Chapter Text
A low, chemical heat suppurated beneath the old Super symbol hoodie Tim had dragged from the floor— a rag smelling of Conners’ stale-sweet sweat and oven-cooked tomatoes. Every time the mangled, raw-meat-colored ridges of flesh on his forearms stretched and cracked to reach the keys of his burner laptop, a metallic stench of copper and curdled bile flooded the back of his throat and tickled under his tongue.
He looked down, drawn to the ruins.
Slipping his fingers beneath the heavy cotton, he burrowed into the bubbled, weeping landscape of his chest. His fingertips sank against stiff, overgrown keloids that felt like bundles of writhing earthworms beneath the skin. The touch sent a sickening jolt of pins and needles up his hands, like raw nerves sparking against rusted wire. It wasn't pride, or even vanity, that drove his touch. There was a morbid, twitching compulsion to dig his nails into the deformities, just to confirm that the rot was still there.
Were they still there, lying in wait?
Were they a bumpy, gelatinous heap, weeping shades of bruised purple or a necrotic, fungal gray?
How violently raised, how tightly puckered did the cooked skin split and bunch across his bones?
He mapped the butchered hacks of amateur surgeries, the jagged trenches of battle wounds, and the self-inflicted gouges, treating his skin like a map of a rotting graveyard. His fingers pried at the scabs to seek the unnatural, sickening comfort of their physical permanence.
Below him, the stolen Wayne Enterprises laptop spat such an abrasive, chalky light into the deep, sunken hollows of his eye sockets that he looked like a skin-stripped corpse. Neon-green telemetry data cascaded down the screen, casting a sickly, gangrenous glow across his face—a dying digital tide he needed to organize before Gotham East went completely dark.
Without warning, his left hand seized. There were no warning tremors, just a sudden, wet snap as the fingers locked into a rigid, clawed spasm. It was the parting gift of a winter tendon laceration, lazily stitched together with dirty fishing line and no anesthesia. He forced his mind to command his index finger to press the trackpad, but the impulse dissolved into the dense, gristly gray scar tissue clogging his wrist. Tim stared down at the translucent, yellowed skin stretching uselessly over the locked joint, listening to the faint, grating click of bone rubbing bone. He felt nothing but a cold, tactical irritation, waiting for his broken, meat-and-tendon mechanics to liquefy and slide back online.
From the narrow, fluid-stained mattress behind the desk, the air curdled, thickening into a low-frequency hum before Conner even moved a limb. He did not wake with a human rise of breath or the gentle drift of consciousness. Instead, he simply clicked online—a heavy, non-human engine firing up in the dark, smelling of unwashed synthetic flesh. Behind his ribs, a dense, bio-engineered weight shifted like an iron block dragging through a sea of black bile. Every unblinking, mechanical expansion of his chest cast a suffocating sensory shadow through the small apartment. It was a distinct, heavy odor that smelled of charred wet tomatoes, sun-bleached plastic, and the sour, rotting stench of maggot-churned post-rain dirt.
Tim did not turn his head as the old floorboards groaned under the sudden, immense weight, which wasn't entirely out of choice. His neck vertebrae had locked into a stiff, calcified knot, trapping him in a shrimp-like hunch over the blue, flickering glow of the burner laptop. The agonizing strain radiated down his spine, a white-hot spike that throbbed with every heartbeat, but he forced his lungs to take shallow, agonizing breaths, desperate to keep his important organs from shifting against his ribcage. He felt them slide softly against each other, hyper-aware of there movements. Already, the intense, feverish heat radiating from Conner’s malfunctioning, solar-filled cells was cooking the air, warming the flesh at the base of Tim's skull from pure proximity, making the fresh scabs there soften and run into sticky yellow droplets.
Exhaustion flowed through Tim’s jaw, forcing it open in a wide, clicking yawn that made the hinges pop and grind, tearing the freshly healed fissures at the corners of his mouth. Three seconds later, mimicry followed. A cavernous yawn tore out of Conner’s throat involuntarily, sounding like a tear of wet leather.
Conner stumbled through the cramped space, navigating the dark with the clumsy momentum of a creature still learning how to weigh his own overgrown limbs. He went through the sluggish phases of wakefulness, his eyes glassy and unblinking, his skin sloughing off the heavy dregs of sleep like shedding a translucent, slimy outer layer of dead tissue that fluttered to the floorboards.
"Your hand is doing the, uh, thingy again, babe," Conner murmured. The words dragged through a throat lined with low, thick gravel, heavy with the sediment of an unnaturally deep, chemical slumber.
Tim kept his right index finger pressed brutally hard against the corner of the trackpad, trying to force a compilation through the scrolling green error codes, ignoring the dead weight of his left arm. The pressure caused a pocket of trapped pus beneath his fingernail to throb violently, but he welcomed the pain—it meant the nerve was still trying to knit itself back together. "It's fine," Tim hissed, his voice thin, dry, and rattling with flecks of dried sputum. "It's barely a five-second lag. If I drop the partition now, the Watchtower might not see the local drain."
Conner leaned closer, his breath hot enough to blister the peeling skin on Tim's cheek. He reached out, his thumb nudging the useless, clawed mass of Tim's left hand. Tim twitched weakly as the blunt force ground the locked tendons together, a sickening wet crunch echoing from his wrist, but he leaned his body weight gently into the touch, using Conner's unnatural body heat to soothe the deep, icy ache in his marrow.
"Tim," Conner mumbled, his voice vibrating right through each inflamed notch of Tim's bad spine, making the marrow jolt. "Your knuckles look like frozen tallow."
He wasn't wrong. Tim’s hand had been drained of all healthy color for a while now, the skin stretched so violently tight over the locked joints that the bones looked yellow-white, slick, and fatty beneath the surface, as if the flesh were turning to soap. The fingers remained rigid, fixed in a fossilized claw that refused to acknowledge the brain's constant commands, though a faint, involuntary twitch in the pinky finger signaled a pathetic, desperate attempt at cellular healing.
Conner sank to his knees beside the wooden chair, his broad shoulders dwarfing the small desk. He moved with a clumsy, heavy density—that of a boy engineered for vast, open suns and fields of grass he had never been allowed to touch, now trapped in a four-hundred-square-foot East End flat that smelled of their collective decay. His broad, almond-colored fingers reached past Tim’s shoulder, his knuckles slightly swollen and oozing a clear, golden serum from the atmospheric displacement that followed his resurrection just a couple months ago. He intercepted the heavy, unlabeled ceramic jar on the edge of the desk, which gave off a rancid, choking odor of raw mutton fat and strong, bitter menthol meant to deaden the screaming nerves of Tim's ruined body.
Damian had dropped by a bit ago, dragging in copious, heavy vats of that foul-sweet minty ointment to butter over Tim's sloughed scarring with. Conner scooped out a slippery dollop of the paste. His hands were broad against the fragile, blue-veined parchment of Tim’s forearm, feeling the frantic, hyper-oxygenated blood pumping irregularly beneath.
As Conner’s palm came down, he meant for the impact to be a soft, deliberate hesitation. But his powers were a volatile, uncalibrated mess since the whole Wayne gallery Lazarus mess. Instead of a gentle touch, his hand struck with a heavy, concussive thud. The raw force rippled through Tim’s forearm, sending a sickening, wet vibration straight up to his shoulder.
Instantly, Tim’s stomach violently revolted. A sudden, crushing wave of nausea hit him so hard his vision went entirely black. The world tilted, and a hot, acidic surge of bile and curdled tea rushed up his throat. He gagged, his body convulsing in a sudden heave as he tried to swallow down the vomit, his chest heaving violently against his locked ribs. Beneath his tongue, the taste of old copper coins in Gotham gutters and cheap, bitter cloves lunged out, heavy, metallic, and utterly sickening.
"Oh, fuck— Tim, I’m sorry," Conner choked out, his eyes widening with a flash of panicked, boyish terror. "Did I break it? Did I split the bone or something?"
"Don't... don't move," Tim wheezed, his voice a thin, dry rattle as he forced the nausea back down, his teeth catching a dry flake on his split bottom lip until it tore, filling the cracks with a tiny bead of dark, sluggish blood. The agony of the impact sent a sharp, sunset-yellow flash behind his left retina— a high-pitched screech of a nervous system so fried it processed pain as a chemical color. "Just... stay still. Keep the heat there."
Conner breathed out a shaky sigh, his broad thumb beginning to trace slow, clumsy circles around the deep, purple-red bite marks near Tim's radial vein. The scars were horrific, permanent, jagged ridges left from those agonizing nights in the Cave where Tim had tried to gnaw his way through his own flesh just to stop the mess of Subject-13-green revolting in his head. As Conner massaged the minty grease into the tissue, his uncalibrated strength pressed a fraction too deep.
With a wet gurgle, the old, poorly healed skin began to give way under the immense pressure. Trapped pockets of yellow fluid and stagnant, old blood beneath the scar tissue broke free, bursting outward to fraternize with the silver ointment in a slick, mottled paste. Neither of them stopped. Conner just casually smeared the mess back across Tim's skin, his thumb smoothing out the ruptured flesh with a strange, domestic tenderness.
"You're completely wasting your time," Tim muttered, though his heels dug hard into the rungs of the chair, his skeletal frame shuddering.
Conner’s snarky smirk teased at the corner of his lips— a tiny glimpse of the cocky boy who used to wear a leather jacket in the sunlight, even if a dark, constant grief still swallowed his blue eyes. "Shut up," Conner murmured, leaning down to press a warm, chapped kiss against Tim's weakly sweaty temple. "I have a lot of solar energy, sweet bird. I can fry the bad nerves if I want to."
Tim was too stiff, his joints utterly ruined from self-enforced trauma and starvation, collapsing inward like wet, cracking clay. But as Conner pulled him close, his finnicky, resurrected muscles surged without warning. His large arms wrapped completely around the caved-in pit of Tim’s ribs and squeezed with terrifying, accidental super-strength.
Tim’s breath was violently blasted out of him. A loud, sickening series of pops echoed out as his lower ribs groaned, shifting and grinding uncomfortably against his sternum under the immense pressure. Air bubbled fruitlessly in his throat.
"Conner—!" Tim choked out, his spots and stars dancing in his eyes again. "Ribs. Ribs."
"Shit! Sorry, sorry!" Conner gasped, immediately loosening his grip, though he still kept his arms locked around Tim like a vice, shutting out the cold, indigo light of the window entirely. He buried Tim in a dark, feverish world made only of Conner’s suffocating heat and the coppery smell of his own breaking skin.
"Mmm… too hot," Tim whispered into Conner’s collarbone, his body turning to jelly against his chest. His throat was a dry, unwashed line of nic, but he leaned his forehead against Conner's neck anyway, tracking the inhuman thrum of his heart. It didn't sync with a human pulse, maintaining a low, mechanical, heavy engine rattle. "You're baking me."
"I know, I know," Conner murmured affectionately against the greasy, black strands of Tim’s hair, his lips brushing the crown of his head. He continued to work the silver grease into the scarred forearms. His thumbs smoothed out the rough, pinecone-like scales of the ruined tissue, working the ointment deep into the fascia. The heat from Conner’s hands was almost agonizing, cooking the meat of Tim's arm until the locked tendons began to give way with a wet, melting sensation.
To help the stubborn nerve drop dissolve, Conner gathered Tim’s rigid, tallow-colored left hand in his broad palm. With an easy, casual tenderness, he began to manipulate the frozen claw. He pressed his massive thumb against the base of Tim's knuckles and bent them back one by one.
The resistance was horribly stiff. The yellowed skin stretched to a translucent, weeping thinness, leaking clear fluid before the joints finally gave up. A series of loud, wet cracks echoed in the small space like dry twigs snapping underwater as the calcified knots shattered.
Tim let out a sharp, breathless gasp that ended in a shaky, satisfied sigh, his body instantly losing all tension in Conner’s lap. The fossilized stiffness washed away, leaving his fingers loose, trembling, and safely drowned in Conner's grip.
"If you get any paler, I'm telling Bruce you skipped your PT," Conner teased softly, his voice a low, rumbling vibration against Tim's ear as he gently massaged the newly loosened, slick fingers. "And I'm telling him you're using his burner to look at old blueprints and shit instead of sleeping."
"Bruce doesn't check the logs," Tim sighed, his right hand relaxing as the nerve drop in his left forearm dissolved under the lather. He didn't move away from Conner's chest. He let his face sink deeper into the crook of Conner’s shoulder, where the skin smelled faintly of the rain outside, old sweat, and the raw, heavy zinc of the vats. "He stands in the study with the lights off for four hours at a time trying to remember if Jason was left-handed or right-handed when he wrote his last report."
Conner’s hands faltered for a fraction of a second. His grip tightened around Tim’s narrow waist again, that protective, terrifying firmness making Tim’s lungs squeeze. "Jason’s dead, Tim. And I'm back. Stoppppp being so difficult."
"I'm notttt," Tim mumbled, his eyes fluttering shut as the warmth of the clone's solar matrix settled deep into his marrow, turning the winter dust and rotting blood in his veins into something soft, warm, and happily paralyzed.
Conner didn't answer. He simply buried his face in the damp, feverish hollow of Tim’s neck, his lips dragging across the sticky layer of silver mint ointment and sloughing skin. He kissed the clammy flesh with a desperate hunger, his breath hot against Tim’s throat. Then, his teeth thoughtfully caught a small, raised ridge of fibrous scar tissue right above the collarbone.
The gesture was clumsy with loveliness, fraught with the immense, crushing weight of what it had cost to drag both of their broken souls back to this four-hundred-square-foot room. He bit down. Not enough to violently tear open the flesh— but he pressed hard enough to make the poorly healed, stratified layers of old skin slide against each other with a soft, internal acoustic movement.
Tim let out an affectionate whimper, leaning heavily into the bite. He wanted the pain if it came from Conner.
When Conner finally pulled back, he left a faint, dark purple contusion leaking a tiny, slow-blooming bead of dark, sluggish blood. It looked like a seed dropped into wet mulch. With casual devotion, Conner leaned back in and licked the metallic, iron taste from the wound, his tepid, thick tongue acting as a soothing balm against the stinging tear.
Tim decided to test his freed working hand. His left arm felt heavy, like a fluid-filled sack of loose gravel, but the calcified stiffness in his wrist had dissolved. Slowly, deliberately, Tim lifted his hand, the slick, silver mutton grease coated his skin, making his fingers look wet and translucent in the flickering blue glare of the Wayne Enterprises laptop.
He didn't reach for the keyboard this time. Instead, he brought his hand down to Conner's waist and moved along it, sending ticklish sparks up and down the nerves of Conner's back.
Tim promptly pressed his other palm flat against Conner’s jawline. His calloused fingertips traced the sharp, heavy bone structure of the clone's face, sliding over the smooth, thick skin that always felt just a little too hot to be entirely human. Tim's thumb pushed gently into the corner of Conner's lips, tracing the edge of that familiar, arrogant smirk. He smeared a faint streak of the silver ointment across Conner's cheekbone, mapping his features like a blind man confirming a miracle.
Tim's fingers curled gently into the short, thick hairs at the nape of Conner's neck, pulling faintly. He used his newly restored grip to pull Conner closer, digging his blunt fingernails into the thick, dense muscles of his shoulders.
Conner leaned into the touch of Tim's hand, closing his eyes as a low, rumbling hum vibrated deep within his chest. The sound was comforting, like a heavy engine idling in a warm garage. Conner murmured indistinctly against Tim's palm, his lips brushing the slick, medicated skin of Tim's fingers.
With a sudden, needy movement, Conner shifted his weight, pressing his broad chest directly against Tim's caved-in ribs again. Tim's newly freed left arm wrapped completely around Conner's neck, his slick forearm locking against him. For the first time in months, Tim wasn't just a passive, decaying weight being tended to now, he was actively holding on, his fingers twisting into the fabric of Conner's shirt, pulling him down onto the narrow, fluid-stained mattress with him. The laptop was all-to forgotten now, its cascading blue telemetry data throwing a sickly, gangrenous glow across their tangled, sweating bodies as they sank into the dark, feverish warmth of each other.
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The heavy, suffocating warmth of Conner’s body was a brief, paralyzing mercy. For a few minutes, Tim remained pinned beneath him on the mattress, completely submerged in the thick, synthetic heat radiating from the clone's core. Conner stayed perfectly still, intentionally anchoring Tim's skeletal frame into the sagging mattress, letting the steady, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of his iron heart vibrate straight through Tim's rumpled spine. Underneath them, the stained sheets groaned, slick with a gross mixture of sweat and the colorless tissue serum kinda leaking from Tim's chest. The silver-mint paste was already beginning to cool, hardening into a sticky, gray film that glued Tim's broken wrists flat against Conner's broad, unyielding pectoral muscles.
Conner liked him right there. He liked knowing exactly where Tim was, keeping him contained, safe, and heavily weighted against the floorboards. But the domestic quietude was always a temporary skin for a creature built for open sky. With a sudden, wet shluck of suctioned flesh parting from flesh, Conner disentangled himself. The loss of his heat was instantaneous and brutal. The air in the flat turned ice-cold against Tim's damp torso, the violent thermal drop causing the fresh bite mark on his collarbone to pucker and ooze a slow, sticky yellow serum.
"Don't move," Conner muttered, his voice a low, gravelly scrape that sounded raw from his resurrection. He was quickly on his feet, his massive, dark-eyed silhouette blocking out the green glare of the dying laptop.
"Where're you going?" Tim said sadly.
"Shh, just stay there," Conner said, a flash of stubborn, boyish frustration crossing his face. His powers surged in his agitation, his bare feet leaving faint, singed patches on the linoleum as he stepped toward the fire escape. "You're breathing like a broken accordion, I can hear from here."
Before Tim could argue, Conner was gone, sliding out the narrow window and vanishing into the sulfurous Gotham downpour.
Left alone, the apartment felt cavernous and rotting. Tim lay paralyzed by the cold, his skin turning a translucent, bruised purple as the mint ointment stiffened like dried glue over his knuckles.
Some minutes later, the window rattled violently. Conner dropped back onto the floorboards with a heavy, uncalibrated thud that made the entire desk shake. He was panting, his curling black hair plastered to his forehead, his bare chest slick with rain that literally sizzled and hissed as it rolled over the glowing-green coolant scars tracing his chest. The cold rain was evaporating off his skin in faint, ghostly plumes of vapor. His resurrection had left his internal thermals completely busted.
In his palm, protected from the downpour by the bulk of his hand, were two soaked packs of unrefined cigarettes and marshmallows from the 24-hour bodega four blocks down. He’d torn the storefront awning a little getting them, his finicky strength failing to gauge the distance, but he hadn't dropped 'em.
Conner sank back onto the edge of the mattress, the wood sighing under his weight. He brought the wet smell of ozone, city exhaust, and sweet rain with him, instantly overriding the rancid smell of the ointment from Damian.
"You're crazy," Tim murmured, staring up at him through the dark.
"Yeah, well, you're starving," Conner rumbled back, his eyes tracking the frantic pulse in Tim's neck. He pulled a single cigarette from the damp paper, his fingers looking monstrous against the white paper. He pinched the tip between his thumb and index finger, forcing a localized, atmospheric spark from his uncalibrated solar matrix.
Snap.
A tiny, violent solar flare hissed from his skin, scorching the air with the smell of burnt hair before the tip of the cigarette caught, a thin, dim orange flower blossoming between them in the dark room. Conner carefully placed the dry, warm filter between Tim’s split, parted lips. His thumb lingered for a second, gently wiping a smear of sluggish blood from Tim's chin with a domestic tenderness that felt entirely too soft for a boy engineered for war. Conner's blue eyes glowing faintly in the reflection of the cherry ember.
"This will help?"
"You are fan-fucking-tastic," Tim said, his voice growing into something almost dreamily soft as he looked up at the wet-haired, panting clone hovering over him.
Tim closed his eyes and pulled the harsh, asphalt smoke deep into his mess of a sternum, his chest expanding with a familiar, dry rattle. The heat of the smoke spread through his lungs, a welcome poison that masked the lingering taste of the old coins at the bottom of a bag.
Conner let out a low huff, leaning down until his forehead rested against Tim's sticky, ointment-stained collarbone. He gently plucked the cigarette back from Tim's lips, holding it away so the smoke wouldn't drift directly into Tim's eyes. With his other hand, he ripped open the plastic bag of marshmallows, accidentally tearing the bag completely down the seam, sending a few fluffy white cubes tumbling onto the stained sheets.
He wrapped his massive, rain-chilled arms around Tim's waist, pulling him back into the furnace of his chest. "We're such a mess," he mumbled with a soft laugh into the skin of Tim's neck, his grip tightening just enough to make Tim's lungs tumble happily.
Conner picked one up, his rough fingers squeezing the marshmallow until it deformed into a flat, sticky puck. He carefully guided it to Tim's mouth, pushing it past his split lips right after the smoke cleared. "Eat. I know you won't touch the protein shakes I buy, but you'll swallow these sugar clouds. Don't lie to me."
Tim chewed slowly, the intense, artificial sweetness shocking his unwashed mouth, masking the copper and cheap cloves. A faint, real smile tugged at the corner of his lips before he swallowed. "You remembered."
"Of course I remembered," Conner said, half smiling.
He set the cigarettes down, keeping his gaze locked on Tim. "I hate that I just ran through a downpour to get you something that's actively killing you from the inside out. But your hands shaking so bad that I can hear your fingernails tapping against the desk from the other side of the room makes me crazy. And you need calories, even if they're just stupid, squishy sugar cubes."
Tim let out a slow, smoky exhale, his head sinking deeper into the damp pillow. "It dulls the wire."
"Yeah? Well, look at me," Conner murmured. He leaned in closer, forcing Tim to meet his eyes through the dim, gangrenous light of the laptop screen.
Tim’s eyes drifted down to the glowing-green coolant lines carved into Conner’s torso— the brutal tracks left by LexCorp machinery during his agonizing resurrection process. The skin there was bubbling faintly with solar heat that hadn't quite settled into his DNA.
"My body still doesn't even know how to be alive right now," Conner whispered, taking Tim's newly loosened left hand and placing it flat over his heart. Tim’s oily, grease-covered fingers sank against the boiling heat of Conner's skin, feeling the heavy, erratic thud of an engine still misfiring. "I've been crushing things, accidentally. I practically ripped the awning at the bodega just trying to grab these stupid marshmallows for you. I'm denting the floorboards just by walking. I'm so terrified that one day I'm going to squeeze you to hold you tight and I'm just going to break your bones in half. But I am trying. I'm fighting every single second to stay anchored here. For you.
"Conner..."
"No, really, listen to me," Conner interrupted, his voice cracking with a stubborn vulnerability. He picked up another marshmallow, letting it into Tim's mouth before speaking again, his own bare palm still holding the snuffed-out cigarette cherry he crushed. His skin hissed, but Conner didn't even wince. "You're spending all your time fixing Gotham, running partitions, and staring at blueprints like you're trying to build a world where… you don't have to exist anymore. You're letting yourself decay still because you think it's easier than healing. I know it's easy. I know how hard it was last Winter. But if I'm fighting this hard to keep my stupid, bio-engineered body from falling apart... you have to try too. You can't just let the it win."
A heavy silence fell over the small flat, broken only by the steady, rhythmic pouring of the Gotham rain against the windowpane. Tim chewed the marshmallow, the soft, gelatinous texture sweet against his tongue. He stared up at the clone, the smoke curling around his face like a shroud. Slowly, the icy, tactical detachment in his eyes seemed to crack. He pulled his hand up from Conner's chest, tracing the lines and old wounds.
"I don't… know how to heal anymore, Kon," Tim whispered, his voice thin, dry, and terrifyingly honest. "Every time I try to stand up straight, my bone clicks. Every time I think about the future, my head just fills up with that green noise from the Cave. It feels like the universe brought you back perfect... and left me behind as a corpse."
Conner leaned down, pressing his forehead firmly against Tim's, his hot breath mingling with the sweet nicotine smoke and vaniglia marshmallow scent between them. He wrapped his heavy arms around Tim, pulling their sweating, sticky bodies together until there wasn't a single millimeter of space left between them.
"You're no corpse," Conner swore against his lips, his grip tightening with that dangerous, protective intensity that made Tim's lower ribs groan. "And I'm not perfect. But we're doing it together. If I have to be the furnace that melts the ice in your marrow every single night, I will. But you're staying alive. Do you hear me? You're staying right here with me. Because you'll always be my Robin."
Tim closed his eyes, his body losing its defensive rigidity as the massive, suffocating warmth of the clone completely enveloped him, turning the winter dust in his veins into something soft, warm, and happily paralyzed in the dark, surrounded by the faint scent of rain, mint, and spilled marshmallows.
"And you'll always be my clone boy."
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The clock on the wall groaned, a rhythmic plastic friction that kept time with the heavy, uncalibrated engine thrumming inside two impaired rib cages. The short, dead space of sleep had left their small East End flat smelling less like a sanctuary and more like a butcher’s shop at closing time— the thick, lingering stench of fat, the cloying, synthetic vanilla of lost marshmallows, and the sharp, vinegar-y tang of Tim’s weeping keloids. When Conner opened his eyes, the room was a gray soup of dawn and sulfurous Gotham downpour. The sheets were cold where he had shifted away, but Tim remained exactly where he had been dropped, a skeletal, bruised silhouette pinned under the heavy dregs of a chemical exhaustion that felt entirely too close to a corpse.
Conner sat up on the edge of the mattress, the old springs giving a loud, metallic shriek under his dense, resurrected mass. He was still processing the weight of his own limbs, his super-senses a volatile wire that buzzed behind his retinas. His chest, marked by those translucent, bubbling LexCorp coolant scars, flared a faint, angry neon green as he took a deep, dragging breath. He looked down at Tim. Tim’s body was a landscape of butchered skin and rigid, yellow-white joints, but as the light filtered through the grimy window, Conner noticed something different. A minute, microscopic shift.
On the milk-crate nightstand, right next to a crumpled, grease-stained cigarette pack, sat a small plastic blister pack of Depakote. One of the silver foil backings had already been torn open by a ridged fingernail, leaving a jagged little tooth of metal behind.
The lavender-colored pill was gone.
Conner stared blankly. Tim hadn’t hidden it under his tongue or dropped it into the floorboards. He had just taken it. He lay there, his jaw slightly less locked than it had been at midnight, Conner felt a heavy knot of relief tighten in his own throat.
"You're awake?" Conner said.
Tim didn't open his eyes, but his right index finger twitched against the sheet. "I can feel the grid dying from here. It's like a cold wire pulling out of my neck," Tim whispered, his voice thin, dry, and rattling with flecks of dried sputum.
"The grid is fine. I think you're just crashing," Conner said, leaning back over the bed. He hated the way Tim’s brain worked when the cycles hit the gray, stagnant mud of a depressive floor. When Tim was up, his fingers would fly across the trackpad until the skin on his knuckles split and leaked clear fluid, talking about blueprints and partitions like he could rebuild the Wayne empire with dirty fishing line.
Or, sometimes he'd just lay there, convinced his blood was turning to liquid lead.
Conner reached out, his massive, broad fingers carefully picking up a squishy, lint-covered marshmallow from the sheets, tossing it to the bedside trash bin.
"Eat that trash I got'ya, sweetness. It's too early for the phantom nerve stuff."
Tim’s eyes fluttered open, their dark circles so deep and hollowed out against the harsh morning light that his eye sockets looked like two empty bullet holes. He didn't pull away from the sticky touch. Instead, his newly loosened left hand moved with a tiny, fluid grace, unlocked and unfossilized. He reached up, his greasy, translucent fingers wrapping around Conner's wrist, his calloused thumb gently tracking the thick, boiling pulse point where Conner''s hyper-oxygenated blood rumbled beneath the surface.
"You're too hot," Tim murmured, but his grip stayed firm. "Your cells gotta still be leaking radiation, Kon. If I had the laptop up, I could map your thermal decay. We could fix the partition in your marrow."
"My marrow doesn't need a partition," Conner sighed, but he let Tim hold his wrist, leaning his heavy chest forward until the heat of his scars was cooking the raw skin at the base of Tim's neck, softening the crusty scabs until they ran in warm, sticky yellow droplets. "You took the meds, right? I saw the foil."
"Took 'em," Tim said, a faint, almost imperceptible pride softening the ice in his gaze. "Have Alfred pencil that into my chart."
Before Conner could shoot back a snarky comment, the high-pitched, crystal-clear chirp of an encrypted satellite phone cut through the wet patter of the rain. The phone was buried deep under a pile of Conners’ stale, mildewed sweatpants on the floor.
Conner groaned, his powers surging in irritation as he reached down, his fingers accidentally crushing a corner of the wooden floorboard into kindling before he managed to fish out the vibrating plastic block. The screen read Penny-one.
Conner flipped it open, "Yeah?"
"Master Kon-El," Alfred’s voice came through the line, but the usual, immaculate crispness of the old man’s tone was entirely gone. It was frayed, heavy with an ancient fear that made the speaker clatter with static. "I... I am checking the local network monitors for the East End. The data has gone dark. Is Master Tim... is he still breathing?"
Conner looked down at the cadaverous boy currently digging his blunt fingernails into the clone’s forearm, searching for the comfort of Conner's physical permanence. "He's fine, Alfred. He's a total mess, and he smells like a dead sheep, but he's here."
A long, shuddering exhale came from the other end of the line— the sound of an old man whose lungs had spent too many years inhaling the damp, moldy air of the Batcave's morgue. "Thank god. Master Bruce is... he has been standing in the study with the lights off since midnight. He won't leave the room. If Master Dick comes down there..."
Alfred’s voice suddenly cut off into a sharp, metallic screech of scrambled frequencies.
"Alfred?" Conner breathed, his solar engine buzzing behind his breastbone with a dangerous, low-frequency hum that made the windowpane vibrate. "Alfred— line's breaking up."
"He's already there," Alfred’s voice flickered through one last time, a desperate whisper before the satellite connection died completely into a wall of white noise. "Dick has been— Conner— He— Do not let him—"
The phone went dead.
Conner slowly dropped the plastic block to the mattress, his blue eyes widening as his super-hearing picked up a sound that went entirely unnoticed by Tim's nervous system. Four flights down, the heavy steel fire-escape door had just been bypassed without a sound— a silent vacuum of air that only a Robin could manage.
"…Kon?" Tim asked, his eyes narrowing as he felt the sudden, terrifying rigidity return to Conner’s massive chest. "What'd Alfred say?"
Conner didn't answer. He didn't have time to.
A sudden, concussive crash shattered the quietude of the alleyway outside as the narrow window didn't just open— it was violently blasted off its iron tracks. The heavy glass exploded inward, raining a thousand glittering, razor-sharp needles across the linoleum and the foot of the mattress.
Through the roaring torrent of the sulfurous Gotham downpour, a massive, dark silhouette lunged into the small flat. The intruder didn't move with the cold, tactical irritation of a vigilante; he moved with the frantic, wild momentum of a rabid animal. The smell of old leather, heavy rain, and the high-altitude ozone of Blüdhaven’s rooftops instantly flooded the room, choking out the smokey-sweet smell lingering up in the air.
It was Dick Grayson.
His suit was torn to shreds at the shoulder, caked in dried, black blood and the gray grime of the river docks. His mask was pulled completely off, revealing eyes that were bloodshot, sunken, and wild with an agonizing desperation that looked closer to insanity than grief. He didn't look at Conner. He didn't even acknowledge the clone's glowing-green coolant scars or his bunching, defensive muscles.
Dick’s gaze locked entirely onto the bed. His chest heaved violently under his tactical armor, his jaw trembling as he took in the visceral ruin of the room—the sticky, gray film of mutton fat smeared across Tim's exposed, skeletal ribs, the purple contusions leaking yellow serum on his collarbone, and the giant, torn bag of spilled sugar cubes rotting on the sheets.
"Tim..." Dick choked out, his voice cracking into a shriek. He took a single, heavy step forward, his boots crunching loudly over the shattered window glass, his long, trembling fingers reaching out toward Tim's pale, motionless legs like a man trying to pull a corpse out of a flooding grave. "Oh god, Tim... what'd he do to you? What'd you do to yourself?"