Work Text:
Kon has had a lot of different voices.
Tim’s one to talk, he has a different voice for just about everything. Parents, friends, school, Robin.
Conner though, is a very public figure, who lacks a bat instilled fear of cameras, so there’s videos of his different voices everywhere.
Tim remembers when he first heard Kon’s voice. It was a new station, where Kon was bragging about defeating Hawaii’s latest top supervillain, and then proceeded to start flirting with the reporter. Tim had nearly rolled his eyes. Well, he had rolled his eyes actually, but it’s pretty hard to tell under the domino.
The new hero just sounded so arrogant, so full of himself. Tim had seen a lot of heroes like that, and they never lasted long.
Conner did though, and Tim finally got to meet him in person. Well, Conner caught him after he got thrown fifty feet in the air by Metallo, about eight hours later than Tim had wanted him there. For a dude who claimed to be as fast as a speeding bullet, it took him a while to get from Hawaii to Gotham.
His voice sounded a bit different in person.
Maybe it was the active threat, but there were moments (few and far between) where his voice didn’t make Tim want to kick his teeth in.
Tim still had all of those old broadcasts, and he marveled a bit at the difference. It sounded so similar, so different.
Tim heard Conner’s voice a lot after they started Young Justice. Almost too much. He has recordings all over, news reels of their team fixing (and causing) a whole host of problems. Bart had loved videoing pretty much everything, so there are hundreds upon hundreds of videos of the team hanging out (usually with very little of Tim in them, who was employing his best bat training to avoid the camera), where Tim can hear Kon’s voice.
It’s so, so different around the team. It can be just as obnoxious, but there’s an undercurrent of camaraderie, of care, of. Well. There’s no performance to it, not as much at least. He’s just another teen losing at ping pong, or ranting about Wendy the Werewolf Stalker, or getting scared by a horror movie. These videos are some of Tim’s favorites, because they are almost, almost, Kon’s voice.
But not quite.
Not quite how he remembers it.
Sometimes, it would just be Tim and Kon, and his voice would be. Well.
It would sound so right. The veneer, the artifice would drop out of it. They would be running through training, or listening to music, and all of a sudden it was Kon, really Kon, talking to him. It might be Tim’s favorite sound. Even when it was Conner threatening to drop him off a building because Tim insulted his new haircut, or Conner obnoxiously screeching a song at the top of his Kryptonian lungs, it was perfect. It was him.
Tim has scoured every single video. Watched every news broadcast, gone back through security cameras, all of Bart’s old videos, everything.
There’s not a single one. Not a single goddamn video where he sounds like how Tim remembers him.
He’s re-watching a video where they were having a pizza party after a rousing mission success (a rarity for Young Justice) and Bart was attempting to see how many slices he could eat at once, and Conner was laughing so hard he sounded like he was going to pass out.
He sounds so happy. But he doesn’t sound like him.
He hear’s a chime, as the computer’s voice reads out “Attempt Seventy-Two Unsuccessful”
His back is pressed against the cloning chamber, and a green glow washes over his phone as he watches the video.
“Initiate next attempt.”
He watches the video again. And again. And again.
He just wants to hear his voice.