Work Text:
The first time Tim saw Kon, he thought he was just some annoying brat he was forced to work with temporarily.
But then, they start to become friends and he feels like Kon is the closest person to him in his life. He has his dad, but he’s always been distant, and disappointed in Tim. He has Bruce, but he’s even more emotionally distant than his father. He has Steph, his girlfriend, but she doesn’t really “get” him, and looking at her doesn’t make his heart clench the way looking at Kon does.
Kon is his best friend and he’s perfect. They like the same music, the same movies, and everything comes so easily between them. They can talk for hours about everything and nothing, and Kon grins at him and sweeps an arm over his shoulders, and saves him when he’s in trouble, and makes him laugh, and smile, and makes his heart pound. He’s everything Tim daydreamed about as a child, a strong superhero there to sweep him off of his feet.
And Tim is fifteen and in love.
Kon starts dating Cassie and Tim breaks up with Steph. He loves Steph, really truly loves her, but not in the way she wants him to and Tim is not cruel.
Kon and Cassie are a perfect match. He is the son of Superman and she is Wonder Woman’s protegee, everything about them is compatible. They look great together and god Tim wants to hate Cassie for making Kon smile like that. But how could he? She’s making Kon smile like that.
And Cassie is his friend too. They’re not nearly as close as he and Kon, but she makes him laugh, and he knows she’ll be there if he needs her to be, and he’d do the same for her.
So as he watches them giggle and cuddle on the couch, he thinks he’s okay with this. He can die happy, as long as Kon and Cassie are happy. He can be a supportive friend, and watch them grow old together.
But then Kon dies, and Tim is filled with a pain that’s unimaginable. He had lost his father, friends, Stephanie; countless people he loved gone from his life. But this pain, this hurt, was agonizing, and he felt like his insides were being torn apart. He loves Kon, loves him so so so much. A world without him is too painful to bear.
So when Dick fires him as Robin, he pretends that’s the reason why Jason has to wrestle him off the top of the building and stares in shock at him and Tim just lies there, staring up at the Gotham sky.
Losing Robin hurt, it really really did. But at this point, it just feels like a side effect and bad things in his life. Compared to losing Kon, it feels like a papercut.
So he goes to Paris. He tries to clone his best friend, knowing it's wrong, but he’ll do anything, anything, just to see him one last time.
He kisses Cassie, on the floor of his lab. He doesn’t have feelings for her, he’s known he’s gay for a long time. But maybe, just maybe, he’ll get a taste of Kon on her lips, he’ll see all of the parts of her that remind him of Kon, he’ll make his life easier and fall in love with her. But he doesn’t. He does love her, but as a friend, never in the same way that he loves Kon.
When Kon returns, he’s almost so far gone that he doesn’t register it. But when he does, when he realizes that Kon is here alive, safe, here, alive, he feels like maybe the world isn’t so against him. Because Bruce is back, and he’s Red Robin now, and Kon is back and they can do everything just like they did before.
Things don’t go back to normal. Kon knows what Tim did while he was gone, how desperate he was to get him back. And while Kon isn’t the most observant person in the world, you’d have to be a complete moron to not realize why Tim did it, that his feelings go beyond normal friendship.
Kon doesn’t say anything though. He sends him guilty glances when he has his arm around Cassie at Titan’s tower while Tim sits alone a few spaces over. He doesn’t kiss Cassie in front of him anymore. And he doesn’t put his arm casually around Tim like he used to.
Tim is able to convince himself that it is for other reasons, that Kon is uncomfortable with the fact that Tim kissed Cassie, or he’s still messed up after returning from the dead.
And that little white lie is comforting to him. He knows that he can never have Kon, that Kon will never love him back the same way he loves him. But not acknowledging it, letting himself think that Kon doesn’t know helps him, with the shame, the rejection.
He thinks, maybe he can keep going on like this.
One day, as Tim is splayed out on Kon’s bed reading a book and Kon is faced away from him looking at his laptop, Kon brings it up.
“You should try to get back on the dating scene, y’know?” He says sheepishly, “There are plenty of girls dying to go out with you, why don’t you go out with one of them? Like Ravager maybe? She’s totally crazy about you.”
Tim’s heart clenches in his chest. He knew Kon to be oblivious, but never cruel. So maybe that’s why, in a cracked voice, the next words out of his mouth are “You know why.”
Kon freezes then, before sighing. “I know. I’m sorry. I wish I could-” he cuts off.
Tim feels tears prick at his eyes. All this time, all these years of loving Kon, he could get by with it being unsaid, even though he knew Kon knew. But here it was out in the open, acknowledged. This was a rejection.
Kon finally turns around and inhales when he sees Tim’s tears.
“Oh, oh. Tim.” he comes closer and puts a comforting hand on Tim’s shoulder, brushing his tears away with the other. “I never want to make you sad.”
That makes Tim cry harder. “But you do.” he wheezes out between sobs. “You make me sad all the time.”
Kom doesn’t say anything else, and neither does Tim. Kon just holds him, until Tim’s tears are expended.
Afterward, Tim buries himself in his work and avoids Kon for about a week. When he returns to the Titans tower, to Kon’s presence, they don’t acknowledge it and Kon continues treating Tim like it never happened at all, like they’re the same pair of best friends with equally platonic feelings for one another. Tim thinks he hates Kon just a little for that.
Tim is sitting at dinner with his family when he hears the news. Dick’s phone chimes and he gives out a little cheer when he glances at the screen.
“Kon and Cassie are getting married!” Dick happily exclaims. “Apparently Kon proposed just a few hours-”
Tim doesn’t hear anymore after that. He stares down at his plate, appetite gone. His peas seem to mock him as he notices the little heart formation they seem to have made on his plate.
He glances up and Dick is still talking. Tim stands up suddenly, drawing all eyes towards him.
“I need to go to the bathroom.”
Cas sends him a concerned look, Jason quirks his eyebrow, and Damian mutters under his breath something Tim assumes is insulting. But nobody stops him.
Bruce finds him a few hours later sitting on the edge of Wayne tower, looking down at the cars passing by. Tim is still in civies, the same suit he wore to dinner. Bruce is in his batman suit, but when he approaches Tim he pulls down his cowl.
“Are you okay?” Bruce asks hesitantly. He knows that Bruce isn’t the greatest at this stuff; emotions and being a father and all that. But he’s trying.
In lieu of an answer, Tim closes his eyes.
“I’m in love with him.”
Bruce doesn’t need to ask who or ask when or where or how or why. He just sits down next to Tim on the edge of the building.
After a few minutes of silence, Bruce speaks up again. “I know how you feel, what you’re going through.” He puts his hand on Tim’s shoulder is what is supposed to be comforting, but just comes off as awkward.
Tim scoffs at Bruce’s statement. He appreciated the attempt, but this is Bruce Wayne, one of the most successful men in the world. He’s a multi-millionaire, playboy, and genius. Tim is seventeen, lanky, and desperately in love with his straight best friend.
“No, really,” Bruce says quietly. “I... “ he pauses, and Tim has never heard him sound so unsure of himself. “Tim, you and I are a lot alike. Especially in how we feel about Kryptonians.”
Tim’s head shoots up to look at Bruce. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wanted to ask more, to clarify that Bruce was telling him what he thought he was telling him. But this is his father, and he knows him, hows he’s emotionally constipated he is and how painful he finds it to talk about his feelings. That statement is as close as Bruce will ever get to admitting he’s in love with Superman.
They sit at the top of the building for what feels like hours before Damian calls Bruce on his communicator and he silently grapples away.
On Kon’s wedding day, he tries to be happy, and to some extent, he is. These are his two best friends, and he’s genuinely thrilled that they’ve found happiness together. But that happiness is dulled by his own pain, flaring up in his chest whenever he sees them together.
It would be easier if he was in the pews, watching them get married in a crowd of others. He could turn his head away when they kissed, tune out their vows, and pretend he was somewhere else. But he isn’t that lucky. He’s Kon’s best man, so he’s by his side as he talks about how much he loves Cassie and kisses her with so much joy in his eyes that Tim is left breathless. He stands there, by Kon’s side as he marries someone else.
After the ceremony, after Kon and Cassie have departed for their honeymoon, Tim sits on the stone ledge in front of the parking lot behind the church, staring at the water pooling at his feet. He feels numb.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there when he hears footsteps approach. A heavy pair leading the group, which he identifies as Bruce, with two others behind him that he recognizes as Dick and Jason.
Dick is laughing, voice laced with tipsiness from the champagne, and Jason yells, “Hey, Timbo! What are you doing back here, Cas and Damian are already waiting in the car, we’re taking off soo-”
Bruce cuts him off, “Tim… Are you okay?”
And Tim can’t take it anymore. He looks up at Bruce and promptly bursts into tears. Dick and Jason go silent after a moment, he hears Bruce tell them to go wait by the car. They must be shocked, Tim thinks. They had seen him throughout many emotions; enraged, thrilled, annoyed, depressed. Even suicidal. But never like this, shaking with sobs and hysterically crying behind a church, so crushed by his own heartbreak that he can barely breathe.
Bruce comes up to him and takes a seat next to him. He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t need to. He just puts his arm around Tim’s shoulders and lets him cry.
In another life, when Tim tells Kon that he knows why Tim doesn’t have a girlfriend, he really won’t. And Tim will whisper that he loves him, and Kon will kiss him and will tell him that he loves him back.
They’ll tell his family, and it will be their engagement that Dick is excitedly raving about, and Bruce will look over at them and be proud and happy for them, touched when Tim asks him to walk him down the aisle.
It will be Tim’s eyes that Kon stares into as they recite their vows and Tim’s lips that he crashes into at the end of the ceremony. Dick will hoot and holler for them, and Jason will give him a congratulatory noogie, and Cas will hug him and call him brother, and even Damian will smirk up at him and tell them congratulations.
They’ll go on their honeymoon, and move in together, and eventually adopt children. When they die, they’ll be old and in each other’s arms just as in love as when they had their first kiss. And Tim will be happy.
But this is not that life.