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 shit)”) 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 cocks 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 basement 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 shit, 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 shitty 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 circumstances. 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, shit, 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 cocks 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 shit 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 fucked 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 shit. 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 shit,” 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, shit.”
“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 shit 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 fuck,” 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.