Chapter Text
Tim did not actually mean to kidnap an alternate reality's version of Kon.
In his defense, he'd had very limited time in said reality and everything in it had been going to shit and . . . well, everything in it had been going to shit. Also, Lex Luthor had been a lot more heavily involved in that particular reality's Cadmus, and hell if Tim was ever going to leave any version of Kon stuck with that bastard.
With any bastard who could ever look at him and call him an "it".
"Ow," Tim grunts into the dirty pavement of what he hopes is his own Gotham as blood drips out of his mouth and he feels Kon's fingertips brush very, very tentatively against his back. He's a little too dizzy to lift his head just yet, but figures it doesn't matter. It's just . . . it's fine. They're not inside any version of Project Cadmus and Kon is safe and Tim is . . . conscious, at least, which means he can work with the situation.
Whatever the situation actually is, anyway.
Kon's hands flatten against his back, which is a very familiar tell, and Tim immediately feels the even more familiar embrace of TTK wrapping him up. Less familiar is the impulse to find said embrace adorable, but in Tim's defense, this Kon is physiologically about ten years old and so far every single thing he's done has been either adorable, heartbreaking, or some awful combination of the two.
"Robin?" Kon asks anxiously. "You're okay, right?"
"M'okay," Tim mumbles blurrily, because it's more or less true. More blood drips out of his mouth and splats on the pavement. "All okay. S'fine. You hurt?"
"No," Kon says, still sounding nervous. "Dunno where we are, though."
"Should be Gotham," Tim says, forcing himself to lift his head enough to check and nearly laughing as he recognizes their surroundings as the exact part of Crime Alley that he got interdimensionally yanked out of seventy-six hours ago. "Yeah. Gotham."
He pushes himself up enough to look over at Kon. Kon is crouched down next to him and looks very small, all sun-starved complexion and buzzed-down hair and barefoot in pristine white lab scrubs with a shiny metal cuff locked around his wrist. The number "13" features prominently in the identification number stamped into it.
Tim wants to melt it into slag.
"Is it your Gotham?" Kon asks.
"No clue, but I'm hoping," Tim says. He thinks about getting to his feet, but he's pretty sure he'd throw up if he tried. Or fall over. Or both?
Probably both, at this point.
Oh well, he figures, and pushes himself up. He’s got work to do.
Tim doesn't actually vomit, surprisingly, although he is very firmly certain that Kon's TTK is the only thing keeping him from falling over. No reason to look that particular gift horse in the mouth, though.
"I need coffee," he says, giving Kon's shoulder an appreciative little pat as the kid stands up beside him, because the caffeine withdrawal is real. He also probably needs medical attention, but also-also he needs to come up with either a cover story for the ER or an explanation for Bruce, and therefore a judicious application of caffeine can't hurt.
"Uh, okay," Kon says skeptically. "I don't think Starbucks or anything is gonna be open right now, though, it's pretty late.”
"God, what did Cadmus teach you, kid," Tim says despairingly, making a face at the thought. "Starbucks is a punishment from God. We're going to the nearest twenty-four hour diner and I'm ordering roofing tar. And we're getting you a hot chocolate. Do you want a hot chocolate?"
". . . yeah," Kon says, biting his lip. "Um. I mean, I dunno if I'd like it, though."
"If you don't like it, we'll get you something else," Tim says, though given his own Kon's tastebuds he's pretty sure the kid will. "But I haven't slept or eaten properly since I left my reality and I need coffee before it becomes a legitimate medical emergency."
"Shouldn't you get, like, real food, then?" Kon asks skeptically. "Not just coffee?"
"Coffee is food," Tim lies reflexively.
". . . I don't think it is," Kon says, squinting up at him suspiciously. "Are you taking advantage of me being too stupid to know if coffee's food or not?"
". . . we can get something light," Tim says, wishing he'd blown up a bit more of Cadmus on his way out of that fucking cesspool of a reality. "You're not stupid. Luthor can choke on a fucking cactus for all that shit he kept saying to you."
"I mean, I didn't come out right," Kon says uncomfortably. "I'm not as smart as Dadd—as Lex is. Or as Superman was."
Tim pretends that Kon wasn't about to say "Daddy" for both their sakes. Just . . . yeah. At least for the moment, anyway.
Lex Luthor was a lot more heavily involved in that Cadmus.
And horrifyingly.
Tim tries not to think about the way Luthor had kept touching Kon. All the little too-deliberate points of contact that he'd made time and again and too often. Much, much too often.
He hadn't seen anyone else so much as enter Kon's personal space the entire time he'd been in that godforsaken lab, and every single time that Luthor had made a gesture like he might touch him, Kon had tensed in something that couldn't decide between being fear or longing. It'd made Tim want to burn the whole damn place and every single LexCorp-owned building he could find to the ground.
He'd settled for interdimensionally kidnapping the physiological ten year-old and destroying all of Cadmus's systems and DNA samples as thoroughly as possible. C-4 had been involved.
A lot of C-4 had been involved.
Possibly that had been a slight overreaction, but Tim really, really does not care if it was. Just—their Clark had still been dead, and their Cassie hadn't had powers and their Bart hadn't been in the time period and Tim himself hadn't even existed, for whatever reason, and apparently neither had Greta or Anita or Slobo or even Cissie, and their Bruce had already had his hands full with their Damian, and their Dick had been off-planet and their Jason had also still been dead and just—
Options had been limited, alright?
Options had been very limited, and by that point Tim hadn't had time to go check and see what the local Kents had been up to or track down Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen or even just tip off the Justice League or the Titans, because by that point he'd been just outside an examination room that had contained a Lex Luthor who was stroking a frightened Kon's face with one hand while holding a syringe that was glowing kryptonite-green with the other and Tim had just . . . he'd just made some choices at that point, okay?
He'd made some very decisive choices.
And some very decisive commitments.
Or at least one very decisive commitment, anyway.
"You came out fine," Tim says, wishing terrible things on Lex Luthor. "You're just inexperienced. Luthor's an asshole for acting like you should've been able to keep up with him, he's a grown goddamn man with a level of brainpower that I'm still not convinced isn't metahuman in origin. He's probably smarter than Batman, for god’s sake."
"But I'm cloned from him," Kon says uncomfortably. "I should be able to keep up with him."
"Your brain isn't even fully developed," Tim says. "Even if Cadmus actually jammed the full education Luthor got into your head, you can't possibly be expected to actually apply it with—how old are you, exactly? Literally, I mean, not physiologically."
"I dunno," Kon says, shifting awkwardly in place. "Like . . . three months or so, I think? Or four? They said I was, um . . . they took me out of my tube early so I'd be more . . ."
He trails off, looking guilty. Tim grits his teeth and braces himself for the worst.
"More what?" he asks.
"The doctors said so I'd be more . . . malleable," Kon says, staring at his feet. "So I'd . . . bond. They were gonna, uh—gonna finish me . . . later, I guess.”
Tim wants to throw up after all.
"'Bond'," he repeats very, very carefully.
"Emotionally," Kon clarifies, twisting the metal cuff around his wrist and still staring at his feet. "With . . . you know."
It's not exactly hard to guess, no.
Tim supposes that if he were an egocentric megalomaniacal supervillain with no concept of what real and genuine love might be, he might also assume that he could weaponize Superman's overwhelming capacity for care and compassion by trying to control just who his cloned version felt that kind of attachment to.
Or maybe Luthor had just been trying to make a Superman who was as unhealthily obsessed with him as he himself was with the original version.
Tim remembers, again, the way that Luthor had touched Kon so easily. So possessively.
The way that no one else had touched him at all.
He remembers grabbing onto Kon's arm when he'd first shoved himself between the two of them, and the way the kid’s breath had audibly caught. He hadn't had time to think too much about it just then, but now . . . now he's wondering just how many times anyone besides Luthor has ever touched this kid.
And he's wondering if Kon even remembers any of those times, or if he was sedated for them or just too young to or . . .
Tim is way, way too concussed for this line of thought.
He's pretty sure he's concussed, anyway. Definitely he's caffeine-deprived. Also he's furious and heartbroken and bitterly triumphant and might have a couple of broken ribs, and it's just . . . it's a lot, really. He's a lot, right now.
Everything feels like a lot right now.
Tim exhales, slowly, and runs down his mental inventory. His utility belt is half-empty and his cape is tattered and his faith in humanity has been seriously tested over the course of this accidental interdimensional long weekend, but he's still got his domino on and he's got cash in his boot and no version of his best friend is ever, ever going to be in the same reality as the Lex Luthor who’d looked at him and called him "my precious little abomination" ever again.
There's still the existence of this reality's Luthor to worry about, admittedly, but at least this reality's Luthor didn't deliberately make a half-grown Superman and try to make the kid love him in the most fucked-up way possible. This reality's Luthor originally intended to do all his immoral mind control shit and manipulation to a physiological adult, if nothing else, and mostly doesn't seem to care about Kon's existence at all these days. Well—alright, admittedly the last time the world had thought Luthor was dead, Mercy Graves had popped up outside Titans Tower to inform Kon that he was expected at the reading of the will, but fortunately the bastard had turned up alive before said reading had actually happened. Kon hadn't been intending to go, for obvious reasons, but Tim's still leery of what the results actually would've been.
Either way it’s an appallingly low bar to clear, but at this point Tim will damn well take it.
. . . although it definitely means they can't let this kid anywhere near Metropolis until he's gotten so much therapy, because god forbid this Kon meet a version of Luthor who's familiarly manipulative and abusive without being as specifically and disgustingly horrible as the one that he's used to. There is no possible way that would ever end well.
God, what a fucking awful thought.
"I fucking hate Lex Luthor," Tim mutters under his breath, then heads out of the alley without really caring about the fact that he probably looks like a trash heap of a vigilante right now. Kon follows him, keeping a hesitant hand on his arm and his TTK wrapped around him in support. The kid is so unbearably good, Tim thinks with a fierce, painful bolt of grief, and hates Luthor just that little bit more.
He grabs Kon's hand outright to lead the way to a diner he knows Jason occasionally wanders through in Red Hood's gear, because a place that Red Hood frequents is not a place that’s going to take one look at a beat-up vigilante with a scared kid in lab scrubs and call the cops. Although given it's Crime Alley, probably not many places would call the cops anyway.
They might call Red Hood, admittedly, but it's not like that'd be an actual problem. Jason's good with traumatized kids. Better than any of them except Dick, really, and in that case it's kind of a toss-up depending on the kid.
Admittedly, their Kon doesn't really like Jason all that much. But that's because of Jason nearly murdering Tim a couple times, not because they're, like, fundamentally incapable of getting along. And this Kon has no reason to either know or care about a couple of water-under-the-bridge murder attempts between brothers, now does he?
Though Tim maybe just won’t mention those either way, if it comes up.
“Um . . . Robin?” Kon asks hesitantly as he follows along after him, his TTK gripping Tim even tighter than his hand is. “What is a hot chocolate?”
“Something we’re going to be ordering you a large of, kid,” Tim replies firmly. “Ever heard of whipped cream? Because you're about to."
At this point, a large hot chocolate is the least of what the multiverse owes this poor kid, and Tim will be stabbing anyone that tries to argue with him on that one someplace very sensitive with a batarang.
This is Kon, after all, whether it's the same version of him that Tim knows or not. He'd do a lot more than just stab someone who was making themselves a problem, for Kon.
. . . like, apparently, blow up the better part of an underground lab and commit a spontaneous interdimensional kidnapping. Which, well—still not as weird as their last Young Justice mission, Tim figures.
Maybe a little bit harder to explain to Batman, though.