Chapter Text
The radiator in the corner didn’t hiss so much as it rattled, a rhythmic clicking that vibrated through the floorboards of the bedroom like a dying pulse. Outside, Gotham was the color of a smoker's lung, the early morning fog dragging its belly across the cracked window glass and sealing the world in a cold, greasy gray.
Conner lay perfectly still in the dimness, his unblinking eyes fixed on the ceiling plaster. He didn't need to breathe— not really, not since all that Cadmus bullshit had basically rewritten his lungs with the thick, sulfurous logic of a Lazarus Pit— but he did it anyway, pulling the heavy, soot-choked air of the East End into his chest just to feel the mechanical lift of his own ribs.
Beside him, Tim was a collection of sharp, broken angles.
The resurrection had changed Conner’s eyes, sharpening his Kryptonian perception into something far more clinical and invasive than simple X-ray vision. Tim lay on his stomach. He was translucent, almost blue under the dawn light, his skin so thin and paper-like that the dark, winding branches of his veins were visible underneath, looking like ink stains spreading through a wet bandage.
Light from the ceiling struck him like a low, resonant chord on a cello, casting a cold indigo hue over the bedsheets. He was a broken sonata of a man, offering to the dawn a grotesque blueprint of a body systematically dismantled by grief and reassembled with deliberate structural flaws. To look at his spine was to hear the harsh, grinding scrape of tectonic plates. The individual vertebrae rose against his pale skin like a row of jagged, uneven river stones, each one a sharp note of calcium that protruded and poked out. And his skin, a fragile parchment through which the world bled, had thinned to a paper-like silence, yet beneath it, a dark symphony pulsed.
Conner reached out, his thick fingers hovering an inch above Tim’s left shoulder blade. He didn't touch him, not yet.
For Conner, most of his skin remained cold, but occasionally, a blind, localized flare of energy would spark along his knuckles or down the line of his jaw. On the other hand, Tim was always cold. Along his flanks, the three ribs he'd shattered were warped, mended into an awkward, caved-in cage. Every shallow breath he drew was a tiny fracture, a tremor of violet and grey that made the room feel heavy, smelling of static electricity and winter dust, as if his very anatomy was a song written in minor chords and mapped out in bruising.
It was his forearms, though, that held the most grotesque geometry.
Conner looked intently at the dense, dark embroidery of Tim’s scars. They weren't smooth lines; they were thick, puckered, plum-colored ridges where Tim had repeatedly driven a curved suture needle, or a scapel, or a floor tile, right through his own flesh. The skin had healed, but it healed into hard, raised seams that resembled the rough, overlapping scales of a pinecone or the hide of a flayed animal. In the places where the scalds from the master bath had peeled the top layers away, the flesh remained a shiny, weeping pink, thin as an onion skin and perpetually raw to the touch.
"My pretty bird," Conner whispered, almost cooing.
Tim woke up with a lurch. His nervous system short-circuited on instinct, his left elbow snapping backward in a spastic, defensive jerk that caught Conner right in the ribs. It was muscle memory from a life lived under a mask, but there was no strength behind it. His knuckles scraped against Conner’s bracelet, and a small, microscopic tear opened along his split cuticle, spilling a thin, dark drop of blood onto the sheet.
Tim’s eyes flared wide, the pupils dilated into tiny black pins surrounded by a yellowing, unwashed haze of chronic insomnia. He was almost gasping, with a dry, rhythmic clicking in the back of his throat that sounded less like human breathing and more like a valve failing in an engine.
"Hey, baby," Conner said, his voice dropping into a deep, mid-western gentleness. He didn't move away, instead shifting closer, his hand coming down to cup the back of Tim’s head, his fingers burying into the matted strands of black hair. "You're in the apartment. You're in Gotham. Nothing's wrong, and I'm right here."
Tim lay frozen for three full seconds, pressing his forehead against Conner’s chest. He listened to the rhythmic, heavy thrum of Conner’s heart— a sound that didn't sync with a standard human pulse, but was loud enough to drown out the whistle of the radiator.
Slowly, the tension left his spine, his skeletal frame collapsing inward like squished playdough until he was just a heap of pale, scarred tissue resting against the clone’s chest.
"Your hands' hot," Tim murmured into the fabric of his shirt. His throat was dry, lined with the acrid, stale residue of cigarettes.
"Resurrection perk," Conner said, a snarky smirk teasing at his lips.
Tim let out a short, sharp laugh that turned into a wet cough. He weakly lifted his right hand— the wrist still showing the deep, purple-red bite marks from the night he had tried to gnaw through his own radial vein— and reached under the pillow. His violet-stained fingernails fumbled with a crumpled white pack of cheap, unfiltered tabs and a scratched silver lighter.
"Hey, Bruce called last night," Conner said, his eyes tracking the way Tim’s thin, bony fingers trembled as he pulled a wrinkled cylinder from the paper.
Tim’s jaw locked. "What did the he want?"
"He didn't ask me to come back for evals or tests to make sure I'm not evil again or anything," Conner said, his thumb sliding down to graze the rough, armor-like texture on Tim’s forearm. "He just asked if you were taking what Alfred sent. He said you were looking too much like a turnip at the last debrief."
"Tell him the turnip is functional," Tim snapped, though his voice lacked the sharp, authoritative bite it used to carry when he was barking directions through the comms. He shoved the cigarette between his split lips, the paper sticking to a dry flake of skin.
The sulfur caught on the first flick, an orange bead that lit up the hollows of his cheeks and the deep, dark craters beneath his eyes. He didn't care about the taste of the lighter fluid anymore, he just needed the heat. He hadn't bought matches for weeks, just for simplicity's sake. He pulled the diesel-y, asphalt smoke deep into his lungs, his caved-in chest expanding with a dry, rattle that made the scars along his ribs stretch and pull.
Conner sat there in the gray fog, his green-ringed eyes recording every single micro-tremor in Tim’s hands, his own chest sparking with a localized, chemical heat that wanted nothing more than to melt the winter out of the boy's marrow.
Tim blew a lazy, gray plume toward the window, his eyes glazed and staring at something three inches behind the glass.
Conner reached forward, his large fingers gently clamping around Tim’s wrist, right over the raised, bumpy tracks where the skin was still shedding its gray, partially baked cast. He pulled the thin arm away from the pillow, drawing Tim’s emaciated torso closer until the grotesque, warped curves of his ribs were pressed flat against the dense bulk of his own chest.
He brushed his lips against the pale skin of Tim’s neck, where the pulse was jumping like a cornered wild animal. Tim let his head drop sideways onto Conner’s shoulder, his teeth biting into the cotton of his hoodie to keep the wail from escaping his throat while the smoke from the crumpling cigarette gently burnt him, a vinyl-scented shroud that smelled like the only home they had left.
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The skin over Tim’s ribs felt like greaseproof paper that had been crumpled up and then flattened out by rushed, desperate hands.
Conner’s calloused palms moved over the boy’s hips, tracking the sharp, razor-like flare of the pelvic bones. Tim lay sprawled across Conner’s lap like a medical specimen, his long, thin legs tangled in the gray sheets, his knees permanently discolored with deep, yellow-purple hematomas from where he had repeatedly struck his own limbs against the ironwork of the supercomputer. His body didn't yield with the soft, elastic bounce of a normal twenty-something; his joints were loose and ruined from months of physical trauma and starvation, yielding too far under Conner’s weight until his limbs looked disjointed, like a marionette with its strings cut.
Conner’s chest was bare now, his black shirt discarded on the floorboards, and along his stomach, the silver coolant scars from the Prime blast were glowing with a faint, chemical green luminescence. Whenever Conner’s skin touched Tim’s raw forearms, a high-frequency hiss would rise from the tissue, the localized heat drawing out the clear, yellowish lymph fluid that still wept from the unhealed scalds.
Conner shifted his weight, his heavy thigh sliding between Tim’s thin, translucent legs. The contrast was brutal— Conner was solid, sun-warmed iron and heavy Kryptonian muscle, while Tim was a collection of pale, hemmoraging red tracks and unfiled bone. When Conner pressed his torso down, he could hear the distinct, dry clicking of Tim’s lungs beneath the caved-in stern cages, a rattling, mechanical friction that sounded like a dry sponge being squeezed in a fist.
He leaned down, pressing his face into the hollow of Tim’s collarbone. The smell of Tim was a sickening, intimate mix of hospital antiseptic, stale cocoa oil, and the sharp, vinegar-like sting of a laboratory chemical wash. It was the odor of a mausoleum that had been wired with electricity, but to Conner, it was the only air that matched the static in his own lungs.
"Look at me," Conner ordered, his voice dropping into that lower, denser resonance that belonged to the boy who had risen from the Bialyan mud.
Tim tilted his head back, his neck vertebrae cracking against the pillow. His eyes were wide and completely unguarded, the pupils so blown out they swallowed the blue light of the Gotham morning, leaving nothing but an empty, glassy reflection of the room. There was a thick line of dark, dried blood crinkling at the corner of his split lip, a remnant of his morning routine.
Conner dragged his hand down Tim’s chest, his fingers tracing the dense, tangled root system of those self-inflicted stitches. The thread was still thick beneath his skin, puckering the pale dermis into hard, raised seams that had healed poorly around the knots.
Tim hooked his fingers into the front of Conner’s jeans, dragging his weight upward until his teeth met Conner’s jaw in a clumsy, desperate collision. There was no elegance to it, no romance from the glossies. Conner met him halfway, his hands shielding Tim’s raw forearms from the cold air of the bedroom as they clutched each other like two survivors in a collapsed tunnel. The taste of Tim was salty like dry winter air, and had the bitter, tar-ish smokeyness of an unfiltered cig. Beneath it all, there was that faint, sugary confusion of a boy who'd given in.
His chest heaved like a skeletal birdcage, the parchment-pale skin stretched so tight over his bones that they looked slick, wet, and translucent beneath the light. The self-inflicted damage reamined a vivid map of horror. A thick, weeping track of yellow-crusted chemical burns mottled his left flank, the skin there peeling back in damp, gray ribbons that revealed the raw, dark flesh of the muscle beneath. His collarbone hooked upward like a fractured rib, traced by a swollen, bulging network of veins that throbbed with a frantic, superficial rhythm, as if his blood was too thick to pass through the narrowed channels of his hungry body. But the unhealed midline incision from his clumsy, desperate self-surgeries was the centerpiece. A jagged, five-inch line ran vertically down his sternum, poorly bound by thick, black nylon threads that Tim had pulled through his own flesh with an clean scapel. The skin around the black knots had turned a slick, necrotic green, leaking a thin, clear serum that smelled faintly of old copper and decay every time his lungs expanded. He looked less like a young (in)human and more like an organism that had been roughly reassembled by blind eyes, held together only by sheer will.
"Look at what that damn winter did to you,"
"I'm sorry, I know it's the worst. I know I'm horrible to look at and I'm so pitiful and embarrassing, 'specially for someone who's meant to be a Guardian of fucking Gotham. It's disgusting, pathetic, really—"
Conner cut him off, capturing his mouth so fast Tim barely the faint, murmured "Tim" right before their lips parted and locked. The kiss tasted more magnetic this time, like the bitter residue of sedatives, and the lingering, sweet tang of clove cigarettes. It was even clumsier, fraught with the immense friction between them. Conner’s mouth was burning hot, he kissed Tim with a frantic, unrefined desperation that felt like a man trying to pull air into a collapsed lung.
Tim’s fingers dug into Conner’s shoulders, feeling the thick, shifting muscle beneath. He didn't want some gentle miracle. He wanted the heavy, crushing certainty of a Kryptonian pressing him down into the mattress until his ribs groan under the impact. He wanted to feel the physical reality of Conner’s return to drown out the scrolling green error codes in his head.
Conner rolled them over, gently. He was careful, but the movement was heavy, messy, and real. His breath was hot against Tim’s ear, a frantic, rhythmic panting that matched the erratic spikes on the diagnostic monitor across the room.
"I know you'll tell me if it becomes too much, at all, right?" Conner said, breathless, his teeth grazing the side of Tim’s neck. He lovingly planted faint, dark contusions against the pale skin like seeds in wet mulch.
Tim said nothing, arching his back, lifting his hips to meet the heavy, solid pressure of Conner’s thighs.
Sliding the hand resting on Conner's neck upward, Tim snaked his fingers through Conner's hair and pulled, hard and soft. He was growing more comfortable now, bolder. Conner gave up all the air in his lungs as Tim deepened the kiss, leaving them both feeling happily drowned in it.
"And, my sweet, pretty bird, y'know how much I love you, right?" Conner breathed, when the kiss finally broke for air.
Tim’s eyes darkened with sudden heat. “You have so much nerve,” he sighed, biting him with a playful, sweet care. He paused his movements just long enough to tug softly at Conner's pants.
In response, Conner teased up Tim's neck before nibbling and kissing his way back down. Tim hummed in approval against Conner's skin, his body beginning to roll rhythmically with him.
Conner slid a hand off Tim's side, trailing it down across his abdomen and between his thighs. He used his fingers to gauge the slick heat pooling from Tim, testing his readiness. After faltering for just a nervous heartbeat, Tim matched the gesture, his fingertips moving with a sweet, tentative touch.
Conner continued to anchor him, sewing so much sincerity with his mouth that his movements seemed to pull every lingering doubt right out of Tim's chest. He leaned up to meet Tim for a chaste, reassuring kiss. Tim tried to sink down into him, but Conner gently pulled back to pace them, wanting to take his time.
"You still okay, baby?" Conner asked, so soft and unrelenting.
Tim shook his head with a desperate yes.
"It doesn't hurt," Tim said quickly, "Don't pull back. Don't you dare."
"I'm not— pulling back—" Conner grunted.
He was rewarded instantly as the fullness of Tim's fingers finally pressed deep to him. Conner's eyes gazed him, locking onto Tim's fluttering eyes as he dissolved into a broken radio of soft sound, feeling a pit of heat building in his stomach.
Conner let out a shuddering breath as he felt Tim slowly removed his hands and shifted his weight. The sudden absence of the warmth inside him made Conner whine, a needy sound that made Tim's jaw tight. Quickly, awkwardly, Conner's hands moved to Tim’s waist, his grip firm and grounding as he lifted Tim slightly. He reached between them to align himself, his eyes never leaving Tim's face for a second.
Tim didn't want to wait. He braced his hands on Conner’s broad chest, feeling the frantic, heavy thud of Conner's heartbeat beneath his palms. Slowly, deliberately, Tim pressed downward. The sudden, overwhelming fullness had him gasping, his fingers digging into Conner’s shoulders as he adjusted to the stretch.
Conner let out a low, guttural groan, his hips twitching upward instinctively before he forced himself to stay still, letting Tim set the pace. He reached up to wipe a stray tear of sensation from Tim's cheek, his expression full of reverence. "God, you're perfect," Conner strained out. "So beautiful."
Tim rested his forehead against Conner's shoulder, panting heavily. He shifted his hips forward, rewarded instantly by the sharp catch in Conner's breath. Increasingly confident, Tim began to lift and sink in a slow, agonizingly perfect rhythm, completely consuming them both in the friction.
He bowed his head and looked down, his eyes searching Conner's dark pupils. "Conner," Tim spluttered, his hands shifting up to cup Conner's jaw, his thumb smoothing over the cheekbone.
Conner’s gaze softened with puppy-dog devotion, his hands tightening on Tim's hips. "Tim," he whispered, the name a sacred, breathless vow against the quiet of the room. "Tim. I've got you."
The slow, agonizing rhythm of his hips brought his upper body fully into the light, and the sheer, harrowing reality of what he had done to himself came into sharp, undeniable focus. Conner’s hands, broad and warm against Tim’s waist, emphasized how frail Tim had become. His collarbone hooked upward, traced by a network of veins that throbbed with a frantic rhythm.
Conner’s eyes were filled with an overwhelming mixture of concern and devotion. He didn't pull away.
"Tim…" Conner breathed against chilled skin, his voice trembling as he watched Tim.
Conner’s hands slid gently up from Tim’s waist, his palms moving with immense reverence over the fragile, trembling curve of Tim’s protruding ribs. There was no judgment in Conner's eyes, no horror, only a profound adoration.
Tim let out a sharp breath, almost a sigh, his fingers gripping Conner's shoulders for leverage.
"I've got you, Tim," Conner murmured softly, his voice a soothing anchor in the quiet room. "Let me take the weight. Just rest on me."
With careful, deliberate tenderness, Conner shifted beneath him, lifting his hips to meet Tim's slow movements so Tim wouldn't have to strain himself.
Tim let out a long sigh, the tension finally draining from his shoulders. He gently collapsed forward onto Conner’s broad, steady chest, burying his face in the crook of Conner's warm neck. He felt uncomfortably small, but entirely safe. Conner’s strong arms immediately wrapped around Tim's back, cradling his narrow frame with a lightness that ensured he didn't put any pressure on the tender, still-unhealed skin of Tim's chest and flank.
"You're so beautiful," Conner whispered against Tim's hair, his lips brushing his temple. He began a slow, rhythmic rocking motion, a steady and comforting pace that required nothing from Tim but to receive it.
They moved together in slow, beautiful harmony. Tim’s arms stayed locked around Conner’s neck, his teeth thoughtfully sinking into the thick denim-like flesh of Conner’s shoulder. Conner moved with a slow, heavy momentum.
Every touch was fraught with the knowledge of what it had cost to bring them back to this room.
Conner pulled Tim as close as physically possible without hurting him. The heat radiating between their bodies was a solid, undeniable shield against the rest of the world. As they moved together slowly, the intensity of the moment peaked, washing over them with a distinct softness. Conner wrapped his arms fully around Tim, tucking Tim's head securely under his chin.
"Tim," Conner whispered, his voice leaden with affection. He felt the tiny, happy shift in Tim at the sound, so he said it again, burying his face in Tim’s soft hair. "Tim. Tim, my pretty bird."
Tim let out a tiny, contented sigh, his cheek pressed flat against Conner's warm collarbone. Hearing his name spoken like a sacred vow made something inside his chest heal completely. He loved it. He loved the way Conner said it, and he loved how deeply, fiercely Conner loved him. He wasn't Robin now, he was just him. He was Tim.
Tim’s weak fingers curled into the fabric of the pillow, his eyes fluttering shut as a tear of absolute relief slipped down his cheek.
"All I wants' to take care of you," Conner promised, his heart beating a strong, steady rhythm right by Tim's ear. "And t'have you take care of yourself."
"I know."
"I know y'know."
They stayed, just like that, as the quiet of the room settled around them. They laid against the narrow mattress, their skin slick with sweat and love. Tim’s chest was rising and falling in shallow jumps, his head resting directly over Conner’s heart. Their breath came out in short, uneven jumps, while outside, the Gotham rain began to hammer against the window frames with a steady, indifferent rhythm, washing the soot from the brickwork and leaving the apartment dim and dark. Conner whispered sweet, soft reassurances into the dark, repeating Tim's name like a lullaby until Tim's breathing slowed again, into a deep, peaceful sleep.
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Tim sat cross-legged on the edge of the mattress, his skeletal frame hunched forward into that familiar, shrimp-like posture. The room had grown colder, the automated grid upstairs apparently shifting its priority down to some other sector of the city, leaving the apartment to the mercy of the November frost. Tim didn't seem to feel it. His skin was a bright, angry crimson along his thighs where his violet-stained fingernails had been gouging red, uneven furrows into the muscle during the comedown.
He reached into the side of his boxers, his knuckles swollen and trembling as he pulled a thin cigarette from the waistband. He didn't use scramble for his lighter, or even some matches. He just held the tab between his lips, waiting.
Conner leaned in close, his bare chest still showing the glowing, chemical green tracks of the Lazarus brine. He didn't speak. He just brought his right index finger up to the tip of Tim’s cigarette. A small, white-hot spark of atmospheric displacement flared along his knuckle— a new development from the feral energy that'd brought him back to the land of the living. The tobacco caught instantly, a dim, diesel flower blooming in the dark.
Tim pulled the warmth deep into his throat with all his might, letting the asphalt fumes tickle the back of his mouth until the smell of the ground was briefly gone. But, he didn't exhale. He leaned forward, his gnarled fingers catching the front of Conner’s jaw with a rigid, desperate firmness. His thumb pressed directly against the yellowed, bruised seam near Conner’s chin, holding his mouth open. Tim leaned in more, pressing their lips together as his blown-out pupils widened, completely fixed on Conner’s unblinking retinas. He opened his mouth and blowed the unrefined plume directly into Conner’s throat.
The heavy, vinyl-scented cloud moved from one set of lungs to the other. Tim reached up his free hand to hold the back of Conner's head, grabbing his hair and gently pulling. Conner didn't move, swallowing the smoke willingly this time, his Kryptonian throat burning with the acrid, stale heat of the tobacco. The nicotine sat at the back of his mouth, familiar and completely necessary, and for one perfect second, he could taste the lemon and cinnamon of the Kansas sunsets, but he could also taste the salt water, the chemical indicator dye, and the dark, gelatinous blood from Tim’s split lips.
"I've got you," Conner mumbled, his own eyes watering from the smoke and the sheer, crushing weight of the boy's grief. He buried his face in Tim’s neck, his teeth sinking into the pale skin above the collarbone until he felt the erratic, rabbit-pulse jumping against his tongue.
His hands came up, his palms gently clamping around Tim’s bare waist. He didn't tighten his grip, but his attention narrowed to a micro-adjustment in posture. They moved together, down on their backs atop the mattress again. Conner moved, placing lazy, sleepy kisses all over Tim. They clutched each other like two pieces of discarded machinery.
Tim let out a dreamy sigh of old vinyl and creosote, his jaw soft against Conner’s collarbone as his brain finally conceded to the exhaustion. They stayed there, in the gray of the Gotham dawn, two broken artifacts from a war that didn't have a winner, holding onto each other, tighter that a sailor's knot.
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The silver comm-link on the bedside table hummed, a low-frequency tactical vibration that made the glass inkwell rattle against the wood.
Conner didn't pick it up. He lay on his side, his large hand still resting open over the sharp, protruding ridge of Tim’s spine, his thumb tracing the hair-line cracks where the scars had faded into the pale cast of his skin. Tim was asleep again— a delirious slumber that was interrupted every few minutes by a spastic, sudden jerk of his limbs or a dry cough that left a smear of black on the pillowcase.
The voice that came through the speaker bypass was flat, synthesized, and carried the specific, cold authority of the Watchtower’s primary monitor network.
"Identification signature, B-20," Dick Grayson’s voice said, the usual Blüdhaven brightness entirely missing, replaced by a tight, rigid flatness that sounded entirely too much like Batman. "Watchtower telemetry indicates a localized power drain within the Gotham East sector. Tim... report."
Conner reached over, clicking the override button with an aggressive, physical firmness.
"Yeah, he's uh, he's not reporting, Dick," Conner said, his voice lower here, carrying that ancient, tectonic resonance he had brought back from the Bialyan sub-levels.
There was a heavy silence on the other end of the line, broken only by the faint, digital hum of the satellite realignment over the eastern seaboard.
"Conner?" Dick asked, his voice breaking ever-so-slightly into a high, desperate register he used whenever he feared things were collapsing inward. "Is he... is he taking his meds? Alfred said he refused the medical disposables on Tuesday. He's using the worst of methods to stay awake, Kon."
"He's asleep now, and if you let him, maybe he'll stay that way," Conner muttered, his eyes tracking the way Tim’s thin, paper-like ribs rose and fell in that mechanical rhythm. "And the teleme-bs is fine. I turned the heater down to zero. We don't need the current for the incubation vats anymore. The experiments are encrypted under the Alpha quarantine."
"You know he was carving his own flesh, Conner," Dick pleaded, the words sounding old, hollowed-out, and pathetic through the encrypted channel. "Bruce stands in his master study with the lights off for hours at a time because he's too mortified to look at what's left in the basement."
"Christ, then don't look," Conner snapped, his jaw tightening the silver coolant scars along his neck turning a blotchy, chemical purple. "Tell the Batman to keep his eight-acre house and his monuments to what he lost. Tim doesn't need a flawless tactician. He just needs patience. And empathy."
He hit the termination code before Dick could answer, the line going dead with a sharp, digital click that left the bedroom in absolute silence.
Tim stirred beside him, his blown-out pupils rolling wildly beneath his eyelids as he muttered an unformatted syntax of genetic sequencing into the bronze of Conner’s skin. His hand— the wrist still the bumpy, welting train tracks— came up to scratch blindly at Conner’s chest, his broken nails leaving faint streaks against the clone’s skin.
"Sequence... copy… a copy," Tim murmured, his voice threadbare, a small, rattling thing that didn't belong to a living boy.
"It's alright, Robin," Conner murmured, using the title softer than anyone else ever said it, a uniquely personal accusation held carefully between his lips in a different way than it once had. He pulled Tim’s emaciated shoulders closer to him, wrapping his large, caramel-colored arms around the ruptured cage of his ribs until his mumbles slowed to long, sleepy breaths.
"We're the only remainders now, sweet bird," Conner whispered into the black strands of Tim’s hair. "Two horrible creatures that outlived their purpose."
The never-ending Gotham fog outside thickened into a dense, purple-black twilight that turned the cracked window glass to a dark mirror. Soon enough, to the dull soundtrack of Tim's head and heart, Conner too drifted off to sleep.