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It’s Steph’s god-given right, after three straight weeks of putting up with Bat bullshit, to turn on her phone’s Do Not Disturb mode, get high, and put on a slasher movie. It’s not exactly therapy, but it’s what keeps her from following Tim’s lead and having a burnout-caused breakdown-turned-international incident. Which is totally a hundred percent the last thing anyone needs from her right now.
Steph’s a goddamn adult, so she climbs up on her kitchen counter to reach the top shelf of her cupboard and finds the bag of gummy bear edibles she bought last month while she was up in Blüdhaven. After finding the one she’s looking for, she slides back down off the counter. As her feet hit the ground a little too loudly, she sends a silent apology down to the people who live in the apartment below hers.
Carefully picking out a clear and a red gummy bear from the bag, she pops them into her mouth and then tosses the bag back onto her counter to deal with later. If she’d been thinking ahead, she would’ve grabbed these earlier when she found some for Tim, but she’d been kinda preoccupied trying to keep him from going full mad scientist in her living room.
The ex in question is crashed in her bed right now, near catatonic due to his own edible from earlier. He’s been watching history videos on an endless YouTube playlist for about three hours now. Besides his hand twitching when Kon showed up to take over babysitting duty, Tim’s been lying completely still as his brain processes the weed while still repressing the PR nightmare Tim had created.
Yet another reason why Steph deserves a night off. Letting Tim hide out at her apartment is basically setting a countdown timer for when one or more of the Waynes busts down her door to drag him back home. Add that to the fact that she’s leaving Tim and Kon in her room, unsupervised-- Steph is a saint. For real.
Having reminded herself of her general greatness, Steph picks up her water bottle and carries it with her to the couch, where she flops down and burrows into a comfortable position and presses play on the movie that’s already pulled up.
After a moment of staring unseeingly at the screen, she realizes she’s trying to eavesdrop on Tim and Kon. This is not only unethical, but it’s also inviting the possibility of overhearing some kind of romantic moment. Steph mimes gagging, just for her own amusement, and then cranks the volume until she’s hearing the vibey synth backing music instead of any potential sound from her bedroom.
The problem now dealt with, Steph tilts over sideways and leans her head on the arm of the couch and watches the screen, willing her brain to shut off.
Before it can, her bedroom door opens. Without lifting her head, she looks away from the screen to see Kon backing out of the room, carefully shutting the door in front of him as though his gentle attempt at not disturbing Tim will be at all effective with Steph’s movie turned up so high.
Kon turns and waves. He gives her a tired smile and greets in a low voice, “How’s it going.”
“So good,” Steph monotones, unwilling to put any extra energy into speaking. “How’s Tim?”
“He fell asleep.” Kon shrugs helplessly. There’s only so much one can do for Tim in the midst of one of his fits of insanity. “I felt creepy watching him, so.”
“Yeah, major Edward vibes.”
“Who?”
“Jeez,” Steph says with a little sigh. She always forgets he was a test tube baby two years ago. “We’ll watch Twilight sometime.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“It is.” She lifts one of her feet to point it at the empty end of the couch, beginning to invite him to join her for a while, but then she sees the empty black wrapper in one of his hands and her blood runs cold.
Sitting up so fast she knocks her water bottle to the ground with a clang of metal, Steph says, “Kon.”
“What?” he asks, frozen in place like a startled fawn.
“How many did you eat?” Steph demands, voice raising in pitch as she goes. She wants so very badly to break down in laughter, but this could honestly be a nightmare of an evening and she should save her hysterics for when she understands just how bad this is going to be.
“What do you mean, how many…” Kon starts to ask, put off by how aggressive she’s being, but then he trails off and his eyes widen, and they dart to the package in his hands. “Wait.”
Steph stands and hurries over to rip the package out of his grip. It is, in fact, completely empty. It had been full when she’d tossed it at Tim’s head earlier. Feeling that same counterproductive laughter threatening again to overcome her, she shoves it in Kon’s face for him to look at. “They’re twenty milligrams each. ”
For a long moment, Kon processes this, eyes scanning the front of the bag. Now that he’s confronted with it, he finally notices the big neon yellow square that discloses the THC content. His face does a slow sunrise into horror, draining the life from his expression until he looks like he’s next up on death row.
“Shit,” Kon says faintly. He mumbles his next words through the hand that he’s clamped over his mouth in terror. “Should I go try to puke?”
“How long have you been eating them?”
“Um, like…since I got here?”
So, almost an hour. Amazed at their bad luck, Steph laughs helplessly. “No, friend. It’s too late for you.”
Kon keeps staring at the empty package like he’s mentally drafting his will. “Maybe I’m immune. I’ve never smoked before, so I dunno, but it’s possible, right?”
“Maybe,” Steph says, trying to keep him from panicking too much, though she doubts that he’ll be completely spared. He gets drunk, after all--she knows this because she vaguely remembers being wasted and convincing an equally wasted Kon to let her do a body shot off of him. They’ve partied together, but she’s never been the one who was responsible for his general well-being after he goes off the deep end. That usually falls to one of his superpowered friends.
If Steph’s math is right, she has about half an hour before her own edible hits, at which point there will be three high people in an apartment and Steph will still have to be the responsible one present. She’s the most emotionally stable and the most experienced. It’s her curse.
Before she can say anything else, a moan from the TV interrupts her. Kon and Steph meet each other’s eyes, startled by the sudden sound. Kon looks like he’s screaming on the inside.
Another weird makeout noise takes over the living room. Involuntarily, Steph lets out a tiny snort. At Steph’s laugh, Kon starts snickering into his hand, and all of the mounting tension is cut in an instant.
Freed from her frozen moment of horror, Steph walks back over to find the remote. She turns the volume down so she and Kon aren’t listening to an IMAX surround-sound of the two main characters hooking up in a car.
Setting the remote back down, she promises, “You’ll get through this.”
“God,” Kon says, dread saturating his voice. “Are you sure?”
“Do you want me to ask around to see if Kryptonians have any kind of weed immunity?”
Kon starts laughing again. The edible must already be hitting; he’s much gigglier than she’s seen him before. “Ask who? Superman?”
“I mean if you want me to…”
“Absolutely not.” Kon’s dragging his hands down his face, turning his expression of despair into a Munchian mask of horror. “It would be fucking hilarious. Don’t do it though.”
“Okay.” He seems stressed enough without her introducing a daddy issues dynamic into this evening, anyway. Steph sinks back down onto the couch, near her original comfy spot. “Well, buckle in.”
Kon sinks onto the other end of the sofa, miserably resting his chin on his bent knees. “How long do I have?”
“You aren’t going to die,” she reminds him. “But it should be hitting any minute.”
He hugs his knees tighter to his chest and hides his face. “Fuck.”
“That’s on you for just eating any candy in sight.”
“Tim said I could eat them.”
“Tim’s not well.” And Steph has a creeping suspicion that Kon had just said something vague like “those look good” and Tim had mindlessly offered, “you can have some.” It was probably a very nonchalant conversation that didn’t involve Tim taking into account that his boyfriend is a dumbass.
Kon miserably emerges from his hiding spot and gives a guilty glance to the closed bedroom door where the aforementioned boy is resting.
“Just…get comfy. And don’t try to run around or anything. You can crash here until you’re sober.”
Kon nods. When he looks at her again, his eyes are definitely a bit glazed-over, more than they were when he first greeted her. With a sympathetic smile, Steph holds out her water bottle by the handle.
Kon accepts it, and confirms her suspicions that his mouth is already feeling dry when he chugs about half of it.
“Slow down there,” Steph says, watching him with the scientific curiosity of a field researcher.
As if he’d forgotten he was in the middle of drinking water, Kon startles, blinks, lowers the bottle. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Then his eyebrows furrow at something across the room and he asks, “The fuck is going on with that lady?”
Following his gaze, Steph sees that they’re at the part of the film where an old woman in a hospital gown is stumbling towards the camera, ignored by everyone around her.
“She’s invisible to everyone except the…main bitch.” Steph always forgets the main bitch’s name, and she’s a little scrambled right now.
“Why?”
“It’s an STD.”
Kon continues to watch, morbidly fascinated, as he screws the cap back on the bottle without looking.
“Are you scared?”
“No,” Kon says stubbornly.
“Sure.” Steph suppresses the smile that spreads too easily on her face. “Have you eaten anything recently?”
“Um,” Kon says. He looks away from the screen and down at his hands, as though they hold some kind of answer to her question. After a moment of pondering, Kon lights up and says, “Oh, yeah, I just--”
“Besides the edibles.”
“Oh.” Kon slumps and thinks again, stumped. Finally, he determines, “Yeah, I had dinner.”
At least he didn’t get fucked up on an empty stomach.
While Steph considers her next steps, Kon looks up and becomes re-entranced by the events of the movie. “Why do all these weirdos keep walking towards her?”
Steph turns her head and watches the creature staggering around. “It’s called It Follows. So it’s…following.”
“That’s all it does? It’s not called It Catches? ”
“No spoilers, but it sometimes catches.”
“Cool,” Kon says. He squints distrustfully at the screen.
“Do you want me to start it over so you understand?”
“No,” Kon quickly assures her.
One eyebrow raising, Steph asks, “Have you ever seen a horror movie before?”
“...I saw The Truman Show. ”
“Oh my god.”
Kon doesn’t appear to be too traumatized by the film yet, so Steph leaves it on. She keeps half her attention on Kon in case he starts having a panic attack, and then redirects the other half of her attention to ordering food on her phone. The Batburger nearest her apartment takes a while to deliver, so she needs to plan ahead a little if she wants to get a milkshake when she most needs it.
She doubles her normal order just in case Kon or Tim want some, and checks out her order to the sound of gunshots from the TV. As she presses her thumb on the screen to check the status of her order, Steph blinks and decides she’s definitely high now.
At the same time, in her peripheral vision, she sees Kon press a hand to the center of his chest with a weird look on his face.
“You good?” Steph asks, turning her phone off.
Kon breathes out a puff of air. A moment later, he lurches and exhales a tiny breath again, as though he’s forgotten where his lungs are.
“Hey, look at me.” Steph unfolds her legs so she can lean over and pat Kon’s arm. “It’s okay.”
Kon exhales again. She’s seen him do very little inhaling to balance any of this out. He looks sideways at her and whispers, “My chest keeps burning.”
“That’s because you aren’t breathing.”
Kon digs his fingers into his chest and his frown deepens. “Right.” Now that he’s remembered what he’s supposed to be doing, he manages a more normal breath and his expression clears a little bit.
After another minute or so, when she’s satisfied he won’t start spiraling, Steph pats his arm and then returns to her own space. “You’re doing great.”
“This is crazy,” Kon says faintly. After that, he gets distracted by the movie again and stops poking himself in the chest so intensely.
She’s never directly worked on a team with Kon. On rare occasions, they end up responding to the same emergencies, but the two of them have had next to zero reason to have to lean on each other in a pinch. This feels more vulnerable than seeing him drunk in the same bar Steph’s ended up at. It’s a step forward in their weird relationship that has previously revolved around their shared best friend.
Another few scenes pass. After the main character crashes her car into a cornfield, Kon perks up again and says, “This girl isn’t handling her STD very well.”
“How would you handle it?”
Without hesitation, like this is something he’s planned for years, Kon says, “I would fuck Tim’s dad to make him hate himself and then I would move to a different continent.”
Steph chokes on a sip of water as she inhales to scream in surprise. Doubling over, Steph gasps for air, feeling like she’s waterboarding herself.
Kon continues talking over her dry-drowning, unfazed. He’s turned sideways on the couch to lean against the back of it, sitting unnaturally still in a way that betrays how extremely stoned he is. “Can the demon thing swim across oceans?”
Steph wipes tears from her eyes and water from the front of her shirt. A few moments pass before she manages to rasp, “It can swim in a pool.”
“Okay. It’s pretty slow...I would get at least three months of time if I moved to, like, Egypt.” Kon frowns in thought. “Wait, isn’t this movie kinda screwed up?”
“More screwed up than fucking your boyfriend’s dad to kill him?” Steph asks. She mops at her chin with the bottom of her hoodie, clearing the last of her spilled water.
“That’s called weaponized femininity, I think.”
“It definitely isn’t.”
“But seriously, this is like, saying people with STDs are scary monsters. Right?”
“Yeah, I guess it’s kinda abstinence-only. But STD stands for ‘Sexually Transmitted Demon’.”
Kon makes a squeaking noise and then breaks into full laughter, eyes screwing shut with the force of it. The sound is infectious; Steph starts giggling too, pleasantly surprised by the warmth that spreads through her at the sight of Kon’s anxiety melting away. If she can keep him from going too deep into his head, maybe she can still make this a normal evening.
The two of them brave yet another sex scene without making awkward eye contact, which shows remarkable valor from both of them. By the end of it, though, Steph notices that Kon’s shaking.
She only hadn’t noticed earlier because they’re teensy little trembles. He has his arms folded across his chest tightly to hold himself still, but it’s not working that well. Steph is fending off her own chills with her sweatshirt and the sweater layered underneath, but Kon wasn’t prepared for this.
“Are you cold?” she asks. She didn’t think it was possible for him to feel cold, but this is a night of wonderful firsts.
Kon nods. His face is completely immobile, his eyes are half-lidded. She wonders what, if anything, is going on in his head right now. Knowing the general vibe of Young Justice, it’s probably only elevator music in there.
Steph stands and wobbles a little on her walk across the room. First, her brain fails to catch up with what her body’s doing, and then her brain surpasses the limitations of what she’s capable of physically. This outwardly manifests as her swerving in a wide arc instead of walking in a straight line. “Do you want a blanket or a sweatshirt?”
“Um, blanket.”
“Sweet. BRB.” Steph eases the doorknob of her room open to avoid any sound, just in case Tim’s still asleep. He’s harder to put down for a nap than a three month old baby and Steph doesn’t want Kon’s hard work to go to waste.
The two sources of light in her room come from her laptop screen and from her window, the latter of which is ajar to let in the sounds of people having an argument on the street below. Her laptop, open and still in use, casts grayish light over the outline of Tim burrowed under her covers, the only parts of him visible being his forehead, eyes, and the bump in the bridge of his nose.
He’s less of an insufferable dipshit when he’s asleep. He almost looks angelic. If Steph’s being honest, she misses having sleepovers with him. She and Tim have had a couple platonic sleepovers since their breakup, but it’s different now that he’s with Kon. It’s weird, even if neither of them are interested in each other anymore.
But Tim’s her ideal movie-watching partner, and he never objected to having his nails painted or returning the favor. He’s also the first person she ever felt safe falling asleep around. Even during the couple nights Steph has spent at Babs’s place, she hasn’t felt at-ease enough to doze off, but Steph had immediately been able to pass out whilst sharing a bed with Tim for the first time.
Steph’s been standing in her door frame for almost a minute now. She blinks and jerks herself into motion, leaving her reverie behind.
With a light push, she nudges her door closed far enough that the living room light stops hitting Tim’s face, and then she sets to work finding one of the folded blankets at the foot of her bed that isn’t trapped by one of Tim’s legs.
In the other room, the movie crescendos with screaming. Steph successfully extracts a fuzzy blanket and is draping it over her arm when she hears Kon call, voice low enough to not wake Tim, “Steph?”
Carefully, Steph leans over Tim to shut her laptop, then she tiptoes over to the door and closes it behind her before answering. “What?”
Kon’s gripping a throw pillow to his chest, staring in terror at the TV. His head is tilted to one side, like a dog picking up a high-pitched noise. “There’s someone coming up the steps of your building.”
“Maybe it’s the It Follows monster.”
“ Steph ,” Kon whines. His shaking has intensified. He looks like a chihuahua. “Don’t even joke about that.”
“You should’ve saved it for marriage, Superboy,” Steph says ominously. “Better go find Jack Drake before it’s too late.”
Kon frisbees the throw pillow at her. It slams into her gut and she catches it to swing it back down onto the top of his head. He latches onto it and tries to wrestle it away from her--he could probably rip it from her grasp if he flexed even a little of his superpowers--but Steph holds on with the tenacity of a bulldog.
“Is the implication that Tim got it from you?” Kon asks, gradually gaining ground in their tug-of-war.
“Yeah, and I got it from your mom.” Steph yanks the pillow towards her.
“I don’t have a mom, you bigot.”
“I can tell!”
Kon pulls the pillow from her hands with a sudden sharp movement. Before Steph can retaliate, Kon holds the pillow to his stomach like a shield and shushes her violently, one finger clumsily laid across his lips. “They’re coming closer .”
Maybe it was a mistake to leave him in a room with a horror movie. Oopsie-daisy.
Their visitor is almost definitely either a tenant or the Batburger delivery guy. Kon’s definitely just paranoid because he’s high, but Steph’s also not a good person, so she whispers like she’s terrified, “What do we do?”
“Is there any way to stop it?” Kon asks, his teeth chattering feebly. He’s still shaking. Steph dumps the blanket from her arms into his lap.
“No, unless you hook up with someone else and pass it on.”
Someone knocks on the door. Kon’s face takes on a terrified, ashen tone and he wraps himself up tight in the blanket. “Don’t answer it.”
On screen, people start screaming and firing guns at the monster. After turning the volume way down, Steph gives Kon a very condescending pat on the head and then goes to the door and unlocks it and pulls the chain off and swings it open.
The girl standing there gives a polite customer-service smile that melts into a more friendly one when she sees that Steph’s her age. Steph’s worked a delivery job and she knows that opening the door is always a mad roulette. “You’re Stephanie?”
“That’s me,” Steph says, accepting the bag of food and the cardboard drink tray with three milkshakes. “Thank you.”
“No problem, have a good night,” the delivery person says. God, she’s kind of cute. That may just be the intense need to make out with somebody that hits Steph when she’s a certain level of high, though. Steph’s certainly not getting any of that action from Tim’s boyfriend.
“You too.” Steph closes the door with her foot. Then she turns back to find Kon glaring at her.
“What?” she asks. “It wasn’t a monster.”
Kon wraps his blanket tighter around himself. “You’re a terrible person.”
“I literally got you curly fries.” Steph shakes the bag. “It’ll ground you.”
Kon doesn’t stop scowling, but he accepts a bag of fries when she puts it in his hand. He starts munching them by the handful.
Steph sets the rest of the food on the table, along with the tray of milkshakes. She takes one and flops back down on the couch, now closer to the middle cushion than the far left, and makes a near-sinful noise at the first taste of her drink.
With his mouth full of fries, Kon’s quiet for a while as they reach the end of the film. Steph meditates on the divine taste of the ice cream, soaking up the chill and the oversweetened milk chocolate.
“That movie wasn’t good,” Kon says.
“Banger soundtrack, though.”
“Oh, I wasn’t listening.”
Steph picks up the remote and turns the volume up, discovering that she never restored the sound after nearly muting it for the delivery person. They’ve been watching the last fifteen minutes of the movie without hearing any of the dialogue or music, without realizing.
“Oops,” Steph says, as Kon breaks down into furious giggling. “What do you want to watch now?” She starts scrolling through the suggested movies on the streaming app, but a lot of them are movies even more fucked up than the one they just watched and she’s worried Kon’s head will explode if he gets any more paranoid.
“I haven’t seen a lot of movies,” Kon admits.
“How about Ponyo?”
“Who now?”
Steph starts the movie without another word of discussion. Kon is immediately enraptured by the animation, giving Steph the opportunity to absolutely devastate the burger and fries she ordered for herself. She used to watch this movie every day for several months when she would be stuck in the childcare center at the hospital where her mom worked. This was one of three VCR tapes in the daycare and Steph and the other kids were obsessed with it. She still has most of the lines memorized.
“Do you ever feel like that?” Kon suddenly asks, long after Steph’s gotten distracted scrolling through her Twitter looking for people talking about Spoiler. Searching her mentions without being exposed to spoilers for literally every television program to ever exist is a harrowing task, but she needs to know the gossip or she’ll die.
Steph looks up, seeing a little chicken-legged Ponyo busting the hell out of her bubble. “Like what?”
Kon slurps his milkshake dispassionately, eyes glued to the screen. “Like, uh. I don’t know.”
Taking a guess, based on Ponyo’s rebellious nature, Steph asks, “Punk rock?”
“I wouldn’t ask you about that. I’m never not punk rock.”
“I don’t think it’s punk rock to be scared of a Doordash driver.”
“Fuck you.” Kon pouts at her, then points back at the screen. His gesture is vague, sweeping. He’s even further gone than he was when the movie started; Steph’s not excited to see how bad this gets. “I wanna grow, fuckin’, chicken legs.”
“Me too.” Steph nods sagely.
Kon looks a little less disgruntled, now that he’s sure she’s agreeing with him. “It’s fucked up that the scientists could’ve made me with chicken legs and they didn’t.”
“That’s really fucked up, yeah.”
“Do you think I could fix it, still?”
“Sure, I think women can do anything.”
Taking a thoughtful sip of his milkshake, Kon goes back to the original issue. “The fish girl is growing legs and acting out because she wants a friend so badly. But her dad thinks she’s just doing it to prove he’s a bad parent.”
Yikes, alright. Let it be known to the record that Steph wasn’t the one who introduced daddy issues, but the conversation has arrived here. Steph deserves a full fucking degree in psychology for the amount of talking she gets her friends to do while under the influence.
Steph asks, as neutrally as possible, “Do you feel like your dad treats you like that?”
“He’s not my dad.” Kon considers Ponyo’s grand escape as it happens onscreen. “I feel like no matter how hard I try, though, I mess up. And Clark takes all my fuckups as reflections on himself, so every time I try to live my goddamn life, we get into an argument.”
Steph actually understands him, to her surprise. Being taken off patrol semi-frequently by Batman has given Steph more allegiance with the Batgirls and with Jason, because at least they aren’t going to drop her for any tiny mistake. “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” Kon says. He rests his elbow on the arm of the couch and props his head on his palm. “I never thought I’d be the next Superman, but it’s like…I dunno. Kinda fucked up that I barely exist to him anymore.”
“Yeah, that’s bullshit.” Steph picks through a bag of curly fries, looking for one with sufficient coils. She wants to make Kon stop looking so pitiful and dazed, so she tries to sympathize aloud. “I get it. Being someone’s second choice, I mean. B snatched Robin from me as soon as he could afford to. He was only letting me do it to punish Tim, so.”
Kon’s eyes move over to her without the rest of his head moving. He’s like a haunted painting in a scary corn maze. Not that corn mazes have paintings hung in them, but--anyway. “I didn’t know that.”
“Tim didn’t mention it?” Steph asks dryly. She’s never unpacked that with Tim, herself. It had been such a stinging humiliation that she’d just pretended that it didn’t happen until too many other things happened for it to ever come up in conversation between them. “I didn’t meet many of Bruce’s standards. Not that I wanted to, but…every team needs a fuckup, I guess.”
“Right,” Kon says. His eyes look wet when he turns his head to look at Steph directly. “We’re filling a vital role, then.”
“Hell yeah we are.”
“Fuckup gang.” Kon holds out a fist. Steph obligingly bumps it with her own, and the corner of Kon’s mouth pulls up a little. He swipes at his eyes with the back of his wrist and then slumps. Seeing Superboy so crumpled and sleepy is jarring, but after Steph saw Wally West in drag, she can basically handle anything.
“Did you eat your burger?” she asks.
“Yes. Was it a veggie burger?”
“...No, dude. Are you vegetarian?”
“No.” Kon looks mournfully up at the TV again. “I just haven’t had a veggie burger before so I don’t know what it tastes like.”
“Well, it doesn’t taste like red meat.”
“Oh.” Kon takes his phone out.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing that down.” Kon dutifully types while Steph stares at him. When he finishes, he holds out his phone to display a screen in his notes app. Typed across the top of the note in bold letters are the words “fuck you stephanie”.
Steph flips him off so he knows the laughter bubbling out of her is only a result of how high she is. When she can talk coherently again, she asks, “How’re you feeling?”
Kon re-envelops himself in the blanket as his shivers start up again. “Shitty.”
A glance at her watch says that it’s getting close to one in the morning. Sleep is probably nowhere in Kon’s near future, and Steph has a vigilantism-learned instinct telling her not to go to bed until she’s sure Kon or Tim will be able to defend themselves without her keeping watch.
While she contemplates her situation, she watches Kon open and close his hands in front of his face, staring at his fingers. He’s kept a pretty good poker face, or at least his reactions have been dulled this evening (besides the whole forgetting-to-breathe thing), but now she’s starting to see some worry as he moves his hands in front of his face.
“Those are your hands, yep,” Steph says.
Kon clasps them together, brow furrowing.
“You’re doing great, bud.”
Frustration starts to meld with desperation on Kon’s face as he wrings his hands together. “My head is swelling up.”
“No it isn’t.”
“It is,” Kon insists. He presses his palms to the sides of his head. “Shit.”
“Kon. You’re fine.”
“Shit,” Kon repeats, and pats all around his skull to check for expanding parts that don’t exist.
Thinking as quickly as she can--realistically, she’s operating on at least a two- or three-second delay--Steph leans forward and picks up a cup, then brandishes Kon’s abandoned milkshake in his face. “Drink this. It’s cold.”
Kon takes the cup from her hand. After an experimental sip, he leaves the straw in his mouth and takes to staring at absolutely nothing like a powered-down animatronic.
“Did that help?” Steph asks after a moment.
“Hm,” Kon responds dejectedly, straw stuck between his lips. He goes back to watching the movie, eyes tracing over the sight of the enormous water storm swallowing up the land.
Steph takes this for a yes and sinks back onto the couch. It’s way past her bedtime, and her brain’s threatening to make her fall asleep; it feels dry and itchy like she’s on the verge of a headache. Hopefully Tim’s gonna pay her for babysitting.
Steph looks up at the TV and then blurts, “Do you think you can do that?”
“Thoo wh’r?” Kon asks, garbled by the straw still in his mouth.
“Float around like that.” There are huge blue fish onscreen writhing and rolling over each other, the big waves of the ocean personified. Kon can fly, right? She swears she’s seen him fly.
Kon sets his milkshake down before he hovers a little off the couch, blanket still drooped around him.
“Higher.”
Kon floats a few inches higher. Steph reaches out and puts a hand on his knee and pushes, rotating him slowly around in a circle like the globe that sat on Steph’s history teacher’s desk. Obligingly, he follows the path she expects him to, though she’s vaguely aware that his flying isn’t due to lack of gravity; it’s him consciously lifting himself.
“Grow chicken legs,” Steph dares him.
“I can’t.”
“Coward.”
Kon scowls, hurt.
Steph spins him further up towards the ceiling, where he drifts like an errant dirigible.
For a long moment, Kon drifts upward, more of a dinky jellyfish than a commanding ocean spirit. He doesn’t stay in his seated posture for long; he uncurls and one of his legs curves lazily through the air like a slow-motion kick to an invisible soccer ball. His head tips back as he considers his position. Steph watches him as though he’s the slowly undulating blobs inside a lava lamp.
Steph stretches out on the couch. The cushions are old and worn, but they’re familiar so they’re comfortable anyway. Luxuriating in the comfort of being horizontal instead of forcing herself to sit up, Steph nestles in and keeps an eye on Kon as he floats in the middle of her living room.
Kon’s voice breaks the quiet again, slow and lazy. “Someone is coming up your steps again.”
“Is it the--”
“It’s not the It Follows monster.”
Steph stifles a smile. She rubs her cheek against the couch cushions. “How can you be sure?”
“...I don’t think it’s that.”
“Okay.” Steph hums. “What floor are they on?”
“Yours.” Kon does another lazy circuit, somersaulting in a long, slow movement. “They’re gonna knock on your door soon.”
“Huh?” Steph sits up a little. “Really?”
She’s not expecting anyone else. Steph’s rarely affected by the various fucked-up movies she watches, but a shiver of paranoia hits her now as she recalls the worst scare in the movie, the one in the hallway. At this point in the night, when she feels the most hazy and slow, there’s no way she’s going to be able to defend Kon and Tim from an intruder. Especially a really scary one, one that Steph wouldn’t be able to fight sober.
Her heart beats louder. It’s enough for Kon to overhear; he turns over in the air to face her again, concerned.
“What?” he asks, trepidation in his voice. “Is it someone you know?”
Steph says, “I can’t see through goddamn walls, can I?”
Heavy knocks rattle the front door. Steph jumps.
“Woah,” Kon says. He paddles his hands through the air, as though he can swim forward. He remains in place up in the air, not remembering how to come back down. “Don’t freak out. I’ll answer it.”
“No, I can do it,” Steph says. She rubs a spot in the center of her chest, poking at her sternum like it’ll somehow keep her sane and anchored to real life. “Shit. Okay, stay…fuckin’ quiet. Don’t knock into anything.”
Kon has been slowly lifting higher towards the ceiling while she composed herself, and responds to her instructions by knocking his elbow into the ceiling with a loud bang. He exclaims, “Ah, fuck!”
“Conner,” Steph hisses, fantasizing about burying a shard of kryptonite in his neck.
“Sorry,” Kon says, and his nose bonks into the ceiling as he bumps up against it again like a helium balloon that’s escaped and gotten trapped in the rafters. “Sorry,” he says again, failing to remember how to fly properly.
Steph stands. The knocking on the door repeats, now even more violent. Abandoning the warmed spot on the couch has left Steph shivering a little bit.
She walks to the door, not able to control her flinch when she’s only a few feet away and a heavy fist starts pounding on the door again.
“Jesus,” Steph mutters under her breath, “calm down.”
Steph crosses herself, then opens the door with the door chain still on so it won’t swing open more than a few inches.
Glaring through the crack in the door is a familiar hazel eye.
Steph groans, tension leaving her all at once. She lets go of the door to cover her face with her hands, and says, “Oh my god, what do you want.”
“Is Tim here?”
Behind her, one of Kon’s appendages knocks into the ceiling again. Steph crosses her arms and narrows her eyes and says, “No.”
Jason narrows his eyes right back, immediately suspicious. “I think he definitely is.”
Steph sticks her tongue out at him.
Jason shoves at the door, hard enough that the chain makes a groaning noise.
“Dude, chill.” Steph pushes on the other side of the door. “Don’t break this, my landlord will be pissed!”
“Fuck your landlord.” Jason reaches through the crack in the door and starts to scrabble at the chain, trying to undo it. Due to the door being open, it doesn’t budge. “Let me in. I know Tim’s here, I just heard him.”
“That wasn’t Tim. I have a friend over.” Steph shoulders into the door, attempting to close it. The door stops partway shut, blocked by Jason’s arm wedged in the crack, and he lets out a loud noise of protest. “Get your fucking arm out of here, I swear to god.”
Jason doesn’t listen. He keeps waving his arm around, trying to remove the chain lock to no avail. “Who--? You don’t have friends.”
“Bitch! Yes I do!”
“Prove it.”
Steph punches Jason’s forearm as hard as she can, then does it again when she finds that it’s very satisfying to do so. “You have to… ugh. Get your arm out of the way or I can’t unlock it.”
“Pinky swear you won’t lock me out.”
“Move your arm,” Steph says, refusing to pinky-promise anything.
Jason slithers his arm out of the way. Steph slams the door closed and locks the two extra locks, leaving Jason out in the hallway.
Immediately, he starts to pound on the door again. Steph’s neighbors aren’t going to be pleased with her.
She turns around to face Kon, exasperated. He’s still floating up near the ceiling. While Steph watches, he braces his hands on the ceiling and pushes off, attempting to get lower to the floor. Halfway down, his flight ability apparently switches off and he plummets to the ground, crashing headfirst into an ungainly pile.
“What is wrong with you,” Steph says.
Kon makes a pained moaning sound.
The pounding on Steph’s door ceases, leaving eerie silence behind. Knowing how Jason and the rest of his accursed family operate, this doesn’t mean that he’s given up. What’s more likely is that he’s finding backup or an alternate way to get into Steph’s apartment.
Steph slaps at her face, trying to wake up. Things are all in soft focus, and the edges of all of her thoughts are dulled and rounded. Fuck, she wants more curly fries. She doesn’t remember if she finished hers earlier.
She drops her hands to her sides and looks to the coffee table, finding the paper Batburger bag. Grease is starting to soak small circles into the sides. When she shuffles over and opens it, there’s a medium bag of curly fries still sitting in there, like a gift from God.
Steph pulls them out and selects a particularly coiled fry to shove in her mouth. It escapes her for a moment, why she ordered so many extra fries--right, because she’d been looking out for Superboy, and for Tim.
Shit, Tim.
Not setting down the fries, which are a welcome tether to reality as well as a delicious starchy snack, Steph kicks Kon’s side as hard as she can. It’s not her brightest idea of the night; she grunts and almost falls over at the pain equivalent to kicking a concrete wall. After silently screaming in pain, Steph finds her breath and orders, “Superboy, get up.”
“Chhh,” is roughly the noise that Kon makes, as his face is still smashed into the floor.
“If Jason finds Tim high in here he’s gonna kill me.”
Kon starts to peel himself off the ground. His shivering from before is back in full force, and his eyes remain half-lidded even when he’s gotten up to his hands and knees.
Steph eats another fry, watching him move around all gingerly. Her lethargic brain trundles along, coming to a conclusion just a split-second too late. “Wait, are you gonna--?”
A flash of super-speed, and Kon is in the kitchen, puking in the sink.
Abandoning any hope of getting help from Kon in the near future, Steph glances at the windows of her living room to check for any potential signs of Jason, and then she walks as steadily as she can to her bedroom and shoves the door open.
Tim’s still sound asleep, scrunched into his blankets, curled up tight enough that his head isn’t even on the pillow anymore. Steph doesn’t think she has it in her to pick him up and shove him in a closet and tell him to be quiet for once, so she’ll have to hide him some other way.
Slowly, she extracts the comforter from his grip and pulls it over his head, laying it flat, tucking it beneath the pillows so it looks like no one’s even there. Then she picks up dirty clothes from her floor and stuffs them under other random parts of the blanket to fill it out and make it look like there isn’t a body under there. The process takes much longer than it should, but she wants to be thorough.
Once she’s finished, Steph narrows her eyes at her handiwork, trying to figure out if Jason will fall for it. Tim is definitely breathing under there, but there’s nothing to be done about that without murdering him. Jason probably won’t get close enough to notice. This should be fine.
“The fuck are you doing?” a voice asks from behind her.
Steph lurches around to face the intruder, letting out a loud squeak as she does so.
As she suspected it would be, it’s Jason. He’s fully confused, so much so that he doesn’t even look angry with her for locking him out.
“I’m making my bed,” Steph says.
“Is Tim dead?”
“Yes.”
Jason narrows his eyes at her in thought. Steph tries to remember what it looks like to be normal.
“What’s going on?” Jason asks.
Steph must have failed to look normal. Her eyes might not be open enough, or maybe her posture is weird. She pushes her shoulders back and widens her eyes.
“Ew, what’s wrong with you?” Jason asks, now looking even more weirded out. He tries to dodge around Steph, taking a quick step to the right, and Steph doesn’t quite prevent him from reaching the edge of Tim’s bed.
She clamps a hand around his wrist and wrenches him backwards with all her strength, attempting to unbalance him. “He’s sleeping. Don’t wake him up.”
“He’s been sleeping long enough. B won’t stop fucking bothering me to find him and I’m tired, okay.”
“Just block his number.”
“Do you know how much more annoying he gets when I block his number?”
Steph stares helplessly at him, having no other ideas. He glares back at her.
“...Okay?” she finally says. “I don’t really care?”
Jason frowns. He stops trying to pull out of her grip, and instead leans towards her, scrutinizing her face. “Wait a second.”
A beat passes. Then his eyebrows raise, and he asks far too loudly, “Are you high?”
Steph scoffs. She scoffs again, and rolls her eyes. “Uh--no, I don’t even--what’s--?”
Jason straightens, so far past angry that he’s become completely still and placid. “Did you get Superboy stoned too?”
“He got himself stoned.” Steph crosses her arms. “Unlike me. I’ve never even heard of weed.”
She’s nailing this. Just play it super cool and casual.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous Gotham weed is?” Jason demands. He flicks a finger against her forehead and ignores her annoyed “ow, what the fuck!” “You should know better!”
“I’m literally sober,” Stephanie insists, and attempts to flick him back. He dodges and knocks her arm out of the way, and repeats that for her next several attempts. While she swipes at him, Steph continues, “Even if I was high, I’m not stupid! I’m in Blüdhaven all the time, idiot. Gotham isn’t the only city on the planet.”
“If Tim fails his drug test at work it’s on you,” Jason threatens.
“Yeah, like Tim’s gonna have this job much longer,” Steph retorts. She saw the disaster unfold live on TV.
“Mean,” croaks a tiny, cranky voice.
Steph sighs, her shoulders slumping. “Great, look what you did.”
Jason ignores her, elbowing his way to Tim’s side. Tim has only just barely opened his eyes, and his eyebrows scrunch with annoyance when he hears Jason tell him, “Hey, brat. Time to wake up and face the music.”
Tim groans. He lifts a sleeve-covered hand to rub his eyes, and his eyebrows furrow even more when his movement is hampered by the blanket and also some of Steph’s jeans she’d shoved under the blanket to even it out. “What…?”
“Steph was trying to suffocate you,” Jason says. He pulls the blanket off of Tim and exposes many more balled-up pieces of laundry. He ignores all of them in favor of taking hold of Tim’s arm and starting to drag him upwards. “Up, up and away. Come on.”
“So Bruce bosses you around now?” Tim grouses. He doesn’t really fight being pulled around, just limply accepts it like the most stoned Raggedy Ann on the planet.
“He’s not bossing me around,” Jason says, prickly because that’s exactly what’s going on. “Don’t tell me you’re high too.”
“Nope,” Tim says. He gives Steph a deadpan stare, and she’s overtaken by the giggles that got her earlier. Tim twists his arm out of Jason’s grip and sits back down on the bed. “I’ve got a deal to offer you. Interested?”
Jason narrows his eyes, confused and annoyed and amused all at once. “You can’t bribe me, fuckface.”
“Listen, listen.” Tim waves one hand like he’s attempting to swat a fly. “Here’s my thing. You tell B that I was replaced by an evil clone of myself and the real me is imprisoned in outer space. And I’ll help cover for you to get out of the charity ball this year.”
Jason crosses his arms, but Steph can tell he’s intrigued.
“Help me…how?” Jason asks slowly.
God, they’ll be negotiating this for an hour. Steph takes a couple of steps back, intent on finding where she left the last third of her milkshake. On her way out of the bedroom, she sees Kon-El still hunched over her sink, his head hung low on his shoulders.
Steph picks up her shake and walks over to her kitchen. She gets up onto the counter next to the sink where she can see Kon’s face, now less ashen, his eyes trying to stay closed.
Steph reaches out a hand and rubs her palm up and down between his shoulder blades, trying to be bracing. “How are we feeling, champ?”
A long, gross string of saliva connects his mouth to the bottom of her sink. She sets her shake down and turns on the faucet to start to clean up Kon’s mess. “Ah, Jesus, dude,” Steph says, chiding him as gently as she can. It’s not his fault. “Status update, please.”
Kon’s eyes open halfway, revealing very red eyes. He wipes his mouth with the back of one wrist. “Doing better,” he croaks.
“Yeah, you look better too,” Steph lies. “You might’ve puked up some of the candy. It could help.”
Kon nods. He lowers his forehead onto the countertop and rests there like he’s going to sleep standing up.
“Hey, no, hey,” Steph says. She sets her shake down and slides off the counter to hold onto his waist with both hands, beginning to peel him away from the sink. “Come on. Tim’s awake.”
Kon miserably flops upright and lets her push him along. Steph’s apartment isn’t that big, but it feels like she walks half a mile before they get back to her bedroom, Kon slamming his unfeeling shoulder into the doorjamb as they pass through.
“Sorry,” Steph says; she got distracted while steering him because she was trying to remember if she’d asked the delivery girl for her number.
“I didn’t feel it,” Kon assures her.
“Good.” She pushes him forward.
Kon trips over his feet, and Jason ducks out of the way so Kon face-plants on Steph’s bed, overlapping Tim’s legs at a perpendicular angle and hopefully breaking both of Tim’s knees. Steph’s done babysitting.
“What did you do to him?” Tim asks sharply. His hand jabs into Kon’s neck, searching for a pulse point.
“You were the one who fed him like, six hundred milligrams,” Steph says.
Tim’s eyes go wide. He looks to Kon, who’s quietly groaning. “Kon, what the fuck?”
“Are you serious?” Jason asks. “That could’ve killed him.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Tim sneers. “Because weed kills. God, did you die before they stopped teaching DARE classes?”
While Jason retaliates, somehow sounding even bitchier than Tim, Kon pathetically drags himself upward, having the guts to cuddle up to Tim’s side in Steph’s bed. Steph wants the ceiling fan to fall on them.
Before she can try to strangle anyone, Steph turns and leaves Tim and Jason to fight. Between the two of them, someone will make sure Kon doesn’t die.
She flops back down into her abandoned spot on the couch, fitting perfectly into the indentation in the couch cushions. With the precision of an admittedly slow-working surgeon, she extends a leg out to the other end of the couch and hooks her foot around the blanket Kon was using, and she drags it towards her. When it’s close enough to grab with her hands without sitting up, Steph does so and wraps it tightly around herself.
As she settles back down to a horizontal position, she discovers thanks to a sort of dry, empty feeling in her head that she’s practically sobered up by now. All of that good edible, wasted while she had to take care of someone else’s boyfriend.
The blanket smells like Kon now. Steph turns over and shoves her face into the corner of the couch, getting her face as far away from the Kon-smell as she can before she gets attached to it. She’s not immune to the boy-hoodie-smell effect, and Tim knows this. He’ll make fun of her if he notices, and he will notice.
Jason and Tim’s argument peaks and then cuts off. A door slams. Steph impressively doesn’t flinch, just continues burrowing into the couch like she can fit underneath the cushions if she tries hard enough.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Jason’s voice asks. “Are you a naked mole rat?”
Steph says, “Go fuck yourself, zombie-face,” but her mouth is smushed against upholstery and she doubts he hears any of the individual words.
He makes a disgusted, exasperated sound. His footsteps approach, but instead of any kind of nerve strike or gunshot, he just moves the blanket on her back up higher, tucking it around her shoulders.
Steph lays still, so confused her bodily functions all stop and cock their heads in unison.
“You’re such a nightmare,” Jason says.
“Takes one to know one,” Steph says, still all garbled and impossible to understand.
“Uh huh, whatever, goodnight,” Jason says. His footsteps move somewhere that isn’t the front door. She figures out when she hears his heavy boots on the bathroom tile that he must have broken in through that window. Steph’s been meaning to fix the broken screen in that window, but she honestly didn’t think Jason could fit his football-linebacker shoulders through it.
After the bathroom window slides shut again, the only sound in the apartment is a soft hum of conversation from Steph’s room, the thud of Steph’s slow heartbeat in her ears, and the cheery music playing over the Ponyo credits.
Her own breath has made the couch fabric all humid and damp around her face, but exhaustion has started to set in. If Steph suffocates, so be it. She’ll go out after doing what she’s best known for--being kind of shitty and passive-aggressive while taking care of someone else’s mess.
Steph rolls over to find sunlight in her apartment, a surefire sign that she hasn’t died in her sleep. The whole left half of her face is wet with drool, and her mouth is dry in a way that implies she was snoring like a maniac. At least the not-at-all-restful weed sleep hit like it was supposed to.
She sits up slowly, rubbing at the creases she can feel crisscrossing her face from the couch fabric. Her phone says it’s well past eleven, which means she needs to start moving around soon to make her one o’clock class.
Her apartment looks strange, somehow. Steph squints for almost a minute before she realizes what’s up.
It’s clean. All of the takeout trash is gone. Through the open door to her bedroom, she sees that the bed is made and Tim and Kon are both gone, thank Christ. If she ignores the smell still clinging to the blanket draped over her, it’s almost like the two of them were a bad fujoshi dream Steph had.
She picks her phone up to find two texts, one from each of them. Kon’s came at six this morning, and the tone is polite-- thanks for having me, sorry i ate all your edibles, i cleaned out your sink dont worry, things of that nature--and even Tim’s is surprisingly contrite-- i wont use you as a shield after breaking international law next time, i venmoed you for the snacks kon ate, we didnt have sex in ur bed even a little bit lol.
Steph waits until she checks her Venmo account to pass judgment. Tim’s sent her a hundred and fifty dollars, which is excessive but Steph’s not complaining. She should have charged him triple that after he treated her like an Airbnb host.
ur forgiven but on thin ice, Steph sends to Tim.
She lays back down in the warm spot she left on the couch, looking up at the sun-dappled ceiling. The light in the room makes it hard for her to imagine having genuine fear of a demon monster stalking her into her apartment. There’s a faint scrape on her ceiling where Kon scuffed his indestructible elbow against it.
probably lay off the drugs for a while, Steph sends to Kon, and smiles when he reacts to it with a thumbs-down.