme in its tracks. There will be no coordinated Joker toxin attacks, and if Tim really linked that money to Oracle instead, the rest of the guy’s resources are about to fall piece by piece like a chain of dominos.

“Wanna check my work?” Tim says, arching an eyebrow. And Kon truly sees it for the first time, like clearing away double vision: the boy at the computer is Tim and Robin all at once, shaking limbs and quick fingers and a sharp, bloody grin.

Overthinker, Tim had said. The guy had anticipated everything, set double contingencies into motion and nearly arranged the whole Justice League like pieces on a chess board, and still—still, he hadn’t anticipated Tim Drake.

Cadmus guy makes a wordless sound of rage, jerking forward. Kon snaps back to himself, because the guy is charging back to Tim—back to Robin, who just saved all those people but still has a broken leg.

Kon finds the last, buried scraps of strength in his body and lunges, launching himself up with just enough force to catch Cadmus guy around the waist with an oof and send them both crashing to the floor. He’s not thinking of anything other than keeping the guy away from Tim as long as possible, giving Robin time to figure out what’s next, because he will, Robin always does—that’s the sole, single-minded objective in his mind even as Cadmus guy grunts and shoves Kon off, gets to his feet, kicks away Kon’s clinging arm, drives his heel into Kon’s chest. Give Robin time, Kon thinks as he gags for air and Cadmus guy shakes off Kon’s next, flimsy grab; as Cadmus guy stumbles away, face twisted and calm facade fully vanished, yelling something that Kon’s ears won’t process; as Kon reaches one last time and Cadmus guy steps back, the sole of his boot coming down right on top of the still-rolling compliance training rod, and Kon’s fingers close on empty air.

The guy slips. It’s not graceful—the rod flies out from under his foot, and there’s a moment where he almost seems to be suspended, spine starting to arc backward, and then he falls all at once, slamming into one of the still-standing floodlights and going down hard, the whole fixture crashing on top of him.

He doesn’t get back up.

Neither does Kon, his trembling limbs giving out. He’s on his hands and knees again, ears ringing, the black spots in his vision creeping inward. There’s something dark smeared on the metal below him, and he thinks it’s his, from his hands—his nails are bleeding from the beds, reddish-brown crescents on each finger. Designed to target you on a molecular level.

That’s…probably not good.

“Kon,” Tim says, and for some reason Kon has to suppress a sob at that, at Tim using his name again. He can see Tim’s feet, one held off the ground and the other bearing his weight as he pulls himself along the computer desk toward the platform. “Kon, are you—what did he—I’m sorry, I had to—”

“I’m okay,” Kon rasps, which isn’t true, but Tim stops apologizing. “Is he…?”

“I don’t know,” Tim says. “He’s down. He’s down. What did he do to you?”

“Just…just the…but only twice. You—? Are you—?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Tim says, inching closer to where the guy still hasn’t stirred. “Just stay still, okay, don’t move, I’ll see if he has a key to that thing on your neck. His wire transfer was running through proxies on proxies, but I bet I can get into his system and send out a signal to help Oracle trace us faster. Then we’ll go lock that collar in a lead bunker somewhere, okay? Or maybe B will let me test out the new atomizer. You can come over and watch, if—if you want.”

That sounds nice, Kon wants to say, but the words get stuck in the blood at the back of his throat. There’s something in his eyes, tacky; he raises a hand to wipe at them and his knuckle comes away red.

Definitely not good, he thinks, and lists sideways. He catches himself on his forearm, and for all his strength he’s suddenly sure he’s never held up anything as heavy as his own body right now. He thinks he might be leaking, like, generally—nose and throat and eyes and hands, coming apart at the seams, and he can’t push himself back up. It feels like the floor is moving under him, like the walls are shuddering in his peripheral vision.

Wait. The floor is moving under him.

The lights abruptly go out, the red sun lamps and the computer monitors flickering off in unison, leaving only the emergency LEDs. “Oh, sh*t,” Tim says. There’s a sudden smell in the cold air, searing and chemical. From where he is on the floor Kon sees wisps of smoke curling through the crack under the basem*nt door. “He already triggered the self-destruct here.”

Kon tries to move, and he can’t. “Robin,” he says, too quiet. “Tim.”

“sh*t,” Tim says again as there’s an ominous rumble overhead. He grabs the base of the computer station, dragging himself back to the keyboard. Kon lifts his gaze inch by inch and stares at the back of Tim’s head. Now that he knows, it feels impossible to separate them. Tim Drake, with loose civilian clothes and no shoes and messy hair, cuts a softer silhouette than Robin does. But the curve of his cheek. The set of his jaw. How did Kon not see it?

Tim is Robin. Tim has been Robin all along, from the moment Kon found him in the bunker to last night when Kon kissed him above Paris. For over a year now, every time Kon found himself wondering what Robin’s eyes looked like behind the mask, it turns out he already knew.

Oh, god. He kissed Robin.

He—he broke up with Robin.

The building is still shaking.

There’s something—he should do something, about Robin, about Tim, about the shaking building. He should say…he should…whatever it is, the idea disperses as soon as he tries to grasp it, intangible as the smoke still billowing under the door. His thoughts are coming slow and out of order, like messages beamed from the other side of the galaxy.

“Okay,” Tim—Robin is saying. His hands have paused on the keyboard, shifting to press flat against the desktop. The screens are still dark, dead. “Okay. Okay. Kon. It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

“Robin,” Kon says again.

Tim winces. “I’m sorry. I was going to tell you tonight. I just—” The basem*nt shudders again. Tim shoves away from the useless computer and half-hops, half-drags himself over to Kon, going down hard on one knee. He lifts his hands and runs his fingers along the metal collar. Kon breathes, and breathes, awful little grating sounds with each inhale, and tries to meet Tim’s eyes but Tim doesn’t look up; Kon tries to speak, to say Look at me, please, and breaks out coughing instead. “Hey, hey,” Tim says nonsensically, one hand slipping around to cradle the side of Kon’s head, keeping him upright. And even though everything else is different and objectively horrible, Kon still thinks—they’ve done this before, Tim’s hand soft on his face like this. Tim as Tim, and Robin as Robin, touching Kon not like he’s breakable, but like he isn’t and the gentleness still matters.

Then Tim’s other hand stills on the collar, and he hisses through his teeth. “f*cker has it number-locked. No time to hack it, I can’t—okay.” His hands are shaking against Kon’s skin. He opens his mouth, closes it. Sways forward and presses his forehead to Kon’s temple for an endless, lightning-quick second before pulling back. “Okay. New plan.”

Tim’s hands are gone, and Kon is freezing. He tracks Tim with his eyes as Tim hauls himself back over to Cadmus guy’s prone form, digging through his pockets. “Ah,” Tim says, and Kon sees a flash of silver in his hand—the little remote the guy used to trigger the zeta. “This is—the platform’s still intact. I can reprogram it. It’s just—we need power.”

Power. Something prickles in Kon’s mind, the reminder of an irritant that isn’t attached to his shivering body. The lights went out, the computer went dark, but that incessant ringing hasn’t stopped. “The noise machine,” Kon rasps. “The generator.”

“Yes,” Tim says. “Yes, he rigged it so it can’t turn off, but if we hook it up to—that can—we can do that.”

Kon starts to push himself over to help, but the world wobbles and Tim is suddenly next to him again, hooking Kon’s arm around his shoulder. He pulls Kon to the center of the platform, catching pained noises between his teeth when they jostle his broken shin, but not pausing for a second. Kon doesn’t know how Tim is managing without even a splint on his leg, but Kon is also losing time between blinks as Tim settles him next to the first overturned light. He sees Tim look bleakly at Cadmus guy and then kick the guy’s feet off the platform with his good leg. Blink. Tim is ripping cords from the wall and dragging them to the generator across the room. Blink. Tim has Cadmus guy’s little remote in hand as he attaches one of the cables to the generator, wiry veins running across the floor to the platform. Blink. There’s a slight whir under Kon, a vague sense of power stirring in the platform mechanisms.

“Got you,” Tim says. And doesn’t move.

Kon, despite all evidence to the contrary tonight, isn’t f*cking oblivious. “Rob,” he says. He tries to leverage himself up, arms buckling before he even gets halfway. And—his left arm is stuck. He blinks again, staring at his wrist, now zip tied to the overturned light pole. His fingers are curled around something thin and black—Robin’s mask.

A horrible, cold dread seeps through his gut. “Robin.”

“There’s a zeta prototype at WE.” Tim’s head is tilted down, concentrating on the remote, keying something in with trembling fingers. The whole basem*nt shakes again as he speaks, a crack splintering across the ceiling. “Tube, not platform, but it should be recognizable as an output location. You’ll be safe there.”

“No,” Kon says, and his voice f*cking breaks. He tugs at his hand, the downed floodlight not budging. “Robin. Tim. Come here. Please.”

“There’s barely enough power in this to transport one person,” Tim says evenly. “I’ll figure something out. And if I—if I don’t. Tell Batman the guy’s lab is probably in Wilmington. Someone should clear that out. And, um. Tell him I said this wasn’t his fault, okay? That I would have—that I would have stayed, if I could. And…tell Cassie the pizza tab should be good for a while still.”

“Stop.”

“And she’ll be a great solo team leader. And. Bart—”

“Stop.”

“And you. It’s not true, what he said. You’re not weak, not in any way that ever matters. You have to know that, you’re so—you’re so good. You’re the best of us, Kon.”

“Don’t,” Kon says through his teeth. He doesn’t have enough air to say the rest. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make me live with this. I’ll never forgive you if you make me live with this.

Tim finally meets his eyes, the briefest flash of blue in the dark. “It’s okay,” Tim tells him. “It’s okay. You know I’m not anyone special, not really.”

And then he hits the button.

Kon shatters apart. It feels like it’s happening to someone else, this soundless rush and blur and lurch. A moment free of pain. And then he’s whole again, light flaring around him and the world still spinning until he slams into something hard with a clatter and rain of glass particles. He can’t even feel the impact behind the surge of pain coming back, and he hurts and he hurts and he’s alone. It takes him a few endless seconds to form a coherent thought, to realize Tim did it. He’s somewhere new. The floor under his chest is cold tile, not metal. A bizarre circular structure flickers behind him, and this room is wide and dark and silent, full of utilitarian storage cases and bulky objects under tarps that blur in and out of focus as Kon blinks. It’s—

Back up. It’s silent. For the first time in ages there’s no generator, no horrible, muffling whine.

Kon sucks in a deep, stuttering breath, half his face still pressed against the floor. “Superman!” he screams, barely loud enough to fill the room. He breaks off, coughing. “Superman—help. Please.” He manages to roll himself over, staring at the distant ceiling. Something warm and wet tracks past his temple. He doesn’t have the strength to yell again, doesn’t have the air. “Clark,” he whispers, “please. Please.”

The tile shakes. There’s a faint groan of metal, an alarm blaring somewhere beyond this wide room, and then—a streak of red and blue in the dark. Kon’s breath hitches again; he’d sob if he had the energy, but it’s all he can do to drag himself back a bare few inches as Clark touches down in front of him. “Wait,” Kon chokes out, “don’t get—too close—”

“Kon,” Clark says, already reaching forward anyway. His cape still swirls around him from the sudden stop, and Kon sees him falter, sees his eyes widen in horror as he registers what he’s feeling. The kryptonite. “You’re—”

“Robin,” Kon says. “You have to help him. He’s. He said—just east of Trenton. There’s a building collapsing, there’s smoke. A basem*nt. He’s there. Go—Clark, please, you have to go now.”

Kon’s voice gives out on the last word, but he keeps pushing himself back. He doesn’t know if it’s the shrieking pain or the deadened senses or the general unspooling of his body but he misses whatever Clark does next; between blinks Clark is gone, and Kon is alone again.

The world spins. Kon tries to listen, tries to cast his useless hearing beyond this room or pull himself to the door but he just crashes against a wall of pain. Dull fire radiates from his neck and he feels like he’s going to fall through the tile and Tim is out there, Robin is out there, and Superboy is in here, latched to a pole with Robin’s mask still clutched in one hand. His other hand lifts to scrabble at the collar, bloody nails digging into his skin, and his ears ring, and ring, and ring.

Then: arms around him, lifting his head and shoulders off the floor. His hand is pulled gently from his neck and Kon jolts, fingers curling around the soft hem of a cape instead. “Robin…?” he breathes.

“He’s alive,” Clark says. It’s Clark—back, he must have come back. Now all Kon sees is the blue of his uniform; Clark has one hand pressing Kon’s face to his chest, cradling him, and Kon can feel Clark trembling. The kryptonite must be getting to Clark too, but he doesn’t let go, even though Kon is probably getting blood all over him. “I got him to a hospital. Batman is there. Kon, breathe. That’s it. That’s it.”

“The guy—he was from Cadmus, he—in there—”

“He won’t be hurting you again,” Clark says, voice hard. “Either of you. He—Kon. Match my—match my breathing. There, come on.”

Clark’s breathing isn’t so steady either, but Kon tries. “Robin’s really okay?” he gasps when he has enough air, and is immediately breathless again. It’s like the kryptonite is a physical weight on his windpipe. He can feel the way Clark is slipping sideways, struggling to hold them both up. Can hear the strain when he speaks.

“He’s okay. I swear,” Clark says, his voice far away. “And you will be, too. Okay? Just. Keep breathing.”

I swear, Clark said, and Clark wouldn’t lie. Not like that. Abruptly the rest of Kon’s strength leaves him, the negative space flooded by relief. “Clark,” he mumbles. “I think…something’s really wrong with me.”

“We’ll fix it,” Clark says. “I’m not letting anything happen to you, not again.” His voice is a rumble under Kon’s cheek. Safe. It’s a good place to be, somewhere safe.

A million miles away Clark is telling him to breathe again, and Kon tries, but it’s like there’s no room left inside him. He hears Clark saying something else, hears snippets that sound like cut off—meet me—tech lab—until the last words break off in a groan.

Clark can’t fly away like this, Kon thinks, head swimming. Can’t fight. By being next to Kon and the kryptonite collar, Clark’s making himself just as weak. But Clark doesn’t leave, just keeps holding Kon in this dark room until there’s another rush of air, and huh, that’s Wally West over Clark’s shoulder saying Oh sh*t, oh no, kid, and Clark saying Please, hurry, and then Kon sees a blur of blue and black as Nightwing unfolds from the shadows above them. He has a gleaming tool of some sort in his hand, saying, I’m sorry, Superboy, this is going to hurt for a moment but we gotta get this off you, okay?

Okay, Kon tries to say, but only hears these horrible little gasps that he thinks might be coming from him. His hand spasms on Clark’s cape, and Clark seems to know what he means, because a large hand covers his and squeezes. “It’s all right,” Clark says, strained but sure. “I’m here. It’s all right.”

All right, then, Kon echoes in his thoughts, and his eyes slip shut. There’s a far-off buzz, a flare of heat past the ice-cold burn of the collar. Someone calls his name, but Kon is too far, drifting away, the last pieces of him finally unraveling into the night.