Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

By the time he was 14 years old, Tim was convinced his whole life was one big joke.

“-so then, when Caleb’s halfway out the door-”

“-dammit, the whole thing’s collapsed again-”

“-did you hear about Ellie’s boyfriend-”

Tucked into the back corner of the art room, bent over one of the pottery wheels, and wrist deep in sludge, Tim couldn’t help but be convinced that his entire existence was part of some cosmic sitcom where the shapers of the universe liked to sit around and laugh at his pitiful attempts to adapt to the curveballs life threw at him.

At 14 years old, Tim had come to terms with the fact that he would probably spend the rest of his life alone, because that was just his kind of luck. Tim’s own dad didn't even like him that much and the closest thing he had to friends were an elderly butler and a middle aged man with the worst coping mechanisms west of the Atlantic Ocean.

Tim Drake was a solitary creature, whether by necessity or by natural predisposition. But he was good at being alone. He’d learned to enjoy his own company, to take solace in his own cognizance. Aided by the brisk air of Gotham’s night air and a thrilling sense of independence, Tim learned that some things felt more special when you got to keep them for yourself. Unaccompanied walks down the school halls and singular movie tickets and dinners-for-one weren’t so bad when he could entertain himself with his own thoughts.

Tim had become so good at being alone, he could almost pretend he wasn't desperate for the unconditional love and companionship that a soulmate would guarantee.

It would be nice, Tim thought, to have someone in his life who actually wanted him. Someone who wouldn’t leave every chance they got. Someone who enjoyed his presence instead of merely tolerating it. Someone for whom he wasn’t an obligation.

Wishful thinking.

Every year - every day - that passed with his wrist still blank, his chances of ever getting a soulmate diminished even further from statistically improbable to unimaginable.

“You’ll just be a little more mature when you finally meet your soulmate,” his mother had reassured him when, at the ripe of ten, Tim had asked his parents during a rare family breakfast why a kid in his class told him no one would ever love him and his blank wrist was proof. Asshole. “Any day now, your soulmate will be born and a name will appear.”

“One day, you’ll just be one of those men with a hot, young thing on your arm and you’ll realize you didn’t mind waiting so long,” his father chimed in, winking at him over the rim of his mug.

“Jack,” his mother scolded, slapping his father on the arm, but that only made him grin wider. Tim wrinkled his nose. Even at 10, the thought of being a grown adult while his soulmate was still in diapers made him wildly uncomfortable. “Timothy,” his mother continued. “Ten years really isn’t that large or unusual of an age gap. Not when you get to be our age, anyway. If you still don’t have a name by the time you turn twenty, we can worry about it then.”

But despite his mother’s consolations, there was a giant soulmate-shaped hole in his chest letting in a pretty nasty draft.

Even if his soulmate hadn’t been born yet, he thought there should be some kind of knowing in him. Anticipation or apprehension or an innate faith that there was someone out there waiting to meet him.

Instead, he felt hollow. The soulmate-shaped hole in his chest gathered dust.

But that was okay! Tim had himself, and he had Robin, and really, it was just one less thing to worry about while suiting up, no wrappings that needed to be bound around his forearm like Bruce did before every patrol. Alfred didn’t have a soulmate and he seemed content. Not once had Alfred ever lamented his lack of a divinely appointed partner.

So it really couldn’t be that bad, not having a soulmate. It didn’t mean that he couldn’t fall in love or have a family. It just meant it wouldn’t be as easy for him as it was for everyone else. Hell, Bruce had a soulmate, and his relationship with Selina was anything but easy, as far as Tim could tell. And Dick had, like, 3 different names on his wrist, and that was a mess Tim wouldn’t wanna touch with a 10 foot pole.

Tim had accepted his lot in life and was more or less okay with it. He had a home and a couple hobbies and a handful of people who cared whether he lived or died, and that was enough.

Alas, Tim had forgotten, if only for a moment, that his life was one massive joke, and the post-production crew of existence was about to edit in a laugh track.

The chatter of his classmates made the perfect background noise to tune out while Tim worked fruitlessly at the lump of clay spinning woefully in front of him. The object sitting there could probably contain an amount of liquid, though to call it a cup felt like an over exaggeration. Please, the misshapen lump seemed to beg him. Put me out of my misery.

The gritty material of it was starting to rub his hands raw. More water. That’s what he needed.

Tim lifted his hands from the muddy mess, trying to shake the sleeves of his shirt back down to where they had slipped from their scrunched up place around his elbows. He grabbed the sponge on the side of the pottery wheel and reached for the cup of water set nearby.

And that was when he saw it.

Tim blinked.

The letters didn’t disappear.

Tim blinked again.

Oh, those were letters and numbers.

In the middle of his ceramics class, halfway through third period, the universe had decided, at long last, to grace Tim with a name on the inside of his wrist.

Naturally, it wasn’t actually a name.

Experiment 13

Chapter Text

Between every class, Tim scuttled off to the bathroom so he could lock himself in a stall and stare at his wrist. Every time he twisted the flimsy lock and shoved his sleeve back, he expected to be met with unblemished skin, his soulmark having vanished just as quickly as it appeared. That would just be his luck.

But shockingly enough, every 45 minutes when he checked, it was still there, glaring at him.

Experiment 13

He had half a mind to call out sick for the rest of the school day, because it felt like a momentous occasion and also maybe cause for a little bit of personal crisis, but there really wasn’t any point in that. If the past couple hours had proved anything, it was that that black print wasn’t going anywhere.

The next thing he thought to do was tell someone.

Even if he could get ahold of his dad, he probably wasn't the best person to confide in. Logically, he knew his dad wouldn't chop his arm off to get rid of such a bizarre soulmark, but, well, the fear was there.

Dick was in Bludhaven an hour away and it was the middle of a work day and he’d probably just spout some bullshit about love and trusting the universe anyway. No, Tim needed someone who would be appropriately freaked out by his situation.

Tim needed Bruce.

The rest of the day passed in a blur of bouncing knees and tapping pencils. When the final bell rang, Tim was off like a shot.

Standing in front of the impressive front door of Wayne Manor, Tim couldn’t even remember traveling there. His whole body vibrated. He didn’t remember knocking or ringing the doorbell, but the door swung open, revealing Alfred’s kindly face.

“Master Tim,” he greeted, pleasantly surprised. With a cursory glance, he seemed to notice the way Tim was about to jump out of his own skin and took a step back. “Come inside.”

Tim slipped into the foyer.

“We weren’t expecting you until later, is everything quite alright?” Alfred asked.

In lieu of explaining with words, which Tim felt quite incapable of at that moment, he just turned to face Alfred, yanked his sleeve back, and held out his arm.

“Oh!” Alfred exclaimed cheerfully, catching sight of the black text. “I see we have cause for celebration tonight, don’t-” but then he leaned forward, peering through his spectacles, and Tim saw the moment he really read it. “Oh. Oh dear.”

“Yeah,” Tim responded. “My thoughts exactly.”

“Well,” Alfred said, straightening back up. “Certainly unusual, but not necessarily anything to panic over. We’ll just have to wait until Master Bruce comes home and see what he thinks about this, won’t we? In the meantime, I’m sure you have homework to complete, so go ahead and get settled in the study. I’ll set about fixing you up something to eat.”

Tim allowed Alfred to usher him towards the study, numbly accepting the offered snacks when they appeared on a tray next him. The worksheet in front of him remained empty. Mostly, Tim just stared at his wrist. He couldn’t stop staring at his wrist.

His wrist stared back.

For three hours, Tim wracked his brain for what the name Experiment 13 could mean. Was his soulmate sitting in a petri dish? Was his soulmate some lab grown amalgamation shambling around a test chamber? Was his soulmate even human?

His wrist provided no answers.

Tim was so distracted by those 12 little figures, he didn't even notice Bruce entering the room until a shadow fell over the desk.

“Tim,” Bruce greeted.

“Bruce,” Tim replied.

For a moment, neither of them said anything, just marinating in the building tension. There was no way Alfred hadn’t briefed Bruce on the situation before he came up there and Tim knew that and Tim knew that Bruce knew that he knew that.

Bruce hovered. Tim stared up at him.

“So…” Bruce started.

“Yeah.”

“...right.”

Tim sighed and stuck his arm out. “Just look at it.”

Bruce took his arm and stared at it a good long minute before eloquently expressing, “Hmm.”

Tim’s knee started bouncing again.

“So? What do you think? I mean there has to be a logical explanation for this, right? Like, there’s probably just some really weird parents out there thinking that they just gave their baby a really unique name and that’s all it is, just someone really bad at picking out baby names and my soulmate isn’t actually in a test tube right now getting poked and prodded like a lab rat- oh my god, what if my soulmate is literally a lab rat-”

“Tim,” Bruce interrupted. A heavy hand fell to his shoulder and all the air escaped his lungs in a rush. “It’s going to be alright.”

“Right,” Tim replied, a little breathless.

“Though, this is…interesting.”

Any hope Tim had left of maybe living a normal, quiet life someday shriveled and died. He let out a long, defeated sigh.

“I’m going to look into this and see if I can find anything, okay?” Bruce offered, hesitantly.

“Okay.”

Okay.

***

A week later, Bruce hadn’t found anything and Tim was getting the impression that his situation was anything but okay. Tim had come to the brilliant conclusion that everything was a huge mess actually, including his own emotional state.

In the mornings before school, he wrapped an ace bandage around his forearm and kept the sleeves of his shirt buttoned securely at the wrist. At night before patrol, he did the same thing, keeping the mark safe and hidden under layers of fabric.

And during all the moments in between those, Tim found quiet places to hole up, pulled the wrapping off, and allowed the hole in his chest to fill, bit by bit, with possibility. He caressed the smooth skin of his inner wrist, brushing over that name again and again and again with a fragile reverence. He stared at that name during stolen moments, minutes, hours, day after day letting it become a permanent part of himself. And, despite his better judgment, Tim allowed himself to hope.

Bruce hadn’t managed to find any recent birth certificates - any birth certificates at all - that listed Experiment 13 as a name, so that meant his soulmate probably came out of a lab. But that didn’t mean his soulmate was some kind of monster. It could be a Powerpuff Girls kind of situation, a lab accident resulting in the spontaneous formation of new life. Or they could be a Rocky Horror Picture Show-esque creation.

Tim could love a Rocky. Tim could love a Frankenstein. Frankenstein was technically human. Or, at least made out of human parts.

To be perfectly honest, he noted with no small amount of defeated self-awareness, Tim could love a monster, too. That’s what it meant to have a soulmate, right? That no matter how freakish or dangerous or inhuman they were, Tim would love them.

And they’d love him too.

At night, when that name was the only thing protecting him from the stale isolation of his empty house, he could admit to himself that he already did love them.

It was ridiculous to think he could love someone he hadn’t even met yet, but he did. He longed for their company. They were the first thing he thought of when he woke up and the last thing he thought about when he fell asleep. He hoped that wherever they were, whatever they were, they were alright. That someone was looking out for them. That they yearned for him as much as he yearned for them.

Tim reminded himself that it had only been a week and they still didn’t know anything and it was silly to become so involved so quickly. But he couldn’t help it.

Wherever his Experiment was in the world, that’s where he wanted to be. Tim had come to terms with loving someone who may be a monster, and it didn’t seem so bad anymore. He’d accepted it.

And then, just when his life had settled for a moment, encased in a rare bubble of clarity and tentative faith, the ground shifted under his feet again.

Roughly five and a half hours.

That’s how long Tim went without looking at his wrist on Saturday night. He was 100% certain that when he’d wrapped it up before patrol, it still read Experiment 13. So that meant that at some point in the estimated 5.5 hours between when he suited up and when he suited down, it had changed.

Standing half dressed in the changing room of the batcave, staring down at his arm, Tim felt incredulous, conflicted, and vaguely offended. He didn’t even bother to finish getting dressed, just strode right out into the open space of the batcave in his socks and tights and undershirt, making a beeline to where Alfred and Bruce were both examining something on the screen.

“You guys can see this too, right?” he asked when he was close enough for them to have noticed him, sticking his arm out so there wouldn’t be any mistaking what he meant. He was distantly aware that his voice came out sounding a little hysterical. “Like, I’m not crazy, am I? I’m not hallucinating? Does this say what I think it says?”

Tim was in desperate need of a second opinion because, while soulmarks changing over time was normal for the average person - whether because a long-used nickname overtook a legal name, or a chosen name replaced a dead-name, or a person’s last name switched due to an adoption or marriage - his situation was anything but normal.

Because somehow, despite all odds, in some bizarre stroke of fate, the name of Tim’s soulmate had inexplicably become weirder.

Where his wrist once read Experiment 13, it now simply said Superman.

Chapter Text

There were a lot of things wrong with the situation. So many things, in fact, that the part of Tim’s brain not shutting down from a system overload began compiling a helpful list of the many things that were wrong with this situation.

1. Superman wasn’t a name so much as a title, a character that Clark assumed when he was out saving kittens from trees, or whatever necessitated a superhero in Metropolis. If Superman was his soulmate, shouldn’t his wrist have read Clark Kent? Or even Kal-El?

2. Clark was old. More than twice Tim’s age. Which was gross. Clark was dating before Tim was even born, which, coincidentally led into the next facet of how the situation was off-the-wall bonkers:

3. Clark was definitely not only born a week ago. If Clark was his soulmate, why would it only show up on his wrist now?

4. If Clark was his soulmate, there was still no explanation he could fathom for why his name first showed up as Experiment 13.

5. Clark was dead. D-E-D dead. Deceased. Departed. Unalive. 6 feet under. Kicked the bucket. Met his maker. Left the building. Closed for business. Dead. Had been for - 7? 8 weeks? - a while. The wound was still fresh. The world was still grieving. His family was still grieving, which led to the last and most important point:

6. Last time he checked, Clark and Lois were in a committed relationship. Tim wasn’t a homewrecker.

That was as far as Tim got into his mental data analysis before Bruce spoke.

“Okay,” he said, clearly grasping for the right way to respond to your sidekick/weird-neighbor-kid having a soulmark bearing the title of your deceased friend/coworker who was probably the single most renowned superhero of all time. “Okay,” he said again. It was good to know, at least, that Tim wasn’t the only one blowing a circuit over this.

Just when he’d come to terms with being eternally bound to Mr./Mrs./Mx. First-Name-Experiment Last-Name-13, the universe went clowning on him.

Cosmic Prank City, Population: Tim

Alfred leaned forward, peering through the glasses perched low on his nose at the newest source of anxiety in Tim’s life. “Curious,” he commented, like Tim wasn’t having 3 different identity crises in rapid succession. “That does appear to read ‘Superman.’”

“Okay,” Bruce said for the third time. Tim kind of wanted to hit him over the head with the keyboard, or maybe the entire computer. “So… I suppose this changes things.”

Tim waited for Bruce to elaborate on that, propose a plan of action maybe, give him something, anything to go on.

Bruce did not.

Tim and Bruce stared at each other and it kind of felt like they were communicating telepathically in the way that Tim’s head felt like it was filled with bees and he thought Bruce was probably experiencing the exact same thing.

Eventually, Alfred was the one to break the silence.

“Well, there’s no cause to panic. I have complete confidence that this situation will work itself out. In the meantime, it’s of no use to stand around and gawk. Master Timothy, finish changing and head home. You will be alerted promptly if any new information is discovered regarding your situation.”

The bees in his head prompted him to nod and he turned to head back to the locker room. He made it all of 2 feet before his next coherent thought appeared and he swiveled back around to face Bruce and Alfred.

“My dad and Dana are coming back after the weekend. What am I supposed to tell them?”

It wasn’t something they’d discussed so far. Tim hadn’t planned on informing his dad about his soulmark initially and the whole situation hadn’t gotten any less weird, it’d just gotten weird two steps to the left.

But they were supposed to be back home in two days, and how long could he feasibly keep something like this a secret before it came out and everything blew up in his face and he had to move to Greenland to escape the fallout?

Bruce pursed his lips.

“Maybe…” he offered tentatively, “...don’t tell them about it.”

***

“So, Tim, did we miss anything exciting while we were gone?”

Dana’s voice was chipper as it rose over the clatter of the bagel shop they were in. As always, she was warm and encouraging and blissfully unaware of the Kill Bill sirens going off in Tim’s head.

He choked down a mouthful of blueberry and bread before answering, “Oh, you know, just the usual murder, theft, and arson that goes on around here.” Totally no bizarre or life altering occurrences that may or may not have beat him upside the head in the middle of the school day.

“No strippers or cocaine?” Dana teased, slathering cream cheese on her bagel.

“Eh, I’m really more of a heroin and hookers kind of guy.”

“Don’t even joke about that,” his dad piped up good-naturedly, setting three mugs on the table before squeezing Tim’s shoulder. “You’ll send me to an early grave.”

“Maybe that’s part of my evil plan to get hold of my inheritance early.”

“Oh yeah?” his dad said, reaching over to steal a chunk off his muffin. “Then who would take care of you?”

Who takes care of me now? Tim couldn’t help but think. He washed that thought down with a mouthful of cappuccino. The coffee was less bitter.

He didn’t need anyone to take care of him. He was fourteen years old. He had a bus pass and a debit card and Batman on speed dial. He didn’t even want his dad around all the time; it wasn’t like they had much in common.

But he did want his dad to want to be around all the time.

“Dana, obviously,” he said after a moment, popping the bubble of growing resentment in his stomach. It was a beautiful day and he wanted to enjoy brunch with his family. Or what was left of it, anyway.

“As long as I get my half of the inheritance,” Dana said, throwing him a wink. He wondered what she would say if she knew what hid beneath the layers of wool and cotton and industrial strength concealer on his forearm. Probably something vaguely comforting and incredibly unhelpful, the way she always did when confronted with the challenges of pseudo-parenting a kid that wasn’t her own.

“Alright, alright,” his dad said, waving a hand through the air. “You vultures can pick me over after I’m dead.”

“Speaking of picking apart the dead…”

Tim followed Dana’s line of sight to the flat screen mounted on the wall of the cafe where the Metropolis News Network was displaying the Superman logo for the billionth time in two months. Even after the guy was 6 feet under they still kept milking him for headlines.

He tuned out the ambient chatting and clinking and muffled rush of cars outside just in time to catch, “-in from all over - sightings of a costumed do-gooder who witnesses claim was Superman.”

He then promptly inhaled the bite of muffin in his mouth, sending him into a coughing fit. Tears blurred his vision as a series of eyewitness accounts flashed across the screen, the sound of his own hacking drowning out their words.

“Jesus, Tim,” his dad said, pounding on his back, which did nothing to dislodge the obstruction and only resulted in exacerbating a nasty bruise under his shoulder blade.

“Are you alright, honey?” Dana asked, handing him a napkin.

“Yeah, I’m f-fine, just - ahhck! - just went down the wrong pipe,” he rasped.

By the time he managed to focus back on the news, a reporter was saying, “-and back to you Ryan,” and the weekly weather forecast replaced what could have been Tim’s soulmate conveniently displayed on live television.

“Bathroom,” Tim managed to choke out before scuttling off towards the back of the shop.

Me [10:21 AM]: Have you heard about the Superman sightings in Metropolis this morning?

Shit. It was 10 AM on a Sunday morning. There was no chance Bruce would face the sun until noon at the soonest.

Me [10:22 AM]: No rush, just let me know when you’ve had a chance to check it out.

Maybe Tim was overreacting. Eyewitness reports weren’t always reliable. It could have been a different superhero. Or a cosplayer. The Superman-adjacent figure running around Gotham’s sister city was probably completely unrelated to the fact that a couple days prior the name Superman had been emblazoned on his wrist.

Me [10:23 AM]: Maybe it would just be better if I came over tonight. I know I’m not supposed to go out on school nights, but I’ll just come over to use the computers for research and you can still go out.

Me [10:23 AM]: I won’t even stay late

Me: [10:23 AM]: Promise

That was alright, right? Was he being crazy? Should he send another message? Or maybe hack a cell tower and delete the messages from existence before Bruce could read them? God, how long had he been in the bathroom? Were Dana and his dad getting worried? Getting suspicious? Was he having a panic attack in the bathroom stall at Bunsen & Burner Bagels?

Shit. Shit.

He was in a bagel shop during the brunch rush having a panic attack in the bathroom and he was in a middle stall so he couldn’t even dramatically slide down the wall and curl into a ball while hyperventilating. The best he could do was sit on the toilet seat and press his hands to the side walls to keep them from closing in and crushing him.

Soulmates were supposed to be a good thing. Finding the predestined love of your life was a magical experience, one filled with whimsy and romance. It was something he was supposed to show his family with excitement and giggle with his friends about. That’s what all the movies said.

Instead, one of the most joyous occasions of his life had been filled with nothing but stress, anxiety, and confusion.

Tim wanted to be able to share his soulmark with someone and be happy about it. He wanted to be held and congratulated. He wanted someone to tell him everything would be alright; he just needed to trust in the universe.

He wanted his brother.

***

“Timbit!”

The door swung open to reveal Dick, a wide grin stretching his face, casual in his yoga pants and Gotham Knights tank top. Just seeing him lowered Tim’s blood pressure. There were other adults in his life, but Dick was by far the coolest, and the only one he could talk to without feeling stupid, awkward, or bothersome.

“Hey, Dick,” Tim greeted while ducking through the doorway, careful to avoid brushing the splintered door frame that always managed to snag his jacket.

He made a beeline directly to the couch that might have been blue once, a decade or two ago. Probably around the same time it was last comfortable. That didn’t stop him from flopping onto it like a corseted lady from a Victorian era novel.

“You want anything to drink?” Dick asked. “I have, umm, two percent milk, and also tap water.”

Tim hummed, pretending to think. “Does the water come with lead poisoning?”

“Oh, everything in Chez Grayson comes with complimentary lead poisoning.”

“A glass of your finest tap water then, please.”

Tim threw an arm over his eyes and listened to the soft pad of Dick’s footsteps into the kitchen.

“You want ice?”

“Yes, please,” Tim answered.

He heard the schluck of the ancient freezer door getting pried open, then Dick said, “Just kidding, I forgot to refill the ice cube tray. You get room temperature tap water.”

“Mmm, delicious.”

A few moments later there was a nudge on the side of his leg. Tim uncovered one eye to find a glass of hygienically questionable Bludhaven tap water held in front of his face. He took the glass and moved his legs just long enough for Dick to sit down before throwing them back over his lap.

“Your dad still out of town?” Dick asked in that way that sounded casual but Tim knew was a subtle inquiry as to whether Jack would be losing or gaining points on the Quality of Dad Scale.

“Nah, he and Dana got back from their trip a couple days ago.”

“Oh.” Dick sounded pleasantly surprised. “Umm, where does he think you are right now?”

For as absent as his father could be sometimes, Tim and Dick were both aware that even he would get involved if he knew his underage son was spending his lonely weekends with a 21 year old college dropout from Bludhaven. Not that it was anything like that, but his dad didn’t even know his favorite color, let alone the intricacies of his extra-familial relationships.

“In bed.”

“At-” Dick turned to look at the time displayed on the microwave, “-seven forty-five PM?”

“He and Dana went out to dinner just before seven,” Tim explained. “They’ll go out for drinks afterward so they won’t be home until ten at the earliest, at which point he’ll assume I’m already asleep. I leave for school in the mornings before my dad even wakes up to get ready for work, and if I tell him I have some after school activity, he won’t expect to see me until, like, five o’clock tomorrow night.”

“...Have I ever mentioned that I think your home life is questionable?”

Tim propped himself up on his elbows and looked pointedly around the decrepit apartment.

“Have I ever mentioned that I think your home life is questionable?” Tim shot back.

Dick’s eyes narrowed. “Touché.”

Tim flopped back down.

“So,” Dick continued after a moment, “Did you come here to talk about your problems or ignore them?”

“Well…”

Now that he’d traveled all the way to Bludhaven and weaseled his way onto Dick’s couch, Tim found himself doubting his decision to confront his issues. Dick had taken Clark’s death hard. What if seeing the mark on Tim’s arm just made things worse?

All his fantasies of a tentative yet joyful announcement crumbled to a fine dust that was indistinguishable from all the grime in the apartment.

“Well?” Dick prompted.

Tim chewed on his lip. “...have you talked to Bruce or Alfred lately?”

He was stalling. He knew he was stalling. And he knew that Dick knew he was stalling.

“Not since the last time I was in Gotham, and that was a couple weeks ago. Why?”

He tugged at a loose thread on the hem of his shirt. “Umm…have you seen the news yet?”

“We’ve established that I haven’t left my bed all day.” A pinch at his ankle made Tim yelp and he finally met Dick’s eye to glare at him. “Stop being cryptic. What news are you talking about?”

He heaved a great sigh and set the untouched glass of water on the coffee table before sitting up. “Okay, don’t freak out.”

Dick’s wary gaze fell to where Tim was shoving up the right sleeve of his jacket. “Okay, not a great way to start out…” His sentence fell over and died the moment he caught sight of that one silly little word that might as well have been stamped across his forehead for how undeniable it was.

“Holy shit,” Dick said, stunned. “Holy shit. You have a soulmark? When did this happen?”

“Uhh, yes, apparently, and a couple weeks ago.”

“A couple weeks ago?!” Dick shrieked. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you now!” Tim defended.

“And Clark is alive? When did that happen!” Every sentence was punctuated by an ironclad grip shaking his knee back and forth like Dick was incapable of expressing his emotions without jiggling Tim like a bowl of jello.

“I don’t know, like, this morning?”

“This morning?!”

Somewhere past the window a dog barked, and Tim thought it may or may not have been related to the pitch of Dick’s voice.

“Why doesn’t anyone tell me anything? Why didn’t you tell me anything?”

“Okay, in my defense, this has been a very stressful situation and there isn’t exactly a guide book on how to react to a freakish soulmark. Also, regarding the Clark thing, I texted you after I saw the news, but, as previously mentioned, you’ve been becoming one with your mattress for the past eight hours.”

The words came out harsher than he intended and regret curled in his belly. Like an idiot, Tim had hoped that for once in his life things would just go well.

Dick puffed out his cheeks before blowing out a long stream of air. He dragged a hand down his face then turned and looked at Tim curled against the arm of the couch, picking at his nails so he didn’t have to look Dick in the eye.

His voice was hesitant when he asked, “Clark’s really alive?”

Something ugly and bitter bubbled in Tim’s chest. It took him a moment to realize that it was resentment. Useless, childish, jealous resentment. Resentment at Dick for caring more about a potentially reanimated corpse than his own brother. Resentment at the universe for banking on shock value in the story of his life. And most of all, resentment towards himself for putting himself in this situation, for getting his own hopes up, and for being the kind of person who cared more about his own stupid feelings than the return of earth’s greatest hero.

But all of that was irrelevant. So Tim poured all those thoughts into a jar and screwed a lid on it tight. The jar went into the back of his mental pantry behind his canned childhood memories and bottled disappointments, and Tim got back to work.

“Where’s your remote?” he asked. “It’s been all over the news, at least one channel is probably still running the story.”

Dick’s hands dove in and out of couch cushions, eventually coming up triumphant around Tim’s knee. He clicked a button, swore when it did nothing, and heaved Tim’s legs off his lap so he could get up and slap the side of the TV. The screen fizzled a bit before a colorful picture sprung to life.

“-fessor Utonium accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction - Chemical X!”

Tim squinted at Dick. “You watch Cartoon Network?”

He narrowly avoided getting smacked in the face by a television remote turned projectile.

“Try MNN,” Dick instructed. “If Superman really is back in Metropolis, they’ll be reporting on it.”

“Wow,” Tim drawled. “I can really tell you were trained by the world’s greatest detective.”

“Brat.” The word was accompanied by a flick on his ear as Dick got settled back on the couch.

He flicked through the channels until the MNN logo popped up. Unfortunately, it was alongside a clip of the Met U Bulldogs Vs. Stockton Ospreys basketball game. “Damn. Hold on-”

“-then add your onion - oh, listen to that sizzle-”

“-♫ not gonna take it. No! We ain’t gonna take ♫-”

“-for only nineteen-ninety-nine, this set can be yours! Just call one-eight-hundred-”

“You need to go up-”

“I am going up! I’m literally clicking the up button!”

“Oh my god, give me that.”

“No- Dick, get off-”

In their scramble for the remotes, buttons got mashed from top to bottom, flipping through settings, volume levels, and channels alike. Tim was about to resort to biting to maintain his claim on the remote until-

“-clone of superman!”

Both of them froze mid battle to whip around towards the TV.

“I don’t have my memories ‘cause there was no living brain tissue but - hey! Less mental baggage!” the figure on the screen said.

Tim’s vision tunneled.

He lounged in his armchair like he didn’t have a care in the world. A cocky grin tugged up one corner of his mouth. A pair of circular sunglasses glinted in the stage light. His dark curls were mussed and his suit was skintight and his leather jacket was just a little too large.

The first coherent thought Tim had was, Definitely more of a Rocky than a Frankenstein.

The second was, Thank god he’s age appropriate.

The third was, Holy shit. That’s my soulmate.

Chapter Text

Tim was one shaky camera shot away from chewing a hole in his lip.

“There’s been a…surprise attack on Superman. Explosions have shattered the safety cables between him and the engine.”

Ever since that first fateful interview on GBS, Tim had been glued to the batcomputer like a barnacle on a boat. Every news report, gossip rag, or internet forum devoted to Superman sightings had been tracked down and copied onto a digital folder.

Tim’s soulmate even had his own case file now, in the PERSONS OF INTEREST section.

>SUPERMAN (CLONE)

>ABILITIES

>CADMUS FILES

>CIVILIAN REPORTS

>PHYSIOLOGY

>VIDEO RECORDINGS

     >GBS

          >3/24 (FIRST APPEARANCE)

          >3/25 (ALTERCATION WITH STEEL HAND )

          >3/30 (MEETING WITH SUPERGIRL )

          >4/2 (ALTERCATION WITH THE STINGER )

     >METROPOLIS CCTV

     >OTHER

>WEAKNESSES

So, technically, all the new Supermans had their own files. SUPERMAN (‘Man of Tomorrow’), SUPERMAN (‘The Last Son of Krypton’), and SUPERMAN (‘Man of Steel’), alongside SUPERMAN (Clone). So far, John Henry Irons was the only one who had been taken off the list of Tim’s Potential Soulmates with certainty.

The other two were still technically possibilities, but…well, Tim just knew. It was his soulmate after all.

“No time to talk, Tana. I got a train to catch!”

In the past several days Tim had spent lurking in the batcave every minute he could weasel away from home, he’d watched every video in the file a dozen times, and they never failed to raise Tim’s blood pressure. Every time his soulmate got shot at or sucker-punched or enveloped by flames, Tim looked down at his wrist expecting to see those lovely little letters turned to scar tissue.

The color black had never been so beautiful.

Despite his concern, Tim couldn’t help but look at the boy on TV and think, Really? Him?

The boy who called himself Superman was arrogant and self-absorbed and reckless. He cared less about saving people than performing for the camera. Watching him do anything was a constant test of Tim’s patience and nerves.

And he couldn’t get enough of it.

His face, his costume, his stupid pop culture references, they all pulled at him like doorknobs catching the wire of his headphones. It was infuriating and addicting. All his little habits and mannerisms filled up the parts of Tim that had once felt hollow. When he breathed, it was Superman in his lungs. When his heart beat, it was Superman in his veins.

The hunger for information possessed him. He had to know everything because there wasn’t nearly enough to know. All he had to go on was Tana Moon, superwatch.net, and a handful of files pilfered from Cadmus.

At least Bruce didn’t have a problem with him monopolizing the batcomputer. Of course, he wasn’t in a position to lecture Tim about obsessive tendencies, but his understanding was appreciated anyway.

“How ‘ja know?” a construction worker on the screen recited. Tim had hacked his medical records for sheer lack of anything better to do. His cholesterol was a little high. “Super hearing? Tel-o-scopix x-ray vision? Some sorta sixth sense?”

“Would you believe dumb luck?” the Young Superman answered.

God, Tim wanted to rip his hair out. No matter how many times he heard, he never wanted to yell at the boy any less. He wanted to scream Stop! Don’t hurt yourself! Don’t you know how important you are to me?!

But he couldn’t.

So instead he watched the video to its end.

Then he hit replay.

***

Tim woke up Wednesday night and Coast City was gone.

Adrenaline had jolted him from slumber, triggered by an aimless, anxiety-inducing nightmare. He could remember that his dad was in it, and so was his middle school gym teacher, but every other memorable detail had fled his brain upon waking.

He blinked bleary eyes up at his bedroom ceiling, still exhausted but too unsettled to go right back to sleep, lest the nightmare return. The alarm clock on his bedside table read 11:49 PM in glowing green dashes.

He rolled over and plucked his phone from the bedside table, planning to play Snake until he couldn’t remember why he wasn’t asleep, but a couple text notifications had him roping his few active brain cells together.

B // 10:03 PM

Left town for business. Not sure when I’ll be back. Don’t go out without N nearby or A in your ear.

‘Business’ meant JLA stuff, not to be confused with WE business, which Bruce always referred to as ‘work stuff.’ And if a location wasn’t specified, he was most likely off planet, which did technically fall under the category of ‘out of town.’

It wasn’t altogether unusual to get a note like that from Bruce, but what really caught his attention was a message from a classmate that had him baffled.

Michael Bruegger (Calc) // 6:29 PM

a couple of us are meeting @ beantown 2morrow 2 cram for the exam nxt week since school got cancelled. U want 2 come?

School canceled? When had he missed that update?

He sat up and peaked through his curtains, expecting to see an unseasonable layer of snow or something to explain a last minute cancellation.

The streets were as barren as always.

Had someone called in a bomb threat? Were the teachers striking again? Why hadn’t he heard anything?

Well, Tim knew the answer to the last question. His dad had insisted on a father-son movie marathon after spending all weekend at the office, no phones allowed. They’d rented the Indiana Jones Trilogy from Blockbuster and had popcorn for dinner while his dad pointed out all the archaeological inaccuracies, which happened about every two minutes

It had been…nice. Almost nice enough to make Tim want a relationship with his father that was close enough to be honest about the things going on in his life.

Almost.

But with questions swirling through his head, Tim was cursing all the time he’d lost being unaware of what was going on. There was a prickle in his stomach that meant he needed to investigate, that there were answers to be found, and he couldn’t rest until they were in reach.

Tim slunk like a ghost out of his bedroom and to the office nook off the living room where his dad’s computer was. The worn leather of the desk chair was cold against the backs of his knees. He sat on the very edge so it wouldn’t creak with his movements.

It only took a couple minutes of research to discover what had gone horribly, devastatingly wrong.

ACCIDENT, INVASION, OR ATTACK? CAUSE OF COAST CITY DESTRUCTION STILL UNKNOWN

ALMOST A MILLION DEAD IN COAST CITY BOMBING

COUNTRY SHUTS DOWN AMIDST FEARS OF TERRORIST ATTACKS

Tim tore through article after article, gorging himself on tragedy until he felt so full of it, he thought he might be sick.

And then the tagline of one article made his heart stop.

CYBORG SUPERMAN AND YOUNG SUPERMAN SEARCHING FOR COAST CITY SURVIVORS.

He read it without breathing, hardly absorbing the words between ‘lost contact with GBS field reporters’ and ‘fog and smoke making it impossible to say what could be happening’ and ‘4 hours later, both Supermen are yet to be seen.’

Tim read until his eyes burned and his jaw ached from how hard he was clenching it. He read about the mysterious explosion and he read about the Supermen who went in to investigate it and the Supermen who didn’t. He read conspiracy theories and nation wide alerts and forums discussing how to survive a nuclear holocaust. He read until there was nothing left to read.

Then he shut down the computer, tracked down his tennis shoes, and sprinted underneath a haze-covered moon to the outside entrance of the batcave.

It was cold and dark and empty. Not really colder or darker or emptier than it usually was, but it felt that way. Tim stood there for a moment in his pajamas, the words Almost a Million Dead pushing at the inside of his skull like an animal in a too-small cage.

Tim didn’t know what else to do, so he went with what he always did: he pulled up a chair and began to dissect the internet with a fervor that a psychiatrist would consider cause for concern.

The advanced system provided him more to work with, more to obsess and stress over than the one at home. It contained deleted articles and classified information stripped from the web by government agencies that didn’t exist on paper. More importantly, it had copies of all the news broadcasts other people would only be able to watch on live television.

And that’s when he found out that the situation was much, much worse than he thought.

“Tana Moon reporting live! The unidentified missile which erupted from the Coast City Disaster Zone has evaded all patriot anti-missile fire!”

The camera turned from the face of the reporter to the sky, all blue and orange in the impending sunset. The view was decorated with fluffy clouds and faint stars and a giant, burning missile hurtling straight for downtown Metropolis.

Briefly abandoning common sense, Tim held his breath and waited to feel the cacophony of Gotham’s sister city being eviscerated before he remembered that the news report wasn’t actually live, and if Metropolis had been hit by a bomb big enough to level it, Tim would have heard the boom or felt the rumble or seen the plume of smoke across the bay.

“Wait! It’s the Young Superman! He… My god! Put this chopper down, Gordon - anywhere!”

It was then that Tim noticed the teeny, tiny, red and blue speck hanging off the missile, almost impossible to see with the shaky camera shot.

His heart dropped down to about his kidneys, or bladder maybe. He didn’t feel the cold anymore, or the plastic of the keyboard under his fingertips, or the pounding in his temples. For about 30 excruciating seconds, Tim ceased to exist completely. There was an absence of him that could not be restored until the waiting was done, until he saw what was going to happen next.

The roar of rocket boosters swelled out of the computer speakers.

The screen glowed brighter and brighter, filled with an overexposed snapshot of imminent doom.

It felt as though Tim was right there, sitting on a Metropolis rooftop, waiting to die.

The missile flew closer and closer then-

Then farther.

And farther.

The sound of the reporter's voice jolted Tim from his trance.

“Yes! He deflected the missile! He’s riding it out over the harbor and toward the open sea! He saved the city, everyone! Superman saved Metropolis. He-”

Tim didn’t even get to enjoy the sweet surge of pride at his soulmate’s victory before the missile exploded.

The missile exploded.

A huge burst of fire ripped through the air above Metropolis, so intense Tim swore he could feel the heat. It was huge. It was horrifying.

It was the kind of thing that would be impossible to survive.

The reporter’s words turned muffled in his ears. A sense like he was underwater descended, and Tim felt dizzy.

It couldn’t be real. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t really happening. What he thought had happened hadn’t actually happened.

Right?

Right?

Distant sobs eeked out from the computer.

My mark, Tim thought, and it was his voice inside his head, but somehow it felt as though it was coming from someone else. My soulmark. Is it still there?

Tim needed to look at his arm. He needed to check, needed to know, and maybe it was wrong, maybe his soulmate had made a clever escape like Batman or Robin or Nightwing had a million times, tripping into the embrace of safety after a near death experience and his soulmark would prove that, still bold and dark against his skin, still real, still proving that the love of Tim’s life was out there and breathing and alive, but maybe instead it could be pale and thin, the name scarred over the moment his hope was snuffed out, proof that the universe was cruel, that Tim would never find love or be happy or meet the ridiculous boy in the oversized jacket with the mischievous grin that filled his stomach with butterflies, fuck, he couldn’t breath.

It was unclear whether he was hyperventilating or suffocating. Trying to force himself to look felt like that moment when you’re in bed and suddenly you’re falling, plummeting through the void, and you jump awake with a gasp, except Tim couldn’t wake up.

He didn’t make the conscious decision to look down, but at some point his head had tilted and black letters swam through his vision.

Black letters.

Black.

And that-

That meant his soulmate was still alive. That meant somehow, someway, the Young Superman saved the city and survived the explosion. So why was Tim clutching at his wrist hard enough to leave little indents from his nails in the skin under his thumb?

He could have died. Tim’s soulmate could have died, without ever getting to meet him, feel him, know him. An explosion like that could have blown him halfway across the state. Maybe he still would die, wasted in a ditch somewhere taking his last breaths, barely hanging on after the damage he sustained. He could be in a hospital covered in burns without Tim there to hold his hand. He could be paralyzed or concussed or in fucking pieces all over the eastern seaboard-

Tim didn’t realize he was crying until a hot tear drop hit his arm. A choked sob popped in his throat like a balloon.

Why was he such a wreck? Tim watched people he cared about run head first into perilous situations on a weekly basis and he never let himself fall apart over it. He didn’t panic when Bruce or Dick went toe-to-toe with some of the world’s most dangerous criminals. He didn’t have a conniption every time his dad bought a plane ticket even after his mother’s casket had returned to Gotham on a private jet. His soulmate wasn’t even dead. He was probably fine.

That didn’t stop Tim from curling up in the giant desk chair and bawling until long after the video clip was over.

The combined exhaustion and stress bowled him over until unconsciousness welcomed him with open arms.

That was how Alfred found him several hours later, a gentle hand patting his cheek to wake him up and a knowing look in his eye.

Not a word was spoken as Alfred powered down the computer and led him upstairs to the kitchen. It was dim, but watery light from the sunrise lent a comforting illumination to the space. He was guided to the window nook and swaddled in a thick, fluffy blanket that soothed him enough that he found it in himself to be embarrassed about his outburst. Being found alone in the batcave crying over a guy he’d never met was not in his Top 10 List of Cool Guy Moments.

Admittedly, he did feel better. Alfred pressed a mug into his hands. He sipped at it without really tasting it, but the liquid was warm on his raw throat. The sob session had softened his lingering tension. He felt scooped out. Hollow, but in a good way. Like an empty bowl left on the rack to air dry.

The cushion underneath him dipped with Alfred’s weight as a hand settled over his shoulder blade through the blanket.

“How are you feeling, my boy?” he asked.

“Ugh.”

Alfred hummed. “Understandable. I take it you’ve had a taxing evening. Recent events have been a shock for all of us.”

Tim stared down into the rippling surface of his drink. He still wasn’t sure exactly what it was. “Alfred, tell me this whole thing is gonna get easier.”

Alfred sighed, his hand slipping down to the middle of Tim’s spine. “I’m sure I don’t know much regarding soulmates, but one thing I know for sure about life is that it never gets easier.”

Tim gave a humorless snort. “Wow, you really know how to cheer a guy up, Alf.”

A silence stretched out for a dozen heartbeats or so before Alfred spoke again. “I wish I had better answers for you. I wish I could take all of your worries and burdens away, but I’m afraid that is beyond my capabilities. The best I can do is promise you will never have to bear them alone.”

Instead of responding with words, Tim leaned into him and rested his head on a warm shoulder. It was firmer than he expected, and the fabric of his shirt was soft on Tim’s cheek.

That simple reassurance meant more than Tim could explain. Even if the worst happened, he could lean on his motley little crew of a second family.

They sat like that until the light turned golden and his drink went cold. After the third yawn to split his jaws, Alfred plucked the mug from his hands and it seemed to vanish into the thin air. Walking across the tiles was a herculean task, but sinking into the velvet couch of the sunroom was second nature, and the blanket made a warm pocket for him with all the edges tucked in by Alfred.

A spare burner phone appeared two inches from his nose and Tim took it, typing out a half-baked story about getting to school before learning it had been canceled and going out to study with a handful of classmates for the day and messaging from one of their phones since his had died and it was all very believable even though he was sure his father wouldn’t question it.

The ambient sounds of Alfred puttering around the kitchen doing meal prep rocked him into a doze, the static of chopping and rustling and Wheel of Fortune reruns playing on the small kitchen TV making him feel safe and watched over and the complete opposite of alone.

***

Things got better after Bruce returned.

After the drama and chaos of the Coast City bombing had subsided, more information came to light, adding definition to an otherwise indecipherable picture.

Tim studied Bruce’s report like it was the bible and judgment day was coming. It described in excruciating detail how the Cyborg Superman was an imitation of the true Big Blue, hell bent on revenge, and willing to destroy millions of lives to get it. Bruce’s irritation at being fooled into leaving the planet with the rest of the Justice League to leave it defenseless was palpable in every sentence.

There was an individual section for each Superman and the role each one of them played. A bone deep sense of relief came over him when he read a Cadmus file that said John Henry Irons had been brought in for treatment by the Young Superman, who was - to the best of their knowledge - in good health.

And perhaps most notable, the original Superman had returned, confirmed by J’onn, Lois, and the Kents.

Tim woke up one morning and his wrist said Superboy. If there had been any doubt in his mind before then that the Young Superman was his soulmate, it vanished into thin air. Paperwork for the sale of the Superman copyright claim from Rex Leech Enterprises to Kal-El of Krypton was filed at the Metropolis courthouse before the week was over.

Knowing all of that, Tim wasn’t quite sure how he ended up in Atlantic City.

Well, a two hour bus ride was how, but that was irrelevant.

Every booth along the pier was bustling with lights and the chatter of families enjoying their weekends. Every booth except the one Tim was hidden in the shadow of, metal shutter closed and awning providing a candy-striped cloak of darkness for him to disappear under.

Maybe it was overkill, combined with the baseball cap pulled low over a pair of aviators, and the fact that the person he was there to observe had no clue who he was.

Even in the crowds of children and young lovers and clumped together teenagers, Superboy might as well have had a spotlight on him for how Tim’s eyes were drawn to him.

The Atlantic City Boardwalk was the third stop on Superboy’s brand tour. Tim had gotten ahold of the itinerary through methods that were not altogether dignified. After Atlantic City, the trio of Rex Leech Enterprises employees would loop up and around New York City before traveling southwest across the country, farther and farther from Metropolis.

Farther from Gotham.

Farther from Tim.

And he couldn’t let that happen without seeing him in person first.

A bright laugh carried on the sea breeze and Tim followed it to the source: a young blonde woman who made up one half of Superboy’s entourage. Roxanne Leech. Her shameless flirting and itty bitty bikini belied the spirit of a street fighter, one Tim could sense just from watching her effortlessly handle both the men she worked with.

It was her father that really raised Tim’s hackles. He gave off vibes greasy enough to have Tim double checking that his wallet was still in his pocket. And if his general aura wasn’t enough, Tim had had the displeasure to interact with him up close and personal at Superman’s funeral procession when the slimebag tried to strong-arm Jimmy Olsen into selling him the photo of Clark’s still-warm corpse.

Leech’s nose seemed to have healed up nicely since then. Shame.

He had also somehow swindled his way into the position of Superboy’s business manager, which was just fantastic. A guy literally named Leech was basically Tim’s manager-in-law. Or would be. At some point. Assuming Tim ever worked up the nerve to just go over there.

His heart rabbited in his chest. Superboy practically glowed in the golden light of the sunset. He’d abandoned his jacket and boots, sitting on the counter of their rented booth kicking his bare feet above the concrete while haloed by the Superman insignia on a hodgepodge of cheap merchandise.

He was too far for Tim to pick out the dimples on his cheeks, but he knew they were there. The pearly gleam of his teeth could’ve blinded someone. The wind tousled his hair like a goddamn shampoo commercial.

Tim had never felt so…lopsided.

What would he say? ‘Hi, my name is Tim and you don’t know me but I’m pretty much already in love with you’ ? That would be a great way to make a first impression as a starstruck stalker. And that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Superboy was Tim’s soulmate but…could he trust him?

He’d so far shown a certain lack of regard for caution or subtly. Would someone practically born in the limelight understand how vital it was for Tim to maintain his secret identity? And furthermore, if he didn’t immediately tell Superboy that he was also of the heroic variety, how long could a precarious situation like that hold out? How long would he fall for the Tim Drake: Regular Guy routine before he found a piece of the Robin costume lying around, or spotted him in the field and recognized him?

God, that would be the worst possible way to tell someone that.

His own dad didn’t know he was Robin. But his dad was also a civilian. With a soulmate who was already a superhero, Tim would never have to torture himself about putting an innocent person in danger with his lifestyle. But that didn’t solve his other problems.

Tim missed his mom.

Even if all his problems were exactly the same, it would have been nice to rest his head on her shoulder and listen to her tell the tale of meeting his father in grad school, how on the first day of her Archaeological Ethics and Laws class, a man burst into the room mid lecture looking for Janet Benoit because he saw her name on an enrollment form in the front office and recognized it instantly.

Before his grief could swallow him whole, Tim pushed his memories of his mother out of his mind. They wouldn’t help him.

Who could help him?

Bruce would tell him to wait, that it wasn’t worth the risk to reveal himself so soon. Dick would tell him to do the opposite of whatever Bruce had advised. Alfred would tell him not to fret, to be patient and trust that things would work out.

Despite his best efforts, Tim pictured his mother’s smile, the warm one he remembered from his childhood that he would have done anything to win. He pictured that smile on her face two decades prior when her soulmate interrupted a 50 person lecture to find her. And he pictured a smile like that on Superboy’s face if he walked over there and said, ‘Hi. I think you’re my soulmate.’

Without his permission, his feet began moving. There was just enough sand to scrape against the sidewalk with every step he took, and Tim took care to soften his footsteps before he remembered that that wasn’t a normal thing to do and let them be loud again. Blood pounded in his ears. One second he was across the boardwalk and the next he was in front of that stupid souvenir booth like he’d teleported. For a brief, manic moment, Tim wanted to go back so he could walk the distance again but be aware of it this time.

Rex Leech’s beady, rat-like eyes set on him like Tim was a walking dollar sign.

“Hey, kid, what can I do ya for? We got all the finest wares themed after the hottest new superhero to hit the streets. Can’t get stuff like this anywhere else, if you want Superboy merch, now is the time to get it before we sell out.”

Tim rolled his eyes behind the safety of his sunglasses. Salesmen. Ugh.

He wasn’t nearly as interested in the dollar shop grade t-shirts as he was the person they were themed after. Superboy sat charming a pair of middle-schoolers who kept giggling and fiddling with the rack of keychains. Like he could feel Tim’s eyes on him, Superboy’s gaze slid past the kids and rested on him for one heart-stopping moment before they flicked back to the pair. That alone was enough to make Tim feel like there wasn’t enough oxygen on the whole beach to fill his lungs.

“-probably, what, a small? Medium?” It took Tim a second to realize that Rex was still talking, a thinly veiled attempt to coax as much money out of him as possible. “We’ve got the short sleeves and the tank-tops. Tell ya what kid, buy one of each and I’ll throw in a magnet, ten percent off. What do ya say?”

Tim wanted to say, “Just looking, thanks,” to skeeve the guy off, but then the middle-schoolers were scurrying off and Superboy’s attention was on him and everything he could’ve said gummed up in his throat.

His eyes were so…blue. Bright and vivid in a way that didn’t quite come across on screen.

Superboy sat there and kicked his feet and looked at Tim like it was the most normal thing in the world because he didn’t know.

“-ain’t a peepshow, kid, either buy somethin’ or scram.”

“Medium,” Tim croaked without looking away from Superboy, “T-shirt. Just the one.”

“Twenty bucks.”

Sheesh.

Tim dutifully forked over the cash and accepted the shirt - no bag and no receipt, shocker - and then-

Then Tim continued to stand there like an idiot, crummy t-shirt draped over his arm and mouth agape like he wanted to say something, which he did, but what the hell was he supposed to say?

“Do you want me to sign that?” Superboy asked, and god his voice - well, it was just a normal voice, but Tim wanted to listen to it ask about his day and order lunch and complain about traffic.

“Autographs cost extra!” Rex said, and Superboy gave him a look before pointedly holding out a hand for Tim’s t-shirt.

He held it out and a little part of him wished that he wasn’t wearing a wrapping around his wrist and a long sleeve shirt to cover the wrapping and a jacket to cover the long sleeve shirt. He wished he could be like everyone else who walked around with their soulmate's name on display, hoping every day that someone would see it and recognize it. He wished that all his constricting secrets could be laid bare in a way that was out of his control so he didn’t have to feel guilty about it.

Superboy took the shirt and fished a sharpie out from behind the counter, leaving an almost illegible scribble right above the S logo before handing it back to Tim with a luminous grin.

“Thanks,” Tim said. Or tried to. He wasn’t positive the word actually came out. And after one more excruciating moment, he turned around and walked away, leaving his heart behind as he did so.

He didn’t stop walking until he got to the bus stop.

The t-shirt was simultaneously paper thin and scratchy as hell. The vinyl of the logo was already peeling up at the corners in the humidity. Tim could just make out a curl that had to be an S and a long vertical line he assumed was part of the P. Decent handwriting considering he’d only started existing a month or two ago.

Tim lifted it to his face. It smelled like plastic and felt even rougher against his cheek.

Tim didn’t know it then, but it would be the first of many Superboy shirts he would acquire.

Chapter Text

An arson fire, three assaults, and a bank burglary, all before 9 PM.

Just another night in Gotham.

The grapple line in Tim’s hands pulled tight as he swung towards the navy yard. Gunfire echoed through the air like thunder, adding to the amalgamation of sirens and voices and engines that cottoned the night. He wasn’t quite close enough to see the sparks of bullets erupting from their chambers, but he would be soon.

The sound of his feet hitting the rooftop was inaudible, even without the cover of police cars screeching to a halt on the street below. A hulking mass of a ship sat in the water just a stone's throw away.

So, Tim thought, the question is, which of our usual suspects is trying to boost a friggin’ nuclear submarine? 

He hoped it was just scavengers. Tim could think of a dozen nefarious uses for something like that just off the top of his head, and he wasn’t one of Gotham’s many career criminals.

A sudden explosion shook the air. The clang of metal on metal reverberated through his teeth. Smoke billowed from the wreckage of the ship. 

Tim heard a chilling, mechanic voice before he saw the figure it belonged to emerge from the haze.

“YOU GUYS WOULD BE A PAIN IN MY BUTT…IF I HAD NERVE ENDINGS THERE.”

That was a voice Tim had only heard from recordings in the JLA database, bits of newscasts and CCTV footage caught before entire city blocks got turned to ash. It was a sound halfway between a robotic monotone and a sarcastic drawl, with one volume: loud.

Metallo. 

Tim’s heart dropped out of his chest into his stomach, and not just from the cheap line. A hulking silhouette cut a line through the haze, threatening him even from half a block away. He didn’t envy the poor saps brunting the metal monster’s full attention.

Definitely not one of the locals. Tim would have taken just about any rogue sitting in Arkham over Metallo. Batman was out of town and he hadn’t left instructions on how to deal with twenty-foot-tall psycho robots.

“OUTTA MY WAY AND NOBODY’LL GET HURT…MUCH!”

Heat bloomed over Tim’s exposed skin as Metallo opened fire, sending a police cruiser soaring down the road. Officers scattered like ants away from the wreckage. Flames burst upward from the trails of fuel left behind and the temperature only increased. Tim took stock of everyone caught in the crossfire and saw-

Shit.

Not five feet from the glow of the fire was a police officer on his hands and knees in a dark, iridescent puddle.

Gasoline.

Without a second thought, Tim threw out his line and swung in a wide arc over the street, letting the line slip through his fingers until he was just above the asphalt, then he gripped tight with one hand, shifting his weight to gain momentum, and reached his available arm out to snag the officer around the waist. The extra weight slowed him down, but not enough to keep him from escaping the ravenous tongues of the spreading flames.

“I’ve got you, officer,” Tim grunted.

He guided their combined mass in a gentle arc around the corner of the building he’d just been perched on top of until they slowed to a stop, and let his feet hit the ground. The officer’s landing was more of a controlled tumble, but Tim was fairly confident there wouldn’t be any bruises. Not from the landing anyway.

Just as he caught his breath, a deafening roar of a noise like an interstate pile-up ricocheted down the alley. Tim looked up to find that Metallo had transformed into a tank. A literal, military grade, village-leveling tank. 

Tim was so screwed.

He was way out of his weight class. Metallo was a Justice League level threat, not a training exercise for a sidekick not even old enough to have a drivers’ license. There was no way he could survive a one-on-one with the - robot? Creature? Thing? - villain who regularly went toe-to-toe with Superman. 

If Metallo was planning to stay in Gotham, he was gonna need to call in reinforcements.

“ Disappointing news, young sir. I was unable to contact Superman via the dedicated phoneline here.”

Tim slumped back into the driver seat of the redbird and bit back the string of curses sitting on the tip of his tongue. Alfred probably wouldn’t appreciate it.

“That’s not a disappointment,” Tim replied. “That’s a disaster. We have to whistle up somebody who can handle a bulletproof walking nuclear power.”

“ That is the prescribed course of action authorized by your mentor.”

“So, who's next on the list, Alfred?”

A moment of uncharacteristic hesitance preceded Alfred’s response. 

“ Well, he has the required level of physical strength…”

Alfred’s reluctance to clarify their next target set his teeth on edge. The older man didn’t make a habit of mincing words. Not unless he was in a passive-aggressive mood anyway. For him to dance around the point while Metallo was still rampaging didn’t bode well.

“Who?” Tim prompted.

“ I hesitate to suggest this, but…Superboy might be easier to reach.”

A shallow scratch on the leather of his steering wheel suddenly became very interesting. He was in his car alone and still wanted to avoid eye contact. “Why do you say that?” he asked, unsure whether he wanted the answer to be a good one or not.

“ As unlikely as it may seem, his number is listed in the Honolulu directory.”

Tim held his breath for a minute. He had to prioritize. Protecting the citizens of Gotham came before avoiding his personal problems.

“Put me through, Alfred.”

RIIIING

His heart pounded in his chest. He could feel his pulse in his tongue.

RIIIING

He was going to talk to Superboy, his soulmate, for the first time. Well, technically the second time, but the first time as Robin, and the first time Superboy would actually have to pay attention.

RIIIING

He was going to hear that voice again. It hadn’t been too long, but what if it sounded different? What had he been up to? When he wasn’t on the news anyway. Tim was well versed in Superboy's heroic doings. But other than that, what did he eat, who did he hang out with, would he like Tim, would he-

“ Hullo - Leech Enterprises! Our merchandise don’t suck! Can I help you?”

Ugh. Rex. The sound of his voice made Tim want to wash his hands.

“I’m looking for Superboy. Is he available?”

“ No, this is his business manager, Rex Leech, speakin’...”

“I need to speak with Superboy as soon as possible. It’s a matter of national security.”

“ Look, I’m sure it’s important, but I’m tellin’ you the kid ain’t here right now…”

“Well, where is he?”

“Oh, I dunno. Probably out savin’ the world or somethin’. You know how it is - Superboy’s always in the middle of these situations that’re pretty mind-bogglin’! But maybe I can help you, Mister…?”

“Robin,” Tim said, patience wearing thin.

“ Say again?”

“Robin,” he repeated louder into the car’s telephone speaker.

“ Listen pal, these ‘Robin Leech’ prank calls stopped bein’ funny a long time ago, so-”

Tim gritted his teeth and prayed to whatever deity may have been listening for the strength to get through the stupid phone call. “Mr. Leech, my name really is Robin! Superman’ll vouch for me! I’m a crimefighter in Gotham City-”

“Crimefighter? Oh, sure you are! Bet callin’ yerself ‘Robin’ really strikes fear into those superstitious, cowardly criminal types!”

At the end of his rope, Tim pulled out the little drawer in the dashboard that contained a travel-size keyboard connected to the redbird’s onboard computer system and started typing furiously. Like magic, a string of arrest records, outstanding warrants, fines, bank records, medical files, and business documents started popping up under the name Rex Leech.

“Maybe not,” Tim said, barely biting back the smug edge to his tone. “But listen to this: three-thousand crates of Superboy air fresheners - superspring and powerpine scents-” god, he wondered if it had taken Leech all day to come up with those, “-limited edition Superboy animated cell, run of one-thousand-two-hundred-fifty, signed and numbered by, umm, you, Mr. Leech. Superboy boxing hand puppet - open-order, must be popular-”

“ Hey! What’s goin’ on?! How’d you know about those, kid? That stuff’s not even on the market yet!”

Tim took a sadistic pleasure in the panicked edge to Leech’s voice. He took a sadistic pleasure in making anyone who thought they could get away with taking advantage of his soulmate sweat .

“And it may never be, Mr. Leech,” he threatened. “I don’t care if you believe me, but believe this: if you don’t do what you can to get Superboy to Gotham City asap, I will reroute delivery of all Superboy merchandise so it’s airdropped in the jungles of Borneo.”

“ Yer- yer bluffin’!”

He could practically feel Leech shaking through the phone. “Then how do I know all this?”

“Umm…he’ll be there, okay? I’ll go get ‘im, an’ he’ll be there fast as he can! Eight hours - maybe less!”

Tim blanched. “Eight- eight hours?!” He couldn’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth. “Superman could be here in eight seconds!” And if Superman could travel that fast, didn’t it stand to reason that a clone of his could as well? He waited for an explanation, an excuse, something, and received nothing.

“Mr. Leech?”

Radio silence.

“Hello?”

Dammit!

Tim huffed and cut the line.

“ My, that was entertaining,” Alfred’s voice came through. Tim had forgotten he was still there. “ In a Benny Hill sort of way. May I suggest we make our next call to-”

“Forget it, Alfred!” The words came out harsher than he meant them to and he immediately regretted it, but he was sure Alfred would understand. After all, it wasn’t everyday your city got invaded by an A-List robot villain and your only hope of defeating him included getting ahold of the soulmate you’d never formally met so you could introduce yourself as a name that they wouldn’t know you by so then the two of you could fight crime together all while you pined away for the beautiful, infuriating boy whom you couldn’t even talk to because his manager was a major slimeball.

Alfred would forgive him.

“By the time I find backup, either I’ll be working with Detective Chimp or that metalhead will have torn down half the city,” Tim continued, less incensed. “I have to see what I can do - here and now.”

Over 6 hours later, Tim hadn’t accomplished much. Metallo had vanished as quickly as he’d appeared, and Tim had a feeling it wasn’t because he decided to skip town. 

Most of the night had been whiled away on dead ends and the occasional arrest when he stumbled across a crime in progress during his fruitless search. After traversing most of the city, Tim caught a lead somewhere he hadn’t been in a long time: the ruins.

Piles of bricks and soot-stained steel beams brought back bad memories of lying in cot waiting for death to steal his breath away. The picture wasn’t helped by the shadows that clung to the emaciated buildings, too similar to the way the edges of his vision had gone dark as sickness consumed him. Gotham was anything but quiet, but among the ruins, not even the rats skittering through the wreckage made a sound.

“ Any progress, young sir?” Alfred asked.

“I’m getting a reading here in the Babylon towers areas, Alfred. Background radiation is higher than norms. Could just be left over from when the towers and surrounding blocks burned back during the Clench epidemic.” Tim pushed the memories far back and focused on the glowing bars quivering on the dashboard screen. “Readings are spiking higher as I get closer to the tower ruins. This has to be it.”

“ Is this prudent, sir? You are entering a dangerously irradiated zone in pursuit of a miscreant who can transform into a tank.”

“I’ll be careful, Alfred,” he reassured.

“ I don’t see how that’s possible given the situation.” 

Alfred’s concern was touching and Tim hoped it was because of the metal monster he was hunting down and not an insinuation that he might be distracted by his soulmate's imminent arrival.

“Careful as I can be, okay?”

Alfred’s response came through staggered and peppered with static. “S-cck - hh - po - kkk.”

“Your signal’s breaking up. Has to be all the hot rads around.” Tim could feel himself developing cancer with every step.

The line stayed silent after that, so he delved further into the rubble. That big metal freak couldn’t have picked a better hideout; no one ever came to the ruins. Maybe it was the plague, or maybe it was the multi-block firestorm that came right after it, but not even the most desperate unhoused people or sleaziest real estate agents were eager to repopulate the area.

The radiation detector beeped rhythmically in his hand, the bars growing taller and redder the further he walked. Metallo couldn’t be too hard to find, the guy left a trail of wreckage and nuclear waste wherever he went. Tim just had to confirm his location, then he could retreat until a better plan presented itself. 

How much trouble could he get into doing that?

He passed through an archway of half-collapsed wall into what was left of one of the towers. Any trace of what might have once been had long since burned away. There was no furniture or placards or anything else that could indicate whether the building had housed tenants or held offices or contained shops. It was just a sad reminder of the carnage that had nearly destroyed the city.

The radiation detector guided him down several flights of stairs in the bowels of the building. Rather than getting darker, a glow emanating from the basement began to illuminate the space. That combined with the counter redlining confirmed that Metallo was close - and as close as Tim wanted him to get.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Goosebumps raced up his arms. Every instinct screamed at him to move.

Just as he turned on his heel to get the hell out of there, the walls exploded.

“ WOAH!” Tim leapt out of the way as chrome tendrils whipped through the air, sending debris flying. The radiation detector alipped out of his hand in the chaos. All around him, steel beams and iron handrails lashed towards him like snakes out of the dust. 

Metallo had turned the building against him.

He dove over a living railing, letting his bo staff snap to its full length in the air. He braced himself to hit the ground on a roll, but his landing never came. While he was still in the middle of his dive, one of the chrome snakes whipped around his ankle like a noose and yanked. 

He collided with a wall, then the stairs, then another wall, before the air opened around him. 

And then Tim found himself face to face with a ten foot tall walking machine gun. The shiny plating of Metallo’s face didn’t make the glow of his mechanic eyes any less terrifying.

“ NOT WHO I WAS EXPECTING.”

“Ughh?” Tim replied eloquently.

“ISN’T THERE ANOTHER COSTUMED FREAK IN THIS TOWN?” Metallo continued. “SOMEONE BIGGER? OR IS THAT JUST IN THE GOTHAM INQUISITOR?”

The sound of his voice was even more unsettling up close. Somehow mechanic and acerbic at the same time.

Tim tried to take in a breath to answer but his lungs refused to cooperate. The smell of motor oil and copper clogged his throat.

“WELL, I GUESS I CAN-” The rest of Metallo’s sentence was cut off as his silver skull swiveled upward at a speed that made Tim’s neck hurt just seeing it. Or that may have been from getting knocked around. His vision was fuzzy and every other second seemed to disappear, like a video with a low frame rate.

“FINALLY. A WORTHY OPPONENT.” Metallo surged up through the ceiling and took Tim with him.

The cacophony of his attack earlier was nothing compared to the earthquake of an explosion that erupted around them as Metallo burst through the layers of dirt and concrete between them and the outside. Shards of rock sliced over the exposed skin on his cheeks and arms. He held his breath to avoid inhaling enough dust to create a plaster mold of his respiratory system.

The cool air of the night greeted them past the shower of debris, and Tim was vaguely aware of Metallo continuing to monologue, but he couldn’t make out the words with the ringing in his ears. He was swung to and fro by the grip on his ankle. Tim was suddenly feeling a lot more empathetic towards piñatas. 

The snake around his leg flung him out one last time before slithering off and sending him soaring through the air.

Wind whistled in his ears. His limbs trailed uselessly behind him. He had to be going 50, maybe 60 miles per hour through the air. He needed to grab his grapple, he needed-

An arm wrapped around his waist.

The pressure against his middle increased, slowing his descent, and the hand that wasn’t clutching his hip grabbed his wrist to tug his arm around a set of broad shoulders. Around the time that Tim figured out which way was down again, he realized exactly who those hands belonged to.

“You okay, pal?”

Tim opened his eyes to see the Superman logo framed by the lapels of a leather jacket.

Superboy. Superboy. 

Despite having been the one to threaten Leech’s baubles and trinkets to get him across the continental U.S., Tim was speechless at his arrival.

Superboy peered at him - Superboy, real and in the flesh and still waiting for an answer - and lowered them to the ground with great care.

“Yeah,” Tim said at last. “Yeah, thanks, Superboy. I’m glad you finally got here. I really don’t remember much after Metallo grabbed me.”

“I think that’s a good thing.” The hand on his wrist disappeared and Tim let his arm fall to his side. 

It felt cold. 

“So I’ve only got one question,” Superboy continued. “Who are you?”

Tim’s jaw dropped.

“ Me?” He said, incredulous. “I’m Robin! I’m the one who had to threaten your agent to get you out here!”

Two minutes into their first official meeting as heroes and it was already going to shit.

“Oh,” Superboy said, scratching the back of his head. “I was, uh, kinda hopin’ that was Batman, maybe…or the army at least…”

Tim had a concussion. He had to. That was the only explanation for how he’d managed to forget how annoying Superboy was. Even more so in person than through the lens of a camera.

Fortunately, Metallo chose that moment to resume attempting to murder them. A hunk of metal the size of a four-door crashed through a wall 10 feet away to his right. It served as a good distraction from Superboy’s apparent obsession with A-list vigilantes.

“Look,” Tim said, heading towards the gaping hole Metallo had hurtled through. “You’re not exactly Superman yourself, dude! Eight hours from Hawaii-”

“Less than seven!” Superboy interrupted. “Thanks for appreciating the effort!”

Oh, he had a few choice words about appreciating effort, but he bit them back. They had more pressing things to deal with. “I’m only looking at the facts - and what we’re up against. Maybe I should call in some real heavy-hitters…”

Tim began to climb the slope of rubble leading up to the shattered wall while Superboy took to the air, hovering directly over the ragged terrain. He looked magnificent in flight, like a rose-breasted grosbeak gliding on an updraft.

Then Superboy started talking again and all thoughts of how beautiful he was got squashed flat.

“Oh right! That’ll be all over the internet in no time! Know what they’ll be sayin’?”

“That we’re smart?”

“No! That we’re just a couple of sidekicks! Or at least you are. Me - I got a pretty good solo rep. But how many people have ever even heard of ‘Robin?’”

“That’s by design,” Tim shot back. “I know this’ll come as a big surprise to you, but not everyone wants headlines!” He tried to temper the prideful, approval-hungry beast inside him, but there was just something about Superboy that got him all riled up. “I keep a low profile, but I’ve done my part putting down Cluemaster, Maxie Zeus-”

“Oooh, tough guys!” Superboy mocked.

“Joker,” Tim added. Maybe it was showing off, but he just had to wipe that smug look off his stupidly handsome face.

“Joker?” Superboy repeated, dumbfounded. 

Mission accomplished.

“Yeah. That’s what happens when you’re the boy wonder trained by Batman.”

The pair of them ventured further forward and the building opened around them, a huge space with layers of balconies circling a central atrium overrun by creeping vines; a shopping center.

“Batman - impressive.” Superboy landed next to Tim, close enough to touch. “But ‘Boy Wonder?’”

“There a problem with that?” Tim snapped, failing to not sound defensive.

“Well…I wonder what happened to Metallo.”

“Yeah.” Tim turned back towards an escalator frozen in its descent. “We’ll look for him. You scout out the top level of the mall, I’ll take the bottom. But we need a plan before we tackle any mechanical muscle!” he stressed as he took the rusty steps down.

“No problem, Wonder Boy!” Superboy said, jumping into flight once again. “I think best on my feet!”

“Maybe,” Tim muttered under his breath. “But your feet never touch the groun- WOAH!” Before he even got the word out, the ground underneath his feet shifted, metal steps flattening into a steep angle that spilled him straight towards-

“Metallo!”

“YOU JUST DON’T LEARN, DO YOU KID?” That robotic, acerbic voice was booming in the echoey space, so bone rattling that Tim thought it was the sound of it causing the steps to shake and not the fact that Metallo - now ten times the size he was before - was ripping the escalator up by its roots. “WELL, LET ME TEACH YOU A FEW THINGS - THE HARD WAY!”

The escalator twisted sideways, launching Tim out towards the atrium. He didn’t travel far - he hadn’t even dropped a full story before crash landing on a hard metal surface: the roof of the old mall greenhouse.

“I- I think this steel ribbing that broke my fall is hard enough, thank you,” Tim muttered, stumbling to his feet.

“YOU’RE THE ONE WHO'S GONNA BE BROKEN, RED!” Metallo chose that moment to stretch out to his full height, almost tall enough to hit the skylight several floors above them. “I’VE ABSORBED ENOUGH OF THIS MALL’S INFRASTRUCTURE TO SQUASH YOU FLAT!”

Tim had the sudden mental image of getting stepped on like an ant. What an embarrassing way to go.

“Hold it, Metalhead!” Superboy’s voice rang out. “That greenhouse’s about the only living thing for miles! No way I’m gonna let you crush it! Oh-  or Robin either, I guess.”

Suddenly, getting stepped on like an ant didn’t sound so bad in comparison to getting treated as less important than a few weeds by his soulmate- and, was Superboy really his soulmate? Tim was having doubts.

“YOU THINK I'M STUPID, KID?” A massive, metal hand whooshed through the air, swatting at Superboy like a fly. “I STUDIED UP ON YOU! I KNOW YOU’RE PRETTY TOUGH AGAINST MOST THINGS, BUT NOT ENERGY ATTACKS!”

Wires whipped out from Metallo’s mammoth fingertips and developed Superboy. Tim saw electricity spark along the wires less than a second before a blood-curdling scream filled the air.

“ Superboy! ” Tim yelled, scrambling uselessly forward. For as irritated and insulted as he was, the sound of his soulmate in pain felt like a lead ball in his stomach, strong enough to bring him to his knees if he wasn’t filled with so much sheer panic. He would’ve done anything to take the pain away, to make the screaming stop.

The grapple was in his hand before he’d even made the conscious decision to move, anchoring on the top floor balcony railing.

“Hey, Metalhead!” Tim shouted, hoping a distraction would be enough to make Metallo stop electrocuting Superboy. “In all your studying, didn’t you learn never to ignore a low-flying robin? Who knows what one might drop on you?” He grabbed the first thing he could reach in his belt and aimed it straight at Metallo’s glowing pupils. “Of course, in most cases it's not fire suppressant foam, but-”

“ ARGHH! MY EYES!”

“Don’t worry, Metalhead! Wonder Boy distracted you long enough to give me another chance!” Superboy’s voice, worn but steady, was a shot of pure relief in Tim’s veins. “And what I’m gonna do to you, you don’t gotta see to believe!”

Tim swung out of the way as Superboy rushed Metallo, but instead of slamming into him with a closed fist or burning through him with laser vision, Superboy slapped his open hand against the giant’s iron chest.

We’re doomed, Tim thought to himself at the sight.

But then the most remarkable thing happened. The material of Metallo’s body seemed to ripple out from Superboy’s hand like water. Upon closer inspection, Tim realized that the rippling was actually all the bolts and screws and tiny, moving pieces of Metallo detaching. It was an explosion in slow motion, a wave of puzzle pieces coming undone and hovering in the air away from their colleagues before dropping to the ground. Anywhere a seam split the metal, an invisible force pried the scraps apart and flung them away like it was nothing. The whole heaping mass of metal dissolved, accompanied by sparks and clicks and screeches as synthetic organs and limbs were shredded. The remains of Metallo’s body crumbled into a heap on the ground floor of the atrium.

It was incredible.

“I almost can’t believe it, Superboy - but you actually did it,” Tim said, more than a little awestruck as his feet met concrete again. “I mean, I’ve learned about your tactile-telekinesis and how it can take apart anything you touch, but seeing it in action gives me a-”

A thrill? A shock? A boner?

The entire mall seemed to tremble around him, an earthquake-like shockwave that sent dust raining down from the walls. 

Ah, hell.

“...a bad feeling Metallo tapped into the mall’s main supports, and when you disassembled him you also-”

KIK-KEK-KREK-KROOOOM!

For the umpteenth time that evening, Tim became the filling in a debris donut. He only had time to think a stream of curse words before a body collided with his back and sent him to the ground, wrapping around him in a makeshift shield as darkness swallowed them.

The sound of it wasn’t as loud as Tim had expected. The first few boulders to blanket them created a dome through which all the ruckus was muffled. He was sandwiched between the rock studded ground and the length of Superboy’s body covering him from head to toe. A pair of thick biceps framed his head. Gasping breaths ruffled his hair. The weight on his back made it difficult to take a deep breath, as did the knee between his thighs.

Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it

Once the rubble had settled and the world around them was quiet, Tim lifted his head as far as he could before it hit Superboy’s collarbone. That spurred him into movement, lifting himself off Tim’s body.

“You really know how to bring down the house, don’t you?” Tim snarked in an attempt to ignore the wriggling feeling in his stomach.

“What?” Superboy said, sounding irritated. “You wanted me to leave the meta-maniac in one piece?”

Tim tried to follow him to his feet, but was stopped by a boot pinning the side of his glove to the ground. “I want you to quit stepping on my hand!”

“Maybe you’d rather’ve had a two-ton rock land on it?” Superboy shot back. The weight on his glove disappeared.

“Could you just get us out of here, please?” It was starting to get warm under the rock dome.

“My pleasure!”

Hazy light flooded Tim’s retinas in just enough time for him to catch a glance of the way Superboy flexed, heaving a chunk of ceiling into the air.

Somehow, the ruins looked even worse than they had an hour ago. What little structure had existed around them was no more than a stone carpet. It looked like a bomb had dropped on the place.

“Brother! Look at this destruction! You and Metallo must’ve leveled half a city block!” If anyone ever came near the ruins, Tim would’ve worried about casualties.

“Yeah. So?” Superboy asked, brushing his gloves off. “Happens to me all the time in Honolulu.”

“Gee, think there’s a connection?” Tim drawled.

“Oh, I come all the way from Hawaii, save the day, tank Metallo, and this is the thanks I get? Y’know, I heard Superman and Batman don’t get along, and I’m beginnin’ to see why!”

“Hey, it’s not that they don’t get along, it’s just that they…well, they approach things very differently, okay?” Tim took in a deep breath then let it all out in a rush. “And I think we should make sure you’ve stopped Metallo before you start taking credit for it. Isn’t there something about how as long as his head survives he can build himself a new body?” He was more familiar with handling weapons of chemical warfare than the kind of heavy hitters that targeted Metropolis, but he kept track of anything that Batman might get called in for.

Much to his surprise, Superboy responded to that with a toothy, crooked grin and hooked a thumb over his shoulder, directing Tim’s gaze to a silver skull speared on a rod. 

“Exactly!” Superboy replied, glowing with satisfaction.

“We still have a renegade nuclear reactor to look for,” Tim reminded him.

Superboy crossed his arms and shrugged one shoulder. “Shouldn’t be too hard to find. Gotta be here somewhere.”

“There’re easier ways of locating it than bulldozing the wreckage. I have a rad-counter.” He fished the device from his belt, not sure when he’d managed to pick it back up. Metallo must have knocked him around harder than he thought.

The radiation detector indicated that the reactor core was just a few convenient feet away, lying innocently on its side among the bricks. As soon as the ghostly green glow of it was visible, Superboy was flying into the crater where it sat, throwing a grin over his shoulder at Tim and saying, “Funny I haven’t set it off. I’m pretty rad myself.”

Tim wished he wasn’t wearing a domino so Superboy could see the unimpressed look on his face.

“I’m not sure if it's safe for you to handle the reactor,” he warned as Superboy approached the yard-long metal tube. “It’s spilling hot core material.”

“I’m the closest thing to Superman that advanced genetics could cook up,” Superboy tossed back. “Some ordinary radiation isn’t going to curdle my milk.”

Tim rolled his eyes behind the safety of his mask.

Superboy knelt down and pressed his hands to the ground. The ripple spread out from his touch, a tiny tidal wave rising to swallow the reactor like a dumpling wrapper with a carcinogenic filling.

“I’d still feel better if we let federal authorities handle this.”

“Wuss.”

“I think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be better suited to handle this.”

“Whatever.”

Kids these days, Tim found himself thinking, like a 50 year old man.

Just when he thought the situation was done and handled, problem solved, soulmate met in costume with dignity still intact, Tim - the poor, pathetic bastard - had no idea of the season finale plot twist headed his way.

A silky, feminine voice curled out from behind them. “Nice to meet another friend of the Earth.”

Tim whipped around to see a vision in green slinking out of the shadows.

Naturally. Naturally. Of course when he was accompanied by the bag of raging hormones that was his harebrained other half, they just happened to run into the one rogue notorious for ensnaring horndogs with her wiles. “Aw, no…”

Ivy prowled closer, gaze set right on Superboy.

“So, Boy Wonder,” Ivy purred, “Who’s your friend?”

Oh, hell no, Tim thought when she brushed her hair behind her shoulder, trailing her fingers across her bosom with the motion in a less-than-subtle advertisement of her figure. Jealousy prickled in his chest and teeth, some bizarre, animalistic instinct he’d never felt before urging him to growl and snap at her to assert his dominance, to protect his territory. It occurred to him a second after he felt it just how ridiculous it was, but that didn’t stop him from getting his hackles up.

“The name’s Superboy, babe. What do they call you?”

Tim’s jaw dropped. His head spun around so fast he heard his own neck crack, but he couldn’t even feel it, not over the sick sense of betrayal he got at the dark look in Superboy’s eyes, and maybe that was unfair, maybe it was completely irrational to expect any kind of loyalty from someone who, to the best of their knowledge, had never even met their soulmate, and maybe it was his own fault for not being honest and it was just so unfair because he couldn’t tell the truth, not then, not like that, not without putting himself and so many other people at risk, and he wanted to scream-

“Stay away from her,” Tim warned, clutching at the back of Superboy’s jacket as he got pulled in like a tractor beam. “She’s-”

“Just my type,” Superboy interrupted. He didn’t even look at Tim before sauntering right into Ivy’s waiting arms.

Tim clutched tighter, pulled harder, tried desperately to keep Superboy from getting drawn in, but it was like trying to stop a train through sheer willpower. Superboy flicked out his hand and it hit Tim’s sternum like a brick wall, knocking the air out of his lungs and sending him flying backwards.

The landing almost hurt as much as his heart. Metaphorically. Though his heart hurt literally too.

The second he stopped skidding through the dirt he leapt to his feet, but it was too late. By the time he could breathe again, his soulmate had already locked lips with one of Gotham’s most dangerous villains.

He saw it the moment it happened, the moment Ivy’s spell took over and Superboy’s eyes went hazy. He was gone.

“Superboy, don’t-!”

Superboy scooped Ivy into his arms and lifted off.

“Where have you been all my life?” Ivy drawled, cozy in the cradle of Tim’s soulmate’s arms.

“Mostly nowhere,” Superboy answered, his voice growing quieter as they drifted off. “But lately I’ve been in Hawaii.”

“Take me there,” Ivy ordered before calling out a smug, “Bye, Boy Wonder!”

Tim stood there and watched them become a speck in the distance.

It was one situation Batman hadn’t prepared him for. Tim wondered what exactly Bruce would say when he heard. Maybe someday 20 years in the future when they were all grown up and - Tim hesitated to think the word married, but, well - once they were settled, they could look back and it would be a funny story.

Assuming he figured out how to take down Poison Ivy with an Ivy-goofy Superboy under her wing.

Hilarious.

Tim had a plan.

Was it a good plan? Debatable.

Did he like the plan? Not even a little bit.

Alfred had spent every minute of Tim’s drive back to the cave from the ruins pleading with him to do something - anything - else. In fact, the second the redbird was in Park and Tim was jumping out of the driver’s seat, Alfred was there, all sad-eyed and fidgety as he said, “I beg you to reconsider, Master Timothy.”

And Tim had. He’d reconsidered. He’d explored alternatives. He’d hoped and prayed for any idea less risky than the one cooking in his brain. But there wasn’t one.

“There’s no choice,” he said, repeating the defense he’d used the entire drive home. “We can’t wait for Bruce to return and there’s no one else we can trust. There’s no telling what Ivy will do to the fiftieth state with someone like Superboy under her thumb. And trust me, they’re an item.”

Despite having the journey back to cool down, bitterness still colored his voice. If his silence was anything to go by, Alfred had noticed. It was undoubtedly one of the reasons the older man was so reluctant to pull out the emergency protocol.

Tim sighed and peeled off his mask. “If Bruce didn’t foresee a contingency like this, he wouldn’t have given me access.”

“I pray that you’re right, Master Timothy.”

He crossed to the pedestal sized security apparatus, the one Tim had never had to use before except to input his biometrics, and navigated the selection menu.

“ Identification procedure engaged,” a computerized voice announced through the tinny speakers.

Tim leaned in to line up his left eye with the optical scanner.

“ Voice analysis phrase,” it prompted.

“Fortune favors the brave.”

“ Voice identification positive. Robin.”

He pulled off a gauntlet and laid his palm over the cold glass that would evaluate his handprint. He was glad it was his left hand in the system so he didn’t have to stare at the accusing letters of his soulmate’s name.

“ Heat signature match. Robin. Hand silhouette match. Robin. Continue accessing procedure.” 

Tim accepted the pair of protective goggles Alfred offered and slid them over his face. “I sure hope this works,” he murmured.

Steam hissed and billowed out from cracks in the floor as the hidden trap slid open. A giant, lead canister big enough for Tim to fit inside rose ominously from the hole. A glowing red biohazard symbol threatened danger for any person foolish enough to persist.

“I’d hoped never to see the cursed thing again,” Alfred said, his voice low. He passed over a heavy pair of lead-lined gauntlets that Tim slipped on up to his elbows. 

He approached the canister and searched for the switch Bruce had only shown him once, all the while stressing to him the severity of a situation necessitating the need of such a tool. The switch clicked when he flipped it. A small drawer - not even big enough to hold the average hair dryer - slid open. A sickly green light, not dissimilar to the one that had radiated from the nuclear core, bathed them, all originating from a tiny piece of jewelry that seemed far too innocuous for how much trouble it could cause.

Tim reached forward and struggled to get a grip on it with his fumbling, gloved fingers.

“The kryptonite ring,” Tim said, feeling a little awed just to be in its presence. “If it can even the odds against Super man, it's my only hope against Super boy.” 

“Might I caution you once more…” Alfred began taking a step back as Tim held the ring up to the light.

“I’m not crazy about this idea either, Alfred,” Tim interrupted before Alfred could talk him out of the plan he so desperately wanted to abandon. “But it's the only way.”

“Heaven help us.”

Chapter Text

Tim never thought he would describe Alfred as whiney. Passive-aggressive? Sure. Conniving? On occasion. Irritable? Only when something was keeping him from watching his shows. But whiney? It seemed a trait much too imprudent to be applied to the stately gentleman.

Until Tim spent a grand total of 15 hours on a plane listening to him grumble about leg room and screaming children and the quality of mid-flight meals. Between the crick in his neck and the fact that one of his ears still hadn’t popped, Tim was about one more complaint away from calling in a bomb threat to get the hell out of there. The humid air of the boarding bridge could have been heaven for how much sweet relief it brought him.

“What a ghastly experience,” Alfred griped at Tim’s side.

“We were lucky to get any seats on the next flight to Honolulu, Alfred,” Tim reminded him, drawing up the last reserves of his quickly depleting patience.

“But flying coach? ” Alfred said, tone dripping with disgust as though they’d trudged through sewers to get to Hawaii and not just flown economy. “ Really, Master Timothy.”

“No choice. We had to catch up with the… other members of our party in a big hurry. We didn’t even have enough time to get a private jet from WayneCorp. Although I’m not sure how we would get Lucius Fox to authorize one for us with Bruce out of town.” That had been an alternative Alfred had pleaded for at length.

“But coach.” 

Tim bit back a sigh and followed Alfred to the baggage claim area. In the swarm of sunscreen smothered tourists wearing brightly colored button-downs, Alfred stuck out like a sore thumb with his three-piece suit and matching fedora. 

The poor guy would be sweating like a sinner during sacrament by lunchtime.

“I’m concerned that your accoutrements -” the double entendre in Alfred’s sentence was not lost on Tim, “-may have gotten sidetracked with the rest of the baggage.”

“We’ll just have to deal with that problem if it comes up.”

“Perhaps I should-”

“ Alfred.” Tim turned to give the older man a long-suffering look. “Everything will be fine.”

“But if it isn’t-” 

“Then Ivy will take over the islands and we’ll all die and the world will end.”

Alfred huffed.

“Look,” Tim faced Alfred, “I know you’re worried. But I’ve got my head on straight, okay? I’m not gonna do anything stupid just because-”

He cut himself off before he could finish, but he saw Alfred’s eye flick down to the waterproof, flesh-toned wrap around his wrist. From a distance, no one would notice it. In Gotham Tim could get away with wearing long sleeves 24/7, but he doubted the Pacific climate would be so allowing.

“I’ll be fine,” Tim finished lamely. “Trust me.”

They spent the rest of the wait and most of the cab ride to the motel in a pensive silence, occasionally broken so Alfred could lament all the sunshine. At least when they got to the motel Alfred stopped complaining about the weather.

Because he started complaining about the motel.

“I’m sure I’ve seen lawns with less dirt than this carpet,” he commented in between checking for bedbugs and securing a travel lock on the front door.

Tim ignored his remarks in favor of flipping through the channels on the staticky television until he found a local news station.

“ Tana Moon bringing you the latest on the virulent new weed that’s taken over the island of Kauai. It’s thought to be a mutated strain of kudzu, a plant native to the islands of Japan. The state and federal government are in gridlock over this. Is it an environmental problem or a natural disaster?”

The camera cut to a shot of a hippie looking guy with long gray hair and a big, shiny Greenpeace button on his jacket.

“This is nature’s revenge for what man’s done to spaceship earth!” he proclaimed into a microphone.

The camera cut back to Tana Moon on location, framed by the wreckage of a vine-throttle wooden shack.

“ Protestors have been making their way to the island to demonstrate support of the plant. This new mutant weed is growing faster than experts can measure, and has already driven hundreds from their homes in communities around Lihue.”

“How far is Kauai, Alfred?” Tim asked, observing the blanket of leaves enveloping the land behind the reporter on screen.

“The travel brochures mention a twenty minute plane flight from the ‘Big Island’ as they call it.”

“Repack our stuff,” Tim instructed, a plan already baking in his head.

“Sir?”

“There’s a giant weed taking over the island of Kauai,” he explained. “I’d say it's got something to do with Ivy and Superboy showing up here ahead of us.”

“Or a coincidence of epic proportions, Master Timothy.”

Tim began to pace back and forth, slipping a nondescript lead ring box from his pocket so he could turn it over in his palm. “The authorities are hamstringing themselves for the time being. But once they do move, they’ll be up against a Superboy taking orders from Poison Ivy. And I’ve got the only thing that can bring that super-ego down without any casualties.”

Was Tim still a little bitter about watching his soulmate fawn over a busty red-head? Maybe.

“I’ve been trying to forget that you removed that from the cave without the master’s permission.” Alfred gave Tim a pointed look as he shook out the Robin suit.

“We’ll explain when we get back, Alfred,” he placated. “Right now, we rent a plane and head for Kauai.”

***

From half a mile above the ground, the entire island seemed to writhe. Kauai was a nest of snakes just waiting for him to get close enough to bite, to curl around him and squeeze until his eyeballs popped out. The vines were consuming the island so fast you could see their growth in real time.

“Man, it’s hard to tell where the jungle ends and the town begins,” he said, pressing his face to the window of the plane to watch the ant-sized citizens fleeing for their lives. A thin strip of asphalt had yet to be overrun, but it wouldn’t be long before it would be impossible to get any vehicles through.

“It is quite a wonder you can see so well in this darkness.” Alfred twisted the control wheel to guide them in a wide arc through the air.

“Night Vision lenses, Alfred,” Tim explained. “I can see it all. But I wish I couldn’t. They’re fighting to save their town, but it’s a lost cause.” Far below, a figure tumbled out of a car window while vines seized it and drew it into their depths. “Those plants are growing faster than they can keep up.” The plane dipped down towards the tarmac, close enough to see the cracks spider webbing through it. The vines were peeling apart the concrete like it was tissue paper. “Even the airfield has been affected. It looks like nothing stops this weed, Alfred.”

With a jolt, the plane hit the ground and they’d barely come to a stop before Tim was undoing his buckles and jumping out. 

“I pray that is not the case, Robin,” Alfred called as he followed Tim to the storage compartment. Alfred pried open the hatch while Tim heaved his motorcycle out onto the tarmac. He looked at his bike then at the ground that seemed to be shattering in slow motion.

“I’m not sure how far I’ll get on the trail bike,” he said, more to himself than to Alfred. Kauai was devoid of the skyscrapers that made grappling around possible. 

Sure would be nice to have someone who can fly right about now, he thought. 

The memory of Superboy’s touch ghosted around his waist, the feeling of hands strong enough to bear his weight without effort yet gentle enough to not leave so much as a bruise. An impressive feat considering how fast Tim had to have been flying through the air after Metallo tossed him around like a ragdoll. If only Superboy hadn’t been so easily ensnared, the two of them could have been tracking down Ivy together, traveling like clouds through the night, wind tossling dark curls, moonlight throwing those dimples into sharp relief as Superboy grinned at some stupid joke he made, and Tim would roll his eyes, but inside he’d be thinking, That’s my idiot, and safe in his embrace far above the rest of the world, Tim would lean in and-

“I’d best take off while there’s still some clear runway.”

Tim almost dropped his helmet.

“I can stay airborne and in radio contact with you in case I can help in some way,” Alfred finished. He either hadn’t noticed Tim’s daydreaming or was choosing not to acknowledge it. Either way, Tim was grateful.

“The source of the superweed is at the northern end of the Alakai Swamp,” Tim informed him, willing away the warmth in his cheeks. “That has to be where I’ll find Ivy and her new boytoy. They shouldn’t be that hard to locate.” Neither of them were known to keep a low profile.

“Be safe out there.” Alfred gave him a knowing look and Tim nodded once before pulling on his helmet and straddling his bike. The engine rumbled underneath him as he sped into town.

Trees rose like a tidal wave on every side. The farther he went, the darker and messier it got. The remnants of thousands of upended lives decorated the growing jungle; front doors and garages left ajar, suitcases spilling prized possessions into the grass, lost pets wandering the unfamiliar landscape. It was no gang war or Clench epidemic, but it was a nightmare nonetheless.

Coming up on Main Street, Tim parked his bike on a loading dock that had been spared from a violent, leafy end by virtue of being a giant slab of solid metal. As terrible as the plants were, they made convenient handholds for scaling the side of an abandoned post office. From the roof, Tim watched a local rev up a chainsaw and attempt to cut through a vine as thick as a tree trunk strangling a volvo.

“As bad as it looked from the air, it’s worse on the ground, Alfred,” Tim said into his comm.

Alfred’s response came through muffled by the roar of wind in the background. “ That’s disheartening to hear, sir.”

“Every street is choked with those vines.” Down the block, an entire church trembled. It wavered, then tipped, then down down down, a silent descent before a cacophonous death, the stone cross at the top bursting apart like a firework in its collision with the ground. “They’re even causing structural damage to the buildings- wait a minute Alfred.” Instead of settling, the dust from the collapse billowed out, displaced by a familiar hulking shape. “Check that last statement; it’s not the weed tearing this street down - it’s Metallo!” 

Tim should’ve known. Nobody ever really died in Gotham.

The villain in question was only humanoid from the waist up this time, his bottom half consisting of tank-like treads and machine guns. He tore out of the church wreckage, flattening everything in his path like the world’s evilest rolling pin. Tim was poised on the balls of his feet, whole body tense as he waited to see which direction Metallo would go, who he would have to save from that megalomaniac’s line of fire.

Then Metallo turned and looked directly at him.

In one heart stopping moment of eye contact, Metallo became a raging bull, and Tim was - quite literally - the bright red target he was charging for. 

With a BANG! and CRASH! and CRRRRRUUUUNNCHH!!! the post office rattled below him, one pillar crumbling after another in the onslaught.

“ What is that cacophony in the background, sir?” 

“Metallo’s after me,” Tim said, leaping back from the edge of the roof. I’m not sure why; he’s Superboy’s enemy.” Superman’s enemy, technically, but - semantics.

“ The ring perhaps?”

An anvil of dread dropped into his stomach.

Crap. What an absolute bomb of a bad idea. Alfred had been right, but Tim was too wrapped up in his own feelings to listen and then he’d ended up 5,000 miles from home with no backup other than a 60 year old man and the one weapon capable of killing the most powerful individuals on the planet.

The one weapon capable of killing his soulmate. And someone very interested in doing just that was gunning for him at full speed.

“That’s got to be it, Alfred!” A stray rock the size of a basketball whizzed past his head. “I can’t let him get it!”

The way back to his bike was an obstacle course of concrete slabs and machine gun bullets. The breakneck speed he ran at wasn’t enough to escape Metallo, though, and Tim had to throw out a line to make it back to his bike before it turned into a very expensive pile of recyclables. 

“ Is there anything I might do, sir?” 

“Not unless you have experience stopping ten-ton cyborgs.”

“ I’m sorry to disappoint, sir.” 

Tim yanked on the throttle right before Metallo turned the alley behind him into rubble.

“HAND OVER THE ROCK AND NOBODY GETS HURT, KID!”

“Why do I have a hard time believing that?” Tim muttered.

With Metallo hot on his heels, Tim took the only clear path the hell out of there.

“YOU GONNA MAKE ME CHASE YOU?” Metallo bellowed, hot on his heels.

“You catch on fast, Metallo!” Tim threw over his shoulder.

He couldn’t outrace a souped up Metallo, not in a dead sprint, but he had the advantage of maneuverability. If Metallo wanted to follow him into the jungle, he’d have to lose about a hundred thousand pounds.

In the rearview mirror, Tim caught sight of his pursuer shifting shape once again. A flurry of metal rearranged like a rubix cube, turning the hulking mass into a slightly more condensed hulking mass.

“ALL I GOTTA DO TO CATCH YOU IS ADD A FEW HORSIES, KID,” Metallo boomed, his voice close enough to make Tim start regretting his life choices. “ANYTHING YOU CAN DO, I CAN DO BETTER.”

Despite himself, Tim couldn’t help being impressed. Metallo’s ability to adapt was amazing, a testament to the compatibility of magic and engineering.

If only all that technical prowess wasn’t geared towards skinning him alive.

Tim would just have to give him a bigger problem to solve, and hope it bought him the time he needed.

Quick as a whip, his line shot out and anchored around a tree branch. Gravity released its hold on him as he swung up, but tragically it held onto his beloved bike, which promptly drove itself right into a pond and disappeared below the murky surface.

Farewell Redbird Junior, faithful automobile and treasured possession. You will be missed.

“CLIMBIN’ A TREE WON’T HELP YOU! ALL I GOTTA DO IS GROW A CHAINSAW AND- HEY ”

SPLASH! 

Mud and water splattered the soles of Tim’s boots.

Enjoy your swim you overgrown lawn mower, Tim thought.

A single bubble blubbed to the surface and Tim allowed himself to enjoy his small victory before taking off again into the woods.

Tree to tree, branch to branch, Tim utilized every bit of acrobatic training Dick had put him through to traverse the terrain. Extend the shoulders, point the toes, front flip, reach, reach, leap. Dick’s voice rang in his head cheering him on as he pulled out enough tricks for an Olympic tryout.

“Alright, Alfred, I’ve slowed Metallo down for a bit. At the very least, he’ll have to drop some of his munitions.”

“ Do I even want to inquire as to why your motorcycle’s tracker has disappeared from radar?”

“Necessary sacrifice, Al. I’m going forward on foot from here on out. I’ll head north then loop back around if need be.”

“ Sir,” Alfred began, sounding dubious. “ The Alakai Swamp is a muck dripping sponge of earth covering thirty square miles of trackless bog. Judging by this guidebook, sir, I have doubts for the success of a manual search of the area.”

“I don’t have any choice, Alfred. I’m not going to sit around, no helicopters are available and I can’t fly- ah!” 

Tim’s momentum suddenly reversed directions, a steel grip around his ankle yanking him backward.

Crap. Tim had thought he’d have more time before Metallo caught up to him. He was upside down, alone, and wishing he’d thought to bring a water bottle. Once again he was strung up like a pig in a butcher shop just waiting for his captor to whip out a meat grinder and-

“Now why is that, Wonder Boy?” Superboy’s voice had Tim doing a double take. “How come guys like you and Batman and Nightwing and Black Canary can’t fly, but me and Superman and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman can? Goin’ by names, you’d kinda expect it to be the other way around, y’know?”

Oh, that puffed up, sarcastic, irreverent, smarmy little-

“You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now, Superboy - trust me. You know how it is - open mouth ‘A,’ insert foot ‘B!’” 

Taking advantage of Superboy’s brief distraction, Tim used his unusual position to drive the heel of his free foot up and into Superboy’s stupid sculpted chin. It would have made him feel bad if he didn’t know it wouldn’t even leave a mark.

“Not that it’ll slow you down much, but it should give me enough time to- oh, great time for my utility belt to get stuck closed.”

Precious seconds were wasted fumbling at the pouch that contained the kryptonite ring. The damn thing felt glued shut.

“Wrong-o, Robin. That’s my trademarked tactile-telekinesis at work.

Tim wanted to scream. Obviously, he knew Superboy’s tactile-telekinesis could be used to take things apart but he hadn’t known-

“Anything I touch I can move, or keep from being moved. Endless hours of fun at parties. And pretty handy when fellow heroes mistakenly believe I’m being controlled by an agent of evil, too. Unless this is my bad and you were just reaching for some mentos…”

Tim wished he could see Superboy’s face in that moment so he could picture wiping the smug smirk off of it.

Inexplicably, he was lowered to the ground, and a foot from the grass the grip around his ankle loosened enough to wiggle free and do a handspring back to his feet. The second he could be sure Superboy’s freaky invisible-hands power was out of range, he dug into his belt - the pouches popped open like it was nothing, of course - and extracted the lead ring box hidden there.

“What, you think I’ll believe you’re not Ivy’s boytoy just because you say so?”

Superboy put his fists on his hips and looked at the sky like Tim was the one being difficult.

“Look, I was, but I got better, okay? If that box-” Superboy nodded at the ring box in his hand, “-you got is some bat-test for detecting undue influence of pheromones - I’ll even take it!”

Tim had to admit, Superboy did seem cognizant. His eyes were free of that lust-filled fog, back to their normal sparkling blue, framed by dark, lush eyelashes that could rival the vines around them in their density, pink lips curled in a grimace instead of a dopey grin, though all of his grins so far had been a little dopey.

“See, I kinda thought we’d team up, y’know?” Superboy added sheepishly. “Do the World’s Finest: Next Generation sort of thing? I mean, you’re the Ivy-League expert, but I think I’d be a big help bringin’ down that pretty poison. Up to you…”

It’s a trap it’s a trap it’s a trap

Tim looked at Superboy’s earnest expression and red tinged cheeks, then down at the box in his hand. It was a bad idea to let his guard down, but, well, what was he going to do? Bust out the kryptonite unprovoked? Kryptonite was a last-resort, and if Superboy was telling the truth then he’d never have to use the rock he wasn’t supposed to have in the first place. Plus…

Butterflies took up residence in his stomach at the words ‘team up.’ The two of them working in tandem, taking down two of the biggest bads on the planet, and, if in the process they realized how well they worked together and decided to do it again sometime, well…

“Okay.” Tim let his hand fall to his side. “But we don’t go up against Ivy without a plan. Last thing I want is you falling under her influence again.”

“Too late,” a sickeningly sweet voice crooned from the tree line. Tim spun around and searched. Ivy’s outfit provided a natural camouflage in the landscape, but the coral of her hair shone like a beacon, even in the shadows.

“Oh, d-”

Before Tim could even finish saying dammit, a fist was cracking across his jaw. Pain bloomed over the side of his face, chased by the sting of betrayal and despair.

“Watch the language, Wonder Boy, there’s a lady present.”

Another fist drove into his solar plexus, punching the air straight out of his lungs.

And Tim-

Tim knew it wasn’t his fault. Superboy couldn’t help it. He was under a chemical spell, turned into a puppet by inhuman pheromones pumped out of a superpowered rogue with nothing but the worst intentions. But knowing that didn’t make the bruises heal faster.

The jolt from his knees hitting the ground reverberated up through his aching stomach and smarting jaw.

“Now, this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”

“Then why not put him out of his misery, Superboy?” Ivy suggested from the sidelines, all girlish charm.

“Good idea, Ivy. Might as well do this quick and easy.” Tim looked up to see Superboy tearing an entire tree up and out of the ground, roots and all, like he was pulling a weed. “One of those cruel to be kind things.”

Tim mustered up his strength and dove out of the way a second before the tree slammed into the dirt like a boot trying to crush a bug.

“Don’t work so hard, Red,” Superboy taunted. “You’re up against the closest genetic equivalent to Superman science could create!”

“That’s what I’m hoping,” Tim muttered to himself.

Without any more hesitation, Tim flicked open the lead box still in his hand and plucked out its glowing emerald contents. Fortunately, it had been built to fit on a Batman-sized finger, so it slid over the bulk of his glove without issue.

“Nothin’ personal, Wonder Boy, this is just what you get for messin’ with the green!”

Tim rolled to his feet just in time to see Superboy lift off.

“It’s funny, Superboy,” Tim said as his assailant hurtled that last few feet between them. “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”

With perhaps more force than was strictly necessary, Tim caught Superboy in a nasty uppercut as soon as he was in arm’s reach. The strength of it combined with radiation poisoning from the kryptonite was enough to send Superboy crashing to the ground.

Superboy gasped and curled up on the ground. But instead of cupping his bruised jaw, he wrapped an arm around his middle and squeezed his eyes shut tight.

“Put… put it away!” he begged. “G-guts in knots… on f- fire!” His tan complexion had gone pale, eyes fogged over from pain instead of mind control. Tim hated it, hated that he’d caused it, but not enough to let his guard down again.

“Sorry, pal, I’m not falling for your act again.” Tim took a step forward, watching as Superboy flinched back. The green glow made him look even sicker. “You’ll have to do better than that if you really want me to believe-”

“ BLEGTCH!” Superboy hunched over and emptied the contents of his stomach into the grass.

“Nevermind! I’m convinced!” He scrambled for the ring box as Superboy groaned. “Hang in there, I’ll have the K-ring back in its lead case before-”

Tim did not , in fact, manage to put the K-ring back in its lead case before something cracked across the back of his head and everything went black.

Heavy - his whole body felt heavy, like it was filled with wet sand.

The grass was wet and cold where it met the back of his neck and elbows - well, one elbow; Tim was vaguely aware of one arm being held straight up in the air, though he couldn’t remember why.

An invisible jackhammer pounded into his skull, the ache only worsened by the commotion around him: a woman’s outraged voice, a mechanic whirring noise, pained noises - though whether or not they came from him, Tim wasn’t sure.

His vision swam when he finally managed to pry his eyelids open, dark spots floating around the edges. Three feet away, Superboy was in a similar position.

The noise grew, accompanied by a shower of dirt, leaves, and wood shavings. As it became louder, the words buried in the noise finally processed through his concussion-lagged brain.

“-SOME KINDA TREE HUGGER IF YOU THINK THIS DANDELION IS INNOCENT.” Metallo’s voice was close, but not close enough to trigger his fight-or-flight response. It seemed to be directed at someone else, which was weird since usually when people were making threats, it was at Tim. “NOW GIVE IT UP!”

Give what up? What could Ivy possibly have that Metallo would-

Oh.

Tim looked down at his very ringless finger.

Oh shit.

Focus. Tim rolled onto his front, pushed up on his hands and knees, and took a breath to steady his roiling stomach.

“You can’t let Metallo have the ring…” Superboy groaned. His whole body trembled where it lay collapsed. Tim didn’t want to leave him alone, not when he was so vulnerable, but he knew it would be worse to let anyone else get away with the ring.

Tim steeled his resolve and pushed to his feet. “I don’t plan on it.”

Tim wasn’t planning on much of anything when he broke into a sprint towards where Metallo had Ivy cornered. He couldn’t hardly manage to take one of them down by himself, let alone both. But his soulmate and the entire state of Hawaii needed him.

High stakes.

Okay, one thing at a time. 

Ivy and Metallo were both bad news, but when factoring in the fate of the entire world, it was clear who was the bigger threat.

Tim took advantage of their distraction to hop onto Metallo’s- rear? The half of him that had previously taken the shape of a tank had shifted into a swamp cruiser with a circular base and a pair of jet engines on the back. 

His brain was human, even if the rest of him wasn’t, so there had to be an interface somewhere in his circuitry. Probably. He hoped. He slipped a multitool from his belt and popped open the flathead screwdriver extension, using it to pry open a panel closest to where the base of Metallo’s spine would be. If he had one.

Up front, Metallo was continuing to monologue at Ivy, but Tim tuned them out to focus on not getting electrocuted. Just as he’d hoped, there was some kind of control translator buried in the nest of wires. All he had to do was get into the settings, plug in the override USB he kept in his belt, download a control program and-

URRKRKRKRKRK!!

A grating series of clicks and grinds erupted from the machine in front of him. Metallo’s entire top half swiveled 360° so he could look at the person performing mechanical surgery on him with his beady red eyes.

“WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?” Metallo demanded.

“I’m going on here.”

“LITTLE BRAT!”

“I’ve got you by the configurations, Metallo.”

“YOU’VE GOT MY DRIVE CONTROLS ALRIGHT! BUT I’VE STILL GOT THE WEAPONS PROGRAM! PREPARE TO GET DICED, BOY WONDER”

“ Woah!” Tim ducked to avoid getting decapitated by a swinging circular saw aimed right at his jugular.

So that plan had gone south a little faster than anticipated, but at least he’d successfully gotten Metallo’s mind off the ring.

He planted his thumb on the button with an up arrow and held. 

The whole machine zoomed forward like a racecar. Tim dug his heels into a couple convenient grooves and held on for his life as he propelled them both forward.

“YOU LITTLE BRAT!” Metallo hollered. “WHAT’VE YA DONE?! I GOT NO CONTROL OVER ANYTHING!” 

“That’s right, Metallo!” Tim called over the wind, directing them into a clearing while he locked down access to the digital systems. “See, a smart cyborg would’ve protected his interface a lot better. Now I’m in the driver’s seat!”

Victor never would have made such a rookie mistake.

If Tim’s mental map hadn’t gotten too scrambled, in less than a mile they’d be running out of track.

“Don’t worry! Our little ride will be over soon enough!” Tim promised.

“FOR THE LAST TIME, LEGGO OF MY INTERFACE, PUNK! I CAN’T STOP!”

Of that, Tim was well aware. He was extremely aware of how much they couldn’t stop. Every inch they got closer to the end of the road Tim became more aware of the fact that they absolutely could not, under any circumstances, stop. 

“I give up the interface, you start morphing again, Metallo! I don’t think so! Just say hello to the Na Pali Cliffs - four thousand feet straight down to the ocean! Now say good-bye!”

A moment of weightlessness.

Their momentum carried them out several yards past the cliff edge before they started to plummet. Metallo’s cry of, “NOOOOOO!” would be the last thing he ever heard.

It was a beautiful night. Without the pollution and lights of the city, stars shone unhindered in the sky. Not how Tim thought he’d go, but not the worst situation for it. The impact from hitting the surface of the water would probably be enough to kill him instantly, and if not, drowning was pretty quick.

He let go and Metallo dropped away from him, doomed by all the extra weight he had to carry.

He’d call it a win/lose scenario. At least he could die knowing he’d taken out one of Earth’s worst villains.

Tim fell so fast the ocean seemed to be opening its jaws to swallow him whole.

He closed his eyes, breathed, and-

“ Gotcha!”

A hand seized his wrist. Tim’s shoulder nearly popped out of its socket with the force of his sudden deceleration. Tim looked up and saw none other than Superboy with his fingers wrapped around the place where his own name was emblazoned, though he didn’t know it.

“Superboy! I thought I was toast!” Tim exclaimed.

“You still may be,” Superboy said, face scrunched up in exertion. “The exposure to kryptonite…”

Though Superboy had slown his descent considerably, they were starting to pick up speed again.

“Can you at least slow us below terminal velocity?”

“Not… nng… sure.”

A great crash below them sent water spraying upward, like reverse rain. Chucks of steel and copper sank out of sight.

“Metallo’s finished,” Tim commented.

“And we’re next,” Superboy warned. “I can’t hold us any-”

With a gasp, the body above him went slack.

Tim saw Superboy’s lips shape around the words Sorry, Robin as his eyes fluttered.

Back into freefall they went. Once again, Tim was headed for an early grave, except this time he wasn’t alone. And that just wouldn’t do. Because, Tim making a heroic sacrifice to ensure the world was rid of an especially dangerous and cruel criminal? Whatever. But Tim’s soulmate dying too? Absolutely not.

He fished in his belt pockets for something, anything, that could save them. A Hail Mary, a miracle, a second third sixth chance.

Low and behold, right next to the handcuffs, his fist closed around a bat-bolas. Better suited for tripping up a target while in pursuit, but maybe, just maybe, if Tim was lucky, it would do the job.

With all the strength he could muster, Tim flung the wing shaped end at the cliffside and prayed it wouldn’t just bounce off.

PAKCHK!

The anchor collided with stone.

P-KACH!

Pebbles rained down, though they were falling so fast the pebbles almost seemed to rise.

THUNK!

The sound of the anchor catching out an outcropping was the most beautiful thing Tim’d ever heard.

He got an arm across Superboy’s back and gritted his teeth as the line pulled taut and they came to a screeching halt midair. If Tim’s shoulder hadn’t been messed up before, it definitely was now.

“Y- you saved us!” Superboy said, sounding a bit awestruck.

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” Tim grumbled, swinging them towards the cliff face. “Besides…we kind of saved each other.”

Moving slow and clutching at each other for balance, Tim and Superboy managed to slide a little further down the rope onto a ledge just big enough for them to perch on and rest their weary muscles. Tim mourned the absence of Superboy’s touch the second they were separated, but the sweet relief of sitting down overtook it.

Tim leaned over to inspect what was left of their adversary floating on the waves.

“Starting to feel better away from that ring,” Superboy said, sprawling back.

“Any sign of Metallo?” Tim asked. He’d made the assumption that Metallo was dead before. It wasn’t a mistake he wanted to make again.

“Still too weak to go down and check.”

Tim looked at his partner in crime fighting. Superboy was still pale - other than his ruddy cheeks - and sweat dripped down his temples. There was a blade of grass in his hair, blood on his chin, and dirt all over his snazzy leather jacket. He looked about as good as Tim felt.

“What happened to Ivy?” Tim asked instead of blurting out, “ Wanna come back to my place so I can nurse you back to health with soup and affection?”

“Knocked her out,” was Superboy’s simple reply. 

While they caught their breath, they sat in silence and watched the sunrise. 

Not exactly how Tim had imagined watching the sunrise with his soulmate, but they were both alive, and that was what mattered.

“Hey,” Superboy’s voice broke their tentative peace. “We make a pretty good team. You know, when I’m not being mind controlled.”

Tim hummed. “I guess you could say we were…pretty rad.”

Superboy’s face broke out into the sunniest grin Tim had ever seen in his life. And knowing Dick Grayson made that a pretty high bar.

His laugh came out breathless and wheezing and just a little manic from the lingering adrenaline, and it set Tim off into his own round of hysterical giggling. They laughed until their lungs ached and the sun was high enough to shine into their eyes. They were exhausted and messy and sporting a myriad of nasty injuries, and Tim wouldn’t have traded it for all the perfect meet-cutes in the world.

He was about to open his mouth and say, “ There’s something you should know,” when Superboy beat him to the punch. 

“We should probably get out of here, huh?”

“Yeah,” Tim agreed, taking one last moment to enjoy the way the sunlight turned Superboy golden before he tapped his ear to open a line. “Agent A?”

“ Yes, sir?”

“I think I’m ready for that extraction now.”

“ I will be arriving at your location promptly.”

“One more thing?”

“ Yes?”

Tim looked at his companion. His soulmate. His…friend.

“You think we have room for one more in the plane?”

***

“I almost didn’t have enough strength left after I caught Poison Ivy, but usin’ my tactile-telekinesis, I could just keep old Metalhead from morphin’...an’ I mean barely!” 

From the top of the KNS office building, Tim watched as Superboy preened for his audience. Was his performance overkill? Maybe. But then again, that was all part of the Superboy brand.

“It took all I had to fly away when we went from four-wheel drive to free-form dive!”

Definitely overkill.

“Let me get this straight,” a reporter called from the crowd. “Metallo’s fought Superman to a standstill, Ivy’s given Gotham City nothing but grief, and you stopped them both? By yourself?” 

“I didn’t say it was easy,” Superboy replied without missing a beat. “But nothin’s impossible if you got a plan, Tana.” He lifted into the air, all bravado, all boyish pride, and Tim could almost see the cheeky smirk no doubt gracing his features. “Think ahead,” he shouted from above the crowd. “That’s today’s lesson!”

He disappeared from view, but it was only seconds before the pat of feet hitting the rooftop alerted Tim to its new inhabitant.

“Looks like it worked, Superboy. Thanks. This’ll make things easier for, uh…” 

For Tim specifically who would probably get ripped a new one if Bruce ever found out about the whole escapade.

“...for everyone.”

“No problem, Robin.” And god if his name - albeit not his real one - didn’t sound good coming out of Superboy’s mouth. “I sounded so good out there I’m beginnin’ to think you weren’t here myself. I mean, Ivy could talk, but who’s gonna listen to her psychobabble?”

Tim rolled his eyes. Trust Superboy to go from sweet to irritating in 2 seconds flat.

“But I gotta say,” Superboy continued, scratching at the back of his neck. “I’m glad you were here, or I might still be under Ivy’s green thumb. Like Tana always says - women are my kryptonite!”

There was that name again: Tana. Superboy said it like they knew each other personally, like they were…close.

Tim knew who she was; Tana Moon, star reporter for GBS before her move from Metropolis to Hawaii. Her face ended up on screen almost as much as Superboy’s did whenever the Junior Kryptonian made a public appearance. He supposed you’d end up getting to know someone if they were assigned to every story that had anything to do with you.

He’d have to do a little digging later.

But there were more pressing matters at hand.

“Speaking of kryptonite…”

“Oh yeah, the ring.” Superboy pulled the item in question from his jacket pocket and turned it over in his hand. “You know, since Cadmus was kind enough to clone me so I spew at the sight of this stuff, I was kinda hopin’ I could keep it.”

Tim scoffed. “Where? In a shoe box under your bed?”

Superboy looked at the box, then at Tim, then back at the box. He got the feeling that Superboy was seriously considering bolting with the ring. It was time for a little improvisation. 

“Watch out!” Tim cried, pointing in a vague direction behind Superboy. “It’s Metallo! Back for the kryptonite!”

Superboy immediately tensed for a fight, tossing the ring box to Tim as he turned to fight his imaginary opposition. “Hold the stone, Wonder! I’ll deal with Mr. Machine this…time?” He spun in a circle with the most adorable confused expression on his face. “What’s the deal? Metallo’s not- hey!”

Superboy realized Metallo was nowhere to be seen just in time to catch Tim tucking the ring box back into his belt, safe and sound. Tim was determined to make sure it was never used to harm his soulmate again, even if that meant bamboozling him.

Superboy stared at him wide-eyed, slack-jawed, and mildly offended.

Especially if that meant bamboozling him.

“You’re right, Superboy, sometimes you’ve definitely got to play fast and loose and make it up as you go along!” Tim took pity on him when he saw the worried look on his face. “Don’t worry about the ring. There isn’t a safer place in the world than the batcave.”

“The batcave? Where is that? Is it your hideout? You know, I’d kill to see that place!”

Oh Bruce would love that.

“Well, we don’t exactly give guided tours…but, yeah, sure, I’ll show you around. Just look me up the next time you’re in Gotham City, Superboy!”

“Count on it, Wonder! You haven’t seen the last of me!” Superboy’s pearly grin was the last thing Tim saw before he shot out a line and swung away.

By the time he made it to the airstrip where Alfred was waiting by their private plane - Alfred had refused to subject himself to commercial flight again - a giddy feeling still filled his chest. Alfred raised a single eyebrow at his blushing cheeks and upturned lips, but otherwise made no comment. He simply opened the cabin door and followed Tim inside.

“Master Wayne is returning from his trip abroad today as well,” Alfred said when they had taken off and the autopilot was set. “With any luck, we’ll arrive home with just enough time to spare so that he never finds out about this little endeavor.”

“Here’s hoping.” Tim held up two crossed fingers.

The last thing Tim wanted was to have to explain to Batman how he smuggled the kryptonite ring not just out of the batcave, but out of the continental United States, lost it, then only managed to get it back with the help of a troublesome teen superhero.

And the last last thing Tim wanted was to have to talk to Bruce about the emotional experience of meeting his soulmate for the first time.

Best if he never heard about the situation at all.

Miles above the Pacific Ocean, Tim looked down over a patchwork quilt of sea foam and cerulean. It was beautiful, but not quite the most beautiful shade of blue ever seen.

Chapter Text

Tim didn’t generally think of himself as a violent person. Sure, he was no pacifist, but he believed in second chances, in peaceful resolutions, in solving problems with logic rather than bloodshed.

But sitting at the dining room table doing homework while Dana’s soulmate prattled on and on about the difficulties of her love life, Tim wanted nothing more than to sink his teeth into her leg like a feral squirrel and hold on while she screeched and jumped around. 

“I’m tellin’ ya, kid,” Christie said, waving around a batter-covered whisk. “If you meet someone else who says they don’t have a soulmark, make sure they actually don’t and it's not just some dirtbag lying ‘cause he wants to cheat on his wife.”

Tim didn’t even bother to give her a placating hum before turning back to his essay on the function of fascism within Fahrenheit 451. He didn’t need to. When the pair of them were together, Dana and Christie could talk a mile a minute, no apparent need for outside opinions. Or encouragement. Or oxygen.

It wasn’t that Tim hated Christie, he just didn’t like her. Mostly because she kept trying to bond with him over the fact that he, to the best of her knowledge, didn’t have a soulmate, and apparently having a platonic soulmate while trying to lock down a romantic partner was an equivalent experience. And if his father’s mysterious disappearances anytime Christie showed up to spend time with Dana was any indication, he didn’t like her much either. Probably because they were a little too much alike.

Christie, like his father, was a charismatic, energetic person with a tendency to forget about other people’s schedules and consequently show up or flake out at random times. Obviously, Dana had a type. However, no attraction had been present in the relationship between the two women who had met in kindergarten, so Dana had eventually found a man with a dead soulmate, and Christie continued on a fruitless search to find a man who wasn’t already spoken for.

Soon after Dana had become Dana and not just Dad’s Girlfriend, Christie had started stopping by for dinners and gossip sessions and impromptu girls’ nights, which Tim didn’t really care about except for the fact that her incessant chattering often brought to attention Tim’s own complicated situation.

That complicated situation being that his stupid soulmate had decided that his stupid soulmark was the one stupid topic he would keep his big mouth shut on.

Even after weeks of being on a team together, of games of truth or dare, of Tim prying in every conceivable way to get a crumb of information from him, Superboy remained steadfast in his quest to drive Tim mad with curiosity. Anytime the subject was brought up and directed at him, Superboy would shrug and make some vague comment before steering the conversation in a different direction. And, yeah, Tim did the same thing, but Robin was close-lipped about everything; Superboy couldn’t shut up about what he’d had for breakfast, let alone his love life.

That’s what Tim had assumed anyway.

A month ago.

“It’s the not knowing that really drives you crazy,” Christie went on as she puttered around the kitchen. “Like, what are you gonna do, rip the guy’s sleeve off the first time you meet?”

Tim gripped his pencil so hard it snapped in half.

Two blonde heads swiveled to look at him.

“Tim, honey, is everything alright?” Dana asked, setting down her baking sheet.

“Fine,” Tim answered, managing a smile that belied his simmering madness. “Everything’s fine.”

It wasn’t. But it would be.

“No.”

“Bruce-”

“ No.”

“He’s my soulmate, ” Tim argued, hovering behind Bruce as they inventoried the weapons stock.

“We can’t take that risk,” Bruce responded.

“I trust him.”

“Trust isn’t enough.”

“Then what is?” 

Bruce let out a long breath through his nose, but otherwise didn’t falter in his organizing of smoke bombs. “Anyone knowing your identity puts all of us at risk.”

“Does it?” Tim challenged. “I mean, it’s not like I’m your kid the way Dick was. As far as the public is concerned, we don’t even know each other.”

“And what about your father?” Bruce shot back. “What about Dana? Anyone knowing your identity puts them in danger. What if what happened with Ivy happens again?”

“That wasn’t his fault. Anyone could get dosed like that.” 

“But the more people who know, the greater the odds that it happens to someone else.”

The absence of an easy rebuttal irked him beyond belief. Tim felt the need to defend his soulmate with a primal ferocity. It was irrational, he knew, and getting emotional was the fastest way to make Bruce dismiss his request.

Because that was what it was. A request. Bruce wasn’t his dad or his boss, but Tim craved his approval all the same. When it came down to it, he trusted Bruce’s judgment, and if Bruce said it wasn’t time, Tim would listen, no matter how tempting Dick’s advice to follow his heart was.

And his heart kept leaning towards Kon like a sunflower towards the sun.

The fourth name to grace his wrist was Tim’s favorite, though it was perhaps the least exciting development in regards to his lovelife. 

Kon-El

It was a good name. Short and sweet, though damningly foreign. The wrapping stayed fastened to his arm as often as ever. It hid his mark, but it couldn’t smother the warm affection that had taken up permanent residence in his chest and made itself known anytime he thought about his soulmate.

He just kept picturing that smile.

The name on his wrist had changed in the middle of the week, on an innocuous afternoon, with no warning. The following weekend, Tim had traveled to the Justice Cave to find Superboy bouncing around, happy as a clam and clearly bursting at the seams to share his news.

“You can call me Kon,” he’d said with a casualty that couldn’t have been more fake. “That’s my name. Superman gave it to me.”

And a part of Tim had wanted to yell, I know! I saw it and I’m so happy for you! I was the first one to know your name! Have my babies!

He’d restrained himself from saying any of that outloud. Barely.

But having that name on his wrist - a real name, not some flashy hero alias - just made him want to come clean all the more. His soulmate finally had a name, one Tim could call him, come up with nicknames for, introduce him by.

This is Kon, my soulmate.

He wanted to say it a million times. Sometimes, in the safety of his bed at night, Tim would whisper that name into the dark in a way he couldn’t the rest of the time.

Kon, darling, have you seen my jacket?

I’m not sure, let me ask Kon.

Dad, I have a soulmate. His name is Kon.

But none of that could happen until Tim came clean.

“He’s going to find out eventually,” Tim finally said to Bruce. “I just…I’d rather him find out from me than have it happen by accident.”

“Well, you can’t tell him right now anyway,” was Bruce’s brisk response. “He’s in another dimension.”

“He- what?” 

“A few days ago, an exact clone of Superboy appeared to give us a warning right before he died. This world’s Superboy was the only one who could investigate, so we sent him into Hypertime. I have no idea when he’ll return.”

Tim gaped like a fish, trying to process the tangled mess of information Bruce had just dumped on him. “Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”

“Because I was concerned you would allow your feelings to cloud your common sense.”

Tim took a very slow, very measured breath to avoid launching one of the batarangs he was sharpening straight at Bruce’s stupidly calm face. All of a sudden, going behind his back to tell his team his identity was sounding like a fantastic idea.

A nasty comment sat on the edge of his tongue, something bitter and cruel about how well common sense had worked out in regards to his relationship with Selina. The only thing that held it back was a rapid sadness that came over him, pity almost that he felt for Bruce. He’d never allowed himself to settle down, to fall in love, to be happy with his predestined other half.

Tim didn’t want to end up like him. He wouldn’t. Someday, he would tell Kon the truth, and it would be on his own terms.

As it turned out, finding the right time to bare his soul and come clean to his soulmate about everything proved a much more difficult task than Tim had anticipated. It kept almost happening. Tim would screw up his courage and resolve to just do it, then some ridiculous life-threatening, world-altering development would get in the way of his lovelife.

He saw Kon dripping wet and shirtless in the pool at the mountain and thought, I’m doing it today. Then their team’s chaperone was denied custody of his own daughter and went on the lam, so the lot of them had to intervene which ended up in a shootout with the DEA, which led to them fleeing and ending up in literal Hell, getting brainwashed, and barely managing to keep a small town from getting demolished by lava, before Harm came back, Secret disappeared, and all of them almost died. Again.

Or: things finally settled down and one day Kon offered to give Cissie a ride back to school on the Supercycle but Tim was the only one it would let drive it so he went along too, and after Cissie had been dropped off it was just the two of them and he thought, Now is the perfect time. Then there turned out to be a shooting at the Elias School for Girls and Kon whisked off to make sure Cissie was okay, and she wasn’t, so Cissie had a breakdown, an attempted-murder spree, an identity crisis, and quit the team. Then, they went to find Secret, blew up a national monument in the process, sparked a series of protests, got driven from their base, and Tim only narrowly managed not to kill his soulmate on about 3 separate occasions, despite the temptation.

At that point, Tim considered dropping a cinderblock on his own foot just to catch a break. 

He’d thought he’d found the perfect time during Young Justice’s relocation. Tensions were high and their public reputation was in the toilet, so they were going to lay low. Take the time to regroup. Settle into their new base at the abandoned hotel in the mountains and breathe. 

It was while they were exploring the building that the opportunity arose. His lot of rambunctious friends had zipped off at the first chance to nose around. The ivory walls of the empty hotel echoed back the soft pad of his footsteps on the tile. 

He was alone until, with a gust of wind, Kon blew into the room and landed right next to Tim like he’d been there the whole time. Tim wished he had been.

Despite all the arguments, despite the amount of times he’d wanted nothing more than to throttle the immature jackass, Tim felt better when he was around. Like he hadn’t even realized gravity wasn’t working right until Kon appeared and it fixed itself. And, admittedly, a lot of that tension was the result of Tim’s own secrecy. It was boiling over; angry comments about trust, prods at his real identity. The lies were affecting everyone for the worse, and it had to come to an end.

“Hey, Rob,” Kon greeted, a teasing grin tugging on his lips. “I suddenly figured that maybe we should stick together.”

“Great idea,” Tim drawled in response to the same advice he’d tried to give earlier. “Wish I’d thought of it.”

“Props to ya. This place is perfect.” Kon tipped his head up, the warm light of the chandelier far above glittering in his eyes, and Tim thought now now now. 

And that was when all hell broke loose. Metaphorically that time.

Because that was the point at which the so called ‘Old Justice’ showed up to handle them, which somehow spun out into a global movement in defense of young heroes during which Tim realized that the Kon he’d been wanting to murder a lot more than usual wasn’t actually Kon at all and oh god Tim had almost professed his undying love to Match, eugh! And then all the kids were adults and all the adults were kids and Kon almost died and there were a bunch of fights and Tim had a heart-to-heart with his dad even though his dad didn’t know it was him-

Just thinking about it gave him a headache.

And when it was all said and done, when everyone was the correct age again, when the Agenda had been driven from Cadmus…

Well, it wasn’t really all said and done. That was the problem.

Tim found himself in the middle of Alaska for reasons he still didn’t quite understand with just about every hero and vigilante in the western hemisphere.

The moment Kon arrived on the scene from Cadmus, he, Bart, Cassie, and Secret were flocking over, looking him up and down for any evidence of the excruciating pain he’d been in from Klarion’s (de)aging spell. But he looked the same as he ever did, except for the empty, tortured look in his eyes.

“Kon!” Bart hollered, zipping ahead of the rest of them. “Are you okay? I wanted to come with you to Cadmus buttheneverythinggotcrazyandwehadtotakealltheadultswhowerekidsbacktoMountJusticeandDoiby’sgunwasn’tworkingsothenwe-”

“Impulse.” After catching up, Tim clapped a hand onto Bart’s shoulder to shut him up so he could launch an investigation of his own. “How are you feeling, Kon? Did they figure out what was wrong with you at Cadmus?”

“Yeah, Serling got me sorted out,” Kon answered, ignoring the first question entirely. “Since I didn’t have the ability to age, the aging spell had me coming apart at a molecular level, but don’t worry guys,” Kon gave a weak imitation of his usual cocky grin. “I’m doin’ just swell now. I’m even gonna grow up like a real boy. Only problem is, all my powers’re gone.”

Secret gasped. “Oh, Kon …”

He shrugged. “It’s fine. It’s whatever.”

Tim chewed on the inside of his cheek, debating whether or not to push for whatever it was that Kon wasn’t saying. “Did…anything else happen?”

Kon stared at the track-marked snow under their feet. Cassie wrapped a gloved hand around his wrist and they shared a look, one that was full of all the things they’d seen at Cadmus that Tim hadn’t been there for.

There was a long moment of silence among them, everyone holding their breath to see what Kon would say next. A great clamor still carried on around them as captured Agenda agents were processed and dealt with, but Tim couldn’t have described any of it with as much detail as he could have Kon’s hollow expression.

“Tana’s dead.”

No one seemed to know what to say to that.

“...how-”

“Amanda Spence killed her,” he answered before the question could even be finished.

“Oh, Kon,” Secret whispered, hugging him as best she could with her wispy tendrils. “I’m so sorry. I know she meant a lot to you.”

“I…I loved her.”

Those words bounced around in Tim’s head like pinballs.

Tana Moon, reporter and known associate of Superboy. Mid twenties, Hawaiian native. There were plenty of rumors about her being Superboy’s girlfriend, but Kon had never talked about her much. Not to the team at least.

Did he love her like a sister? Like a friend? Like…more? And how the hell was Tim supposed to feel about any of that anyway?

One thing was clear at least: it wasn’t the time to be making any grand declarations of love, and it probably wouldn’t be for a while. His soulmate was grieving and powerless. The last thing he needed was a revelation like that to complicate things. No, Tim would wait a little longer.

Bart sounded uncharacteristically slow and cautious when he asked, “Was she…your soulmate?”

“No,” Kon said, his face an unreadable mask of stone. “No, I don’t have a soulmate.”

Tim’s heart stopped. Everything came to a screeching halt as every spare brain cell he had rerouted to analyze that statement.

I don’t have a soulmate.

Of course he did. Tim was his soulmate. Tim had Kon’s name on his wrist which meant Kon-

I don’t have a soulmate.

Kon had to have his name on his wrist, right? Right?

I don’t have a soulmate.

Unless he didn’t. Unless the universe was howling with laughter at the predicament it had put Tim in. Unless the reason that Kon never spoke of it was because, through some twist of divine cruelty, he didn’t have Tim’s name on his wrist. Maybe didn’t have any name on his wrist.

“What do you mean?” Cassie asked, brow furrowed.

“I’m a clone, remember, Cass? I don’t have a real soulmate. And Tana was probably the closest I was ever gonna get.”

That was the last thing he said before turning around and walking away, leaving Tim behind in his wake.

Later, when Tim finally unmasked himself to his team with Bruce’s blessing, he gave them a fake name to go along with it. And when Kon called him out on his bullshit, Tim faked a laugh and thought, It’s not like it matters what my real name is anyway.

Chapter Text

“Mr. Westfield? Mr. Westfield!”

The call echoed down the hallway of the administrative offices in the laboratory. It was soon followed by a lab technician who came to a screeching halt in the doorway of Paul Westfield’s office, white coat fluttering in the ensuing breeze.

“Good heavens, man!" Westfield exclaimed from behind his desk. “What’s all the ruckus about?”

“Mr. Westfield!” the technician eked out between heaving breaths. “It’s Experiment Thirteen!”

The man behind the desk stood with such haste that his chair almost toppled over. “Don’t tell me we’ve lost another one.”

“No, sir!”

“Well, what is it then? Is it alright?”

“More than alright! You have to come see for yourself!”

The brisk walk back to the genetics lab was one skip short of a jog. Never before had the soothing elevator music felt so taunting.

The lab was buzzing with excited chatter, bodies clustered around the large, cylindrical tank with their prize specimen. Scientists and doctors bearing clipboards dove out of the director’s path or were just as quickly pushed to make room in front of the creature they were all so captivated by.

At first glance, it was the same as it ever was. Although, perhaps that wasn’t an apt turn of phrase considering the experiment had been in a constant state of rapid growth from the moment of its conception a week prior. Regardless, it was still spitting out vital signs and floating placidly in the green, nutrient-dense suspension liquid.

“What is it? What’s happened?”

One mousy, graying scientist in a white coat stepped forward. “Look here, sir.” A bony figure directed his gaze to-

“Great scott,” Westfield murmured. “Is that real? When did it appear?”

“Just a few minutes ago, sir. Or, at least, that’s when Dr. Fairchild first noticed it.”

Westfield’s lips pursed together so tightly they went white. “This certainly complicates matters.”

“But, sir!” the scientist exclaimed. “This is a good sign! It means-”

“I know what it means,” Westfield snapped. “Where’s Packard? What does he make of this?”

A younger researcher piped up from the crowd. “I think he’s in the bathroom.”

“Well, go and get him!” he ordered. “I don’t care if his pants are still down! And someone send for an agent from the intelligence department asap!”

Westfield stepped forward to get a closer look at the damning mark on his most promising asset.

“I want to know everything there is to find out about this Tim Drake.”

Superman was 16 years old when he was born. Or, something like that. 15, 16 - that was the general consensus. Born, ejected, freed, stolen, escaped - accounts differ. One moment, memories were popping up like daisies in his mind and the next he was pushing back at them, gnashing his proverbial teeth at the onslaught of mental ropes weaving intricately around his psyche. And then…

There he was.

Experiment 13 was about a week old when the name Tim Drake appeared on his wrist like magic. He didn’t actually notice it until days later. The seconds after he sprung from his tube were a blur of shouts and flashing red emergency lights. Someone handed him a suit and he put it on. Blue spandex kept those little black letters hidden for the first couple days of his life. He didn’t even think to check until he peeled his suit off to take a shower and caught sight of the thing in his peripheral vision.

Superboy was 16 years old when he came to the logical conclusion that he couldn’t really trust anyone, least of all himself. Arrogance and charisma made convenient fronts for the roiling paranoia that haunted him.

He was an experiment. An abnormality. A half-baked imitation of something he could never hope to achieve. And the people who created him, he knew, had less than altruistic motives. They tried to fill his brain with failsafes and control codes, and it was only his rapidly evolving resistance to authority that kept him from becoming a mindless drone. There was a hole in his earlobe where they’d hung an identification tag; it stood to reason they could’ve inscribed any name they liked onto his arm to use as leverage.

Who knew if Tim Drake even existed? And if he did, who’s to say that he really was Superboy’s soulmate?

No, better to disregard it entirely. There were more important things to focus on. Like saving lives. And hitting on babes.

Superboy was 16 years old when he fell in love for the first time with a beautiful woman bearing a blank wrist and he thought, This is it. 

Superboy was 16 years old when he finally got a name of his own and wondered for the first time if maybe he might’ve been beholden to that same divine gift everyone else was. But that didn’t really make sense did it? He couldn’t age. How could he spend his life with someone? Such things were not for him.

Kon was 16 years old when his first love was murdered right in front of him. He was still 16, but for the first time in his entire life he knew he wouldn't stay that way forever; he had the chance to age, to grow, to spend the rest of his life with someone. And the moment that possibility was born from the unholy union of science and magic, the only person he could imagine doing it with was wrenched from his hands. It’s then that he gave up on the idea of romantic love entirely. Anyone who loved him would forever have a target on their back.

Kon was 16 years old when everything changed. 

War is hell. That was the saying, though it felt backwards to him. Hell is war. That felt more accurate.

Kon had seen death and destruction and pain on a massive scale, but nothing like Apokolips. Body parts littered horizonless wastelands; dirt red with blood or blood red with dirt. There was no end to the violence. He watched his best friend die. He saw the disastrous consequences of his own ineptitude on the people who mattered most to him. 

Failure clung to his skin like water soaked into the fibers of his clothing.

After it all, Kon felt like one of the children from Narnia - gone to a far off land, enduring unbelievable exploits, living an entire lifetime, only to have to return to real life as a child again. 

The memories of it all nipped at his heels like a rabid dog, and he ran on the all-consuming adrenaline spewing from a faucet broken by pure animal instinct. 

DeathTorturePainDeathSufferingWarViolenceDeathDeathDeath-

Kon flitted from place to place trying to escape the tidal wave of it all. 

He couldn’t.

He thought about how nice it would be to have someone to collapse into the arms of. To wail and sob and shake in the kind of way that makes the heart of someone who loves you break. But he didn’t have a someone like that because Tana was gone and Roxy was gone and Cadmus was gone and Serling with it and Superman didn’t trust him anymore and also Kon was a test tube baby with nothing even resembling a real family.

And through it all, one thing kept itching at the back of his mind like a bug bite you can’t quite reach: Robin - the one person who seemed to have all the answers.

He regretted a lot of things, not the least of which being how he treated his friend. He was mad at himself for acting that way and he was mad at Robin for deserving it and he was mad at the world for making liars and puppets of them both. He was furious that Robin just left. 

He was furious because he couldn't do the same.

Bart went back to Max and Robin went back to- well, Kon didn’t actually know who Robin had to go back to, which was kind of the crux of the whole issue, but he was sure there was someone. Batman or school friends or a soulmate Kon didn’t know the name of because he didn’t know anything about Robin beyond enough physical characteristics to identify a corpse.

Kon was 17 years old when he realized he probably should have had a birthday at some point. He probably spent it alone, blissfully unaware of what exactly the date entailed. It didn’t occur to him until weeks later that enough time had passed for it. At some unidentifiable point in time, Kon stopped being 16 and started being 17, and that didn’t really mean anything when he was born as a teenager and has since spent 90% of his existence not aging, but it should’ve meant something. To someone.

To anyone.

It’s funny the way fate works out sometimes.

Kon isn’t entirely sure how he ended up in Rhode Island. Well, that’s not true. He got on a bus and fell asleep, then woke up halfway across Connecticut. Then he thought, What the hell. Might as well grab lunch before heading back. 

A teeny tiny cafe tucked between a laundromat and a credit union had the best damn patty melt he’d ever tasted in his life. But his flirting with the waiter was tragically cut short a kerfuffle on the street which turned out to be a motorcycle possessed by the soul of a very angry biker, and Kon ended up on an impromptu road trip.

To Massachusetts. Kon didn’t care much for Massachusetts. The people there didn’t seem to understand that traffic laws existed for a reason. Fortunately, he didn’t stay long. Unfortunately, that was because the aforementioned biker ghost transferred to a tower crane and walloped his ass about 80 miles southeast.

All in all, Kon didn’t think some random suburb in the middle of Buttfuck, Rhode Island was where he would spend his afternoon, but sometimes, that’s just the yard you crash land in.

Kon is plucking blades of grass out of places where there should never be grass when the neighbors start peaking out their doors to investigate the disturbance. Most of them stay in the safety of their living rooms, but one poor sap of the lot is standing frozen behind their car, arms occupied with brown paper grocery bags. One poor motherfucker who picked the wrong day to call in sick and the wrong time to run some errands and the wrong time to start unloading groceries from the trunk of their car. Because that scant slice of time in which they are outside coincidentally lines up with the few moments Kon spends picking clumps of dirt out of his ears in a random ass neighborhood in Nowhere, Rhode Island.

Because Kon looks up and thinks, Do I know you?

And the answer is yes. 

It takes about 4 seconds of squinting for his brain to place the face turned to him like a deer caught in the headlights. It takes another 5 seconds for him to decide what he wants to do with that information.

The civilian in mom jeans and a pair of cheetah print flats drops the bags and bolts for her own backyard.

It isn’t even a conscious decision to follow. Someone makes a break for it and Kon chases after them. After so much crime fighting, it’s instinctual. Dog. Ball. Fetch.

He lands in front of the woman before she makes it past the unused-looking patio set. He stands on a porch in the middle of Asscrack, Rhode Island, blocking the speedy exit of one Dr. Melissa Martinovec.

Or as Kon likes to think of her, Dr. One-of-those-assholes-who-grew-me-in-a-test-tube .

“Shit,” she says, chest heaving. “Are you here to kill me?”

***

5 minutes later, Kon finds himself on a plastic covered couch holding a cup of cheap coffee and wondering how exactly he ended up there.

“So,” he starts, entirely unsure where to begin. “...nice place you got here.”

Dr. Martinovec snorts, settling into an armchair adjacent to the couch with her own mug. “Sure, it’s great, if you like HOA meetings and squirrels.” There’s a sarcastic lilt to her voice that leads Kon to believe she isn’t all that passionate about HOA meetings or squirrels. He can imagine it's a bit of a culture shock to go from working for a top secret, high value organization like Cadmus to growing tomatoes and painting watercolors in a middle class suburb.

Objectively, it hasn’t been all that long since he last saw her. A couple years since his epic containment breach. But Martinovec looks different. Grumpier. A little too normal for comfort.

He remembers her vividly. He remembers all of them. There wasn’t much to do in an observation tank day after day. He memorized every geneticist and doctor and lab technician. He memorized every face, every name shouted across the lab, every employee’s clearance level. 

His first week of life was a rush of cognitive uploads and examinations, and he remembers this woman as one of the many who stood in front of him and scribbled on clipboards.

She’d seemed much more at home then than she does now.

“Why don’t you go somewhere else?”

She snorts again. “Witsec doesn’t exactly let you pick out your dream home.”

“Witsec?”

“The Witness Protection Program. That’s why I’m here.”

“Oh. Because of Cadmus?”

“Cadmus and…other things.”

Kon doesn’t ask what ‘ other things ’ entails. He doesn't want to know. Come to think of it, Kon isn't sure what he wants out of this interaction at all. Rob's voice echoes in his head, You never think these things through. Kon tells the voice to stuff it.

“How is Cadmus, anyway?” she asks.

“It shut down. Permanently. Too much government pressure.”

“Mm. Can’t say I’m surprised. Management there was always a hot mess.” She lets out a wistful sigh. “What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on that equipment again, though.”

“Yeah, real awesome cloning supplies they had.”

Martinovec must not pick up on the sarcasm in his tone because she just keeps staring into the middle distance fantasizing about the good old days of unethical experimentation. “Man, that genetics lab was the stuff of dreams. We had dozens of projects going at once, but you-” her eyes lock onto his with the brightness he remembers from his infancy, “You were the crown jewel. You grew so fast we could hardly keep up! We'd take a lunch break and come back to find you a foot taller!"

A bizarre embarrassment creeps into his chest. He wonders if this is how normal kids feel when their moms bust out the baby albums.

"It took us forever to formulate your tactile telekinesis field," she continues, "But once it was finished, that thing stuck to you like glue. Oh, and I can still remember the day your soulmark appeared.”

Kon’s head snaps up.

“We were all so excited! None of the other attempts at cloning Superman had gone beyond embryos, but you just kept growing, and when that mark showed up we knew it meant you were going to survive. Of course, you were a healthy specimen from the beginning so-”

“Wait, wait, wait.” Kon sets his undrunk coffee on the side table. He makes a time out gesture to halt the doctor’s rambling. “Hold on. When my soulmark appeared? I thought Cadmus added that.”

Dr. Martinovec blinks. “No, no, that name appeared all on its own. Cadmus didn’t have anything to do with it.”

For one sweet, blissful moment, Kon doesn't have a single coherent thought in his brain.

ERROR: REACTION NOT FOUND. REFRESH PAGE TO TRY AGAIN.

And then the inside of his head is the equivalent of when you hit the breaks too hard while driving and set the takeout sitting on the passenger seat tumbling to the floor.

It's a whirlwind. Doubts and hopes and confusions bounce off of each other, creating a colossal racket. He wonders if this was what it felt like for small children to discover the truth about Santa. Of course, Kon had actually met Santa - and watched him die - so perhaps that wasn’t the most apt metaphor. Sue him. His metaphor skills are on the backburner.

“I thought-” he struggles to piece together a coherent summary of his entire worldview shifting. “I thought it was put there to… I dunno. Control me or something.”

“Quite the opposite, actually. After it appeared, one of the first things Director Westfield asked us to do was see if we could remove it. He didn’t want any of his little soldiers distracted from his mission.”

Kon’s hand falls on his wrist, compulsively trying to protect the little black letters that hide under his sleeve. 

He’d never given them much thought before, not outside of reasons to ignore them. The mark was just a reminder of where he’d come from, of all the people who craved control over him. But that wasn’t the case, was it? It wasn’t a trick at all. It was real. And someone had wanted to destroy it.

Warmth and cold bloomed in his chest at the same time. He had a soulmate, a real one, like in all the movies. He was destined to love again. Was his loved one destined to die again? How much time had he wasted? Was his soulmate looking for him? Did they know he was Superboy?

Oh god, how much stupid shit had he done on TV?

In a random suburb of Fuck All, Rhode Island, on an inconspicuous day, through the absurd forces of chance, Kon-El’s whole life changed.

Chapter Text

“I don’t know why, but I kind of thought you quitting the team meant you were quitting Robin entirely.”

To his credit, Robin didn’t even flinch when Kon materialized next to him. Which was good, because he’d found his friend loitering on the two-foot grate that ran along the bottom edge of a billboard that threw his silhouette into sharp relief. A row of purplish lights made the cologne advertisement a beacon in the gray evening. Curling french letters hovered next to the smoldering eyes of that rich guy from Gotham that everyone loved, which was kinda funny ‘cause they weren’t even in Gotham at that moment. Too far north.

Robin responded to the unspoken accusation by asking, “How did you find me?”

“You’re not that hard to find,” Kon said, carefully not mentioning the 4 nights of searching and 2 favors he had called in to find his former teammate. It got him an unreadable look that was both devoid of any definition and also so familiar Kon could’ve drawn it from memory. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“You didn’t ask one.”

Kon fought back a rising tide of frustration. He couldn’t get mad until after he’d apologized. “It was just us, then? Not the danger, not the stress, it was just - us.”

“Kon-”

“You couldn’t even wait until I got back to say goodbye?” Despite his earlier resolution to not let his lingering hurt get the best of him, that old wound tugged at the hasty stitches holding it closed. “I get we were all in rough shape after Apokolips, but I leave to clear my head for a few hours, and when I get back, Cassie tells me you and Bart just left? Do you really hate me that much after everything that happened?”

“Kon, no.” Robin didn’t move from his spot, but Kon saw that he was clenching a wad of his cape in one hand. “I don’t hate you, it wasn’t- I didn’t leave the team because of you, I swear.”

“Are you sure about that? ‘Cause Cassie said you were upset about us not trusting you and attacking you because of what happened with Batman and the Justice League.”

Robin sighed. “Yeah, I- I know I said that, but…it wasn’t the whole truth. Not really.”

A long moment passed where Kon waited for Robin to go on. When he just sat there, chewing on his lip, his patience ran out. “Okay? What is the whole truth?”

Robin released his cape to start picking at the grooves on his gauntlets the way one might nervously pick at their nails. “Do… do you remember on Apokolips, when Granny Goodness had us? When we were all stuck in those mental torture machine things?”

“Vividly.” The charred remains of Tana’s once-beautiful face still lingered at the edges of his vision at night, made only more frequent by the nightmare he’d been forced to relive in that hellhole.

“Well-” a shaky breath interrupted the sentence, “What I saw was you - all of you - dying, over and over again. Burned alive, torn limb from limb, eviscerated in every possible way. And it was my fault. I failed you, every one of you.”

“But that wasn’t real,” Kon couldn’t help but cut in. “Those scenes were designed to break us down. They sure as hell weren’t realistic.”

“Weren’t they? Bart is traumatized from his scout dying, Lobo actually did die and now we’ve got some weird reincarnated version of him running around the base, and the whole reason we ended up in that situation was because I failed as a leader. None of you trusted me. What’s the common denominator there?

“Kon, I quit the team because- because I couldn’t live with myself if any of you got hurt again. I couldn’t be the teammate you needed. I can’t lead you guys, I can’t even protect you guys. I can’t- I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“So you left.”

“I left. Without saying goodbye. I’m…sorry. It wasn’t you. I’m sorry I made you feel like it was.”

Kon shoved his hands in his pockets and sighed. “Honestly? I couldn’t blame you if you had left because of me. I was an ass. I had my reasons for what I did, but I’m sorry I hurt you. It’s hard, ya know? Our team is kinda the only family I’ve got, and when I saw what happened with the JL I guess I freaked out. So freaked out I ended up making the exact same thing happen to us. If anyone is to blame for everything that happened on Apokolips…it’s me.”

“Maybe we can share fifty-fifty custody for ruining everything, yeah?”

He couldn’t help the smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Sharing custody would require you coming back to the team.”

Robin pursed his lips. “I’ll…think about it.”

“I’ll take it.”

Robin’s shoulders dropped half an inch with the tension that bled from him.

Then they sat in silence. The invisible rock that had sat in his chest since their fight was finally gone. Things weren’t perfect, not yet, but they were better. Better enough that Kon considered asking about the other thing that had had him seeking out his friend.

“Was there…something else you wanted to talk about?”

Damn Robin and his freakish powers of observation. “Well…there was one thing I was wondering if you might be able to help me with.”

“Okay.”

“So… you’re like a super-stalker-spy-detective kind of thing, right?” 

“Something like that,” he replied. He tilted his head and a lock of hair fell over his forehead. His hair was looking particularly fluffy and Kon would’ve tried to touch it if he wasn’t afraid of losing a finger.

Don’t get distracted, Kon scolded himself. Priorities.

“So then, do you know how to, like…find people?”

Robin’s mask tilted from the way he tried to lift an eyebrow. The lenses seemed to glow and Kon wasn’t sure if it was because of the billboard lights or if they were just like that. Like Robin was some kind of…anime character. “Find people?” he echoed.

“Yeah. Like, if you were trying to…find someone.”

For a moment, the only noise was the cacophony of the street below.

“Care to elaborate on that?”

“...No.”

Robin stared at him.

Kon fidgeted under his gaze, digging the toe of his boot into the grate. “Can you just answer the question, please?”

The glowing lenses went all squinty for a second before relaxing. “Yes. I know how to ‘ find people.’” 

“ Cool, cool. So…how do you, like,” his hands circled each other in a gesture that was wholly unrelated to the topic at hand, “Go about doing that?”

The breath taking up an uncomfortable amount of space in his lungs rushed out to join the breeze when Robin shifted from his about-to-pounce perching position into a more relaxed sit with his feet dangling over the highway. Kon floated down next to him, leaning back against what’s-his-face’s oiled pecs.

“It depends on what kind of person you’re looking for. If you’re tracking a known criminal, there should be files on that person in the police department closest to where the crime was committed, but getting into the databases requires some hacking know-how. Although, quite a few haven’t digitized their records yet, so you could try to hunt down physical copies, but that requires breaking into law-enforcement record rooms.

“DMV records can be public depending on what state you’re in, but that’s only useful for people who are in the system, so you’ll have less luck in urban areas where most of the population uses public transport.

“You can try-” Robin began ticking stalking methods off on his fingers, “-hospital records, birth and marriage certificates, tax reports, school rosters, word of mouth, the Yellow Pages even. And you’d be surprised how much information people will give you if you pretend to be a headhunter or administrative assistant or writing an article for your school’s paper.

“What details do you have about who you’re trying to find? Location? Job? Appearance?”

“Oh, just- just a name.”

It occurred to Kon that the soulmate-finding process would be much easier with the help of the smartest person he knew doing his whole freaky bat-investigation thing, but…

But part of it still didn’t feel real. A fragile voice curled up at the back of his skull whispered that none of it was true, that no one could be trusted, that it was safer to search alone, without any judgemental eyes picking apart his questionable choices. And things were still so fresh between them, so raw. It felt like any unexpected moves could send it all toppling down again.

“Just a name,” he said again.

Robin turned to look at him. Kon’s eyes focused on the elegant lines of his face and the city beyond it blurred into a backdrop of stars. He looked at Kon like he wanted to say something, but then his head turned a fraction of an inch more, pointing more at the advertisement behind him. His cheekbones caught the light.

Kon opened his mouth to say - something. The word ‘name’ prickled on the tip of his tongue.

Robin turned away. The moment split apart and reality fell around his feet.

“Anything else I can help you with?” Robin asked, already clambering to his feet.

“Oh, uh- no, no. Just- yeah, I’ll let you know if- yeah. Thanks.”

“Cool.”

And with a flourish, his nameless friend disappeared.

“Bart?”

The mane of hair obscuring most of his vision didn’t move from where it was bent over a ten-thousand piece puzzle half arranged on the floor of the rec room. There were no words to describe the comfort of seeing it in their base once again. “Yeah?”

“So…you don’t have a soulmate.”

“Nope,” Bart replied, popping the ‘p.’ “Well, I don’t have a name. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a soulmate, though. Soulmates work different for speedsters.”

“Because of the time travel?”

“Because of the time travel.”

“Right.” 

Kon chewed on his lip. He reached out and flipped an upside-down puzzle piece so the color side was visible. Bart batted his hand away and turned the piece upside-down again.

“But if you did,” Kon continued, “You know, have a name. What would you do?”

Bart shrugged a shoulder and his hair rippled from the motion like a wave pool. “Find them, I guess. Is this a trick question?”

“No, it’s just- I was just curious.”

He was suddenly caught in the tractor beam gaze of two uncomfortably knowing amber eyes. “Is this about Tana?” Bart asked, tone caught somewhere between suspicious and awkward.

For the first time since her death, that name didn’t lodge a marble in his throat.

“No, it’s-” Kon caught the words between his teeth before they could dribble down his chin. He considered. He debated. But there was something terribly disarming about Bart. For as stress inducing as he could be, there was perhaps no one else he trusted more. There was no one else who understood him so well.

“It’s about my soulmate,” he finished at last.

“I thought you didn’t have a soulmate.”

Kon recalled his grief-stricken proclamation from a lifetime ago, bitter and broken in that frozen tundra. “I wasn’t- I was confused.” He blinked and a dozen more puzzle pieces had found a home. “I do. Have a soulmate. I want- can you- will you help me find them?”

“Of course,” was Bart’s simple and cheery response before a gust of wind sent loose puzzle pieces skittering and his friend was gone.

The blank space where Bart had been half a second before stared at him like it expected him to do something. Kon was too caught off guard by the abrupt departure to do anything but stare back. 

Oh, Bart, he thought to himself, It’s a good thing you’re pretty.

Another sudden gust billowed through the room, but in the opposite direction that time. And there Bart stood, looking sheepish.

“So, umm. Who am I looking for?”

***

“There are too many damn Tim Drakes in the world.”

Kon buried his hands in his hair and dropped his head to the aged wood of their makeshift study table. His nose itched. Every time Bart zipped around the room, he managed to kick up dust from some endless, invisible store in the ether.

It wasn’t bad, the old room they’d chosen as their hideaway-within-a-hideaway. Quiet. Unused. Tucked away in a seldom crossed corner of their resort-turned-secret-base-of-operations. It even had a great view.

Of the parking lot.

“It’s not that many,” Bart said, crossing another name off the list. The list they’d written directly on the wall in permanent marker. It wasn’t like anyone else was using the room.

“It’s almost three hundred,” he lamented.

“In the U.S. alone,” Bart helpfully added. “I bet there’s more in, like, Canada.”

Kon banged his head on the table.

The inside of his head was a swarming mess of Tim Tim Tim. 18 Tim Drakes in California. 7 in Ohio. Timothy William Drake the traveling salesman. Tim Edwards, co-captain of Washington Middle soccer team, who had become a Drake following his mother’s remarriage and subsequent adoption. S. Timothy Drake, journalist for the Missourian. Little Timmy born 14 weeks ago in Blackmore Memorial Hospital. 8 lbs, 2 oz. Tim, Timmy, Timothy, as a first name or a middle, just in case. 

There was even a guy on their list by the name of Trevor Ibrahim Malcolm Drake. 

T.I.M. Drake. Someone, somewhere, was laughing at him.

The two of them had a running log of anyone and everyone who might’ve fit the criteria, found in the Survived By lists of obituaries and yearbooks and any other record Bart had been able to find. Having a speedster friend certainly cut down on research time, though it wasn’t proving super useful when it came to narrowing down the potential matches.

Kon was reasonably confident in ruling out all the Tims who were married. Also the ones who were dead. Bart hadn’t been discerning when he’d collected Tims. 

Some of them had their marks visible in the photos. Not many.

The whole thing felt like the plot of some low-budget reality television show.

“Relax, we’ll just take this a few Tims at a time!”

“ Tim Timminy, Tim Timminy, Tim-Tim, Taroo,” he crooned to himself.

“Seriously! We’ll split up. You take Tims eleven, twelve, and twenty-one through twenty-five. Those are the ones closest to here. I’ll take the rest of the Eastern seaboard. And the midwest. Probably the South too. Maybe the Western seaboard if you aren’t finished yet. Yeah?”

Kon opened his mouth to respond, but Bart was already gone, kicking up a plume of smoke in his wake. Kon sneezed.

“God bless me,” he murmured. “God fucking bless me.”

Kon made it a habit to keep his distance from Gotham. Vague threats from the Bat aside, the place was just kind of a mess. There wasn’t a single city block that couldn’t be described as overcrowded. It smelled bad. Not to mention, the last time he’d visited, one of Gotham’s ten bajillion rogues had taken him for a joyride. Not the fondest memories.

But he was willing to put all that to the side to curb his yearning. The odds of his soulmate happening to be a resident of the worst city in the continental U.S. were low, but it would make him feel better to cross a few more names off the list.

It wasn’t so bad from above, either. All the lit windows and car headlights made a decent substitute for the real stars choked out by pollution. The surrounding ocean provided a nice white noise. He’d almost collided mid-air with an honest-to-god giant bat person - not to be confused with the most-likely-human Bat man - on the journey over, but nowhere was perfect.

It could’ve been the most rotten place on Earth and Kon still would’ve ventured there to find answers. The longer he searched, the more his fragile hopes tugged at him. 

He really hoped his Tim Drake was attractive. Not that it was deal breaker, but it would be appreciated. Kon deserved some beefcake after all his romantic struggles.

After striking out with Tim-Drake-HVAC-apprentice and Timmy-Holcombe-Drake-with-Monalynn-on-his-wrist, he’d moved on to Tim Drake #23, son of Jack Drake, the businessman driving the sleek sedan that Kon was following up Route 47 N from 700 feet above the ground. Another lead from an obituary in an old newspaper Bart had added to the pile. Another red herring waiting to happen. Another half-realized disappointment. 

It was more obligation than anything that had him tracking the car into the upscale suburbs north of the city. Odds were Bart would end up finding his soulmate in some random ass town in Wisconsin. Nonetheless, Kon watched from far above as the car pulled up the long, winding drive of a lavish manor home.

The only thing that kept Kon from swooning at the sight of it was the even bigger, more lavish manor next door to it. That one had a friggin’ tower. 

As the car entered the garage, Kon began a silent descent into the shrubbery surrounding the house. He crept along behind the curtain of greenery until he’d passed around the corner of the building and could see through a large set of windows. 

Light popped to life from the interior, swanky living room brought into perfect clarity while Kon remained shielded by the dark.

He was tempted to just knock on the front door and ask, Any Tims around here? but the last time he’d done that, Monalynn had pulled a shotgun on him. 

Gothamites.

Two figures entered the scene: a man and a woman shedding the decals of a nice dinner out. Kon took a moment to appreciate when the woman turned to toss her purse and coat onto the nearest surface and it threw her figure into sharp relief. She took out her earrings before reaching up to release a cascade of dark hair from its up-do. When she bent over to take off her shoes, Kon leaned so far forward he almost face-planted into a bush.

If you’re there, God, Kon prayed, Please let my soulmate have some of those genetics. 

The couple went about settling in for the night, grabbing drinks and relaxing on the couch. That was about when Kon got bored and started casing the joint.

The obituary of Janet Drake from a couple years prior had mentioned her only child and sole heir, Tim Drake. An article written that same week on the tragic death of the woman and crippling of her husband by a cult leader in Haiti devoted a whole paragraph to their young son, who was speculated to be inheriting the family’s sizable fortune and company. And if Kon had read that part a little closer and fantasized about marrying rich, that was his business.

Anyway, quick mental math brought him to the conclusion that Tim Drake #23 was roughly the same age as him, which tipped the odds in his favor. And Kon couldn’t imagine why a teenage boy wouldn’t be home on a school night unless he’d snuck out. 

So Kon flew the perimeter, making a slow spiral from ground level to the top floor, peering into every window he passed hoping to spot another person.

Because the universe hated him, and also his life sucked, the curtains were drawn on nearly every viewpoint. 

Around and around he went, searching for a spare sliver of light anywhere else in the house. It was possible, he assumed, that Tim Drake #23 was already asleep, or that there was perhaps a basement to the house he was lounging in, foiling Kon’s attempts at covert reconnaissance. 

By the second lap, Kon was debating the merits of going back to his sad, empty apartment for the night and returning later. Hopefully to a less empty house.

Then the pitch dark void breathing cold down his back growled.

“Superboy.”

“Holy-!” Kon startled so hard he jumped a foot in the air. And stayed there. When he whipped around to find the source of the growl, he found two glowing slits standing alone in the dark - the eyes of a predator. His fists rose in an instinctive defense.

Kon spared a moment to consider the civilians in the house behind him, the maybe-probably-not-but-possibly future in-laws he’d put in danger with nothing more than his general proximity. His soulmate who he’d put in danger. Maybe. Possibly. That, or just some randos who happened to have the same last name as his soulmate, which wasn’t really any better.

But then his eyes adjusted a bit more to the darkness from their focus on the lit windows, and the freaky thing with the glowing eyes shifted forward a fraction of an inch, and Kon realized-

“ Batman?”

“You aren’t supposed to be in Gotham,” came the graveling response. The unspoken threat had the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. The part of him that was absolutely, pants-shittingly terrified of Mr. Vengeance warred with the indignant, mulish teenager that he was. 

“How did you-” Kon stopped himself before he finished with - know I was here? The point was mute. As far as he could tell, Batman was the personification of the city itself and subsequently knew everything that was happening in it all the time. “Why are you here?” he settled on.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Batman countered. “You should go home.”

“Look,” Kon said, crossing his arms and resisting the urge to snap his words. “I don’t know what your issue is, but you don’t need to worry about me. I’m not here on hero business; it’s personal.”

“Metas aren’t allowed in my city.”

The sound of his teeth grinding became audible, and that was when Kon realized all the bugs in the woods around them had gone silent in Batman’s presence. Resentment and grudging respect rose in him at the same time.

“Technically, I think we’re north of city limits.”

Outwardly, Batman’s appearance didn’t change, but if it was possible, his vibe became more hostile.

“Superboy, you need to-” the sentence came to an abrupt stop and there was half a beat of silence before Batman took a halting step forward. Kon raised his fists and tried not to think too hard about the piece of kryptonite Robin had used against him once and said would be stored in the bat cave. He took a breath, steeled his nerves, and, briefly - briefly - considered the merits of running away with his tail between his legs.

Then he realized that Batman wasn’t looking at him. 

He followed the off-center, glowing gaze over his own shoulder to the scene unfolding beyond the living window.

“ Bart?!” he shrieked under his breath. 

“Oh my god,” Batman said. Actually, Batman just made kind of a vague hissing noise, but Kon thought it safe to assume it was an exclamation of general horror.

Because there was Bart in all his windswept glory - thankfully out of uniform - standing in the front hall of a stranger’s house while Superboy and Batman perved around in the bushes.

“Why is he here?” Batman asked, although it didn’t sound much like a question.

“How should I know?”

Kon couldn’t tear his eyes away. Their conversation was inaudible, but he had a pretty good guess what it was about. Their lips moved and their hands gestured. Kon was frozen, a vulnerable little part of him praying that any moment a third person would come waltzing down the stairs to introduce himself as the soulmate of Kon-El.

That didn’t happen. 

The man shook his head and guided Bart back to the door.

“Shit,” Kon hissed, and hightailed it between the trees to catch Bart before he could dart off to the other side of the planet. He caught the end of a goodnight! tossed through the doorway right before it slid shut. “ Bart!”

Bart froze at the top of the porch steps. “Hello?” he whispered.

Kon took a step forward so Bart would see him in the treeline. “Bart! Come here!”

As his friend trotted over, Kon almost forgot about the thing hovering behind him. He glanced back, and sure enough, Batman was exactly the same distance from him as he’d been when they were on the other side of the house. “Neither of you should be here,” he said. Kon ignored him.

“I thought I was doing all the ones in Gotham,” he said to Bart.

“Yeah, but then I finished up all of mine and got bored.”

Kon sighed and shook his head. “Whatever. What happened? What did they say?”

“Oh, those guys?” Bart hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Their son doesn’t have a soulmate. We can cross this one off the list.”

“Oh.” 

The disappointment was unsurprising, but heavier somehow. If Bart was in Gotham, that meant he hadn’t found success elsewhere. Every Tim Drake in the continental U.S. could be definitively crossed off the list. It should’ve been encouraging. He should’ve been relieved to have the field of suspects narrowed so far down. He should’ve been grateful his soulmate wasn’t a Gothamite.

Instead, Kon felt lonelier than ever. The distance between him and his soulmate felt vast, unconquerable. It all seemed like some cosmic joke, like he was the idiot supporting character in a show everyone laughed at for doing the same dumb stuff over and over again. 

“It’s- that’s fine, we’re- okay.” Kon made a jerky half turn to address Batman, witness to his emotional demolecularization. “You don’t have to worry, Batman. We’re going. And I don’t have any reason to come back here, so… you won’t see me here again.”

He turned back around to see Bart shifting from foot to foot. “When do you wanna go through Canada?” his friend asked, ignorant to his downward spiral.

“Forget about it,” Kon said. “Go home, Bart. I’m gonna…yeah.”

“Are you sure? If you want, we can go back to-”

“ Leave,” Batman growled

“Okay!” Bart squeaked, and in a flurry of leaves, he was gone.

Kon bent his knees, preparing to fly home and drown his sorrows in a pint of ice cream when Batman froze him in place with a single word.

“ Stop.” 

Kon held still, and when Batman failed to elaborate on his order, he made a slow, awkward, still-half-crouched turn. “...yes?”

A long moment of uncomfortable silence followed. Long enough that Kon wasn’t sure he hadn’t hallucinated the exchange in a fit of manic solitude. And then, even more bizarrely, Batman grunted and said, “Come with me.”

For approximately 4 seconds, Kon considered flying away as fast as possible to avoid whatever the hell it was Batman wanted. Then Kon realized he was dying to know what exactly Batman could want with him and he put on a burst of speed to catch up with the black fabric fluttering away between the trees.

“Oh- okay! Cool. Where are we going?”

Batman grunted.

“Cool, cool. Is this…what do you need me for again?”

Batman said nothing.

“Right. Awesome. It’s just- I’ve got this- ow!” Kon tripped over a tree root and scrambled to right himself before Batman saw him eat shit. Not that he thought Batman would say anything about it.

They walked in silence for several agonizing minutes before the trees thinned to reveal a dirt road, upon which sat-

“Is that the batmobile?!”

Predictably, Batman grunted. 

The whir of steel and bulletproof glass as the top opened was almost sensual. Several tons of military-grade, crime-resistant machinery shined in front of him, practically begging to be taken for a joyride. Kon was salivating.

“Get in,” Batman said before climbing into the driver seat.

“You- I- we’re gonna- oh! Yeah! Sure!” Kon floated up to avoid scuffing the beautiful matte black finish of the vehicle and settled in the passenger seat. 

“ Woah,” he whispered. The leather was butter under his fingertips. There were more dials, lights, and switches on the dash than in the cockpit of an airplane. The hatch closed above their heads and it was like getting sealed into a spaceship. Kon would know. He’d been in several spaceships. “So what are we-”

“Be quiet. Don’t touch that.”

Kon yanked his hand back into his lap.

Batman tapped a series of buttons and the speakers came to life from every possible direction. 

“ Hey, B, what’s up?”

“Oh my god, is that Robin? Hi, Robin!” Kon called, previous despair completely forgotten in the face of his futuristic surroundings and the sound of his best friend’s voice.

“ Is that Superboy? What is Superboy doing in the batmobile?” 

“I’ll explain later. Meet us in the batcave as soon as possible.”

“We’re going to the batcave?!” Kon gasped, whipping around to look at Batman.

“ He’s coming to the batcave?” Robin exclaimed, sounding as flabbergasted as Kon felt.

Batman responded to their questions by hanging up and hitting the accelerator hard enough to leave Kon’s scalp on the road behind them. It was comforting to know that he wasn’t the only one who got the stoic treatment.

5 minutes and 3 heart attacks later, Kon. Was in. The batcave. He was gonna need a pacemaker after the emotional rollercoaster of his day.

He stood on a platform in a vast underground cavern and gaped. There were actual, honest-to-god bats. All over the place. Chirping. Pooping. So much bat poop. And lights! Screens and buttons and flood lights reflecting off wet stone and steel beams. It was super dark and really bright at the same time. Kon felt like he was having a stroke.

And for as much as he wanted Batman to find him cool, or at the very least tolerable, he couldn’t make himself shut up.

“Is this about a mission? You need my skills to take down some psycho in the city? I’m pretty busy, but uh, I guess I can squeeze you in. Does this have something to do with those people? I knew something about them was- oh my god, is that a dinosaur?” 

Batman, in true Batman Fashion, ignored him. He strode straight to a massive bank of computers fronted by monitors bigger than the walls of his apartment. Kon trotted behind, both giddy and terrified at the thought of being left to traverse the cave on his own. 

The hulking mass of him folded into what Kon then realized was a truly ginormous rolling chair with a bat symbol on the back. Batman kicked out a smaller rolling chair with a familiar R on it and, without bothering to look at him, ordered him to, “Sit.” An order Kon briefly considered ignoring just to be contrary, but then he realized the comedic potential of Robin arriving at the cave to find Superboy in his chair. 

So he sat.

Among the dozens of smaller sections the monitors were split into, Batman enlarged one that looked vaguely like a sudoku puzzle, but filled with rune-like symbols instead of numbers. There was nothing in the air but clicks, taps, and the static chattering of god knew how many bats. Kon became abruptly paranoid that one was going to poop on him.

The next several minutes were spent in excruciating silence, during which Kon became increasingly bored. He badgered Batman with questions, most of which went unanswered, and the ones that were answered only raised more questions.

“So where’d the dinosaur come from?”

“A theme park.”

“Why couldn’t Impulse come?”

“He would touch things.”

“So is it ‘Batman’ all one word or Bat-space-Man or Bat-dash-Man? First name Bat, last name Man?”

“.....”

“Do you know Superman’s real identity?”

“Yes.”

“Oh my god, what is it?”

“Kal-El.”

Kon stared blankly at the back of Batman’s chair, unclear on whether the guy was being genuine or genuinely didn’t trust him or just genuinely wanted to fuck with him. He decided that maybe it was time to be quiet.

The roaring of an engine was such a welcome interruption to their weird, passive-aggressive stalemate that Kon was on his feet before Batman had turned his head. Pure relief flooded his veins at the sight of Robin appearing from around a dark corner on a sleek red motorcycle that Kon was instantly envious of. Then Kon remembered that he could fly.

The batcave didn’t have a garage (arguably, the entire space was a garage-) but the majority of the vehicles he could see - which included, but was not limited to, a jet, a boat, several bikes, a submarine, and a purple minivan - were clustered on a round, central platform farther below them with several passages leading to the outermost reaches of the cavern. 

“Robin!” Kon shouted, waving an arm wildly through the air, previous plan to dramatically spin around in the rolling chair while stroking a cat like an evil villain entirely forgotten. Probably for the best since he didn’t have a cat on hand.

He bounced on the balls of his feet, anxious for every moment it took Robin to traverse the distance between them.

When Robin finally crested the last step to the giant computer platform, he breezed right past Kon like he wasn’t even there.

Kon didn’t bother trying to hide his offense at that.

“You brought him to the cave?” Robin demanded of his mentor, sounding about as off-kilter as Kon felt.

“The situation was getting out of hand,” was Batman’s gruff reply.

“The situation?” Robin scoffed. “You mean my life?” 

“I found him at the Drake Estate.”

Robin’s mouth snapped shut.

“Impulse was there too,” Kon chimed in. Robin gave him a quick, disbelieving look before focusing back on Batman.

“Impulse is here too?”

“No. I sent him home.”

“But you brought Superboy here.”

“Yes.”

“Would you care to explain why, y-” Robin bit his sentence off halfway through. Kon would have filled in the blank with you complete asshole, but for some inexplicable reason, it almost felt like Robin was going to punctuate his statement by calling Batman young man, like a pissed off mom in a sitcom.

Batman finally abandoned his freaky sudoku to rise from his chair. The bulk of his body nearly hid all of Robin from Kon’s view. His voice was softer, more human, when he spoke again.

“The way I handled your situation with Spoiler was…inadvisable.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Robin muttered.

Kon leaned forward, desperately trying to keep up with their conversation.

“I thought I was doing what was best for you, but…I had my own interests in mind.”

“So you’re apologizing for that by doing the same thing again?” The rage in Robin’s voice was palpable. Kon was in awe that he had the balls to yell at Batman.

“No,” Batman was quick to interject. Kon got the feeling he got yelled at a lot. “I’m not- I didn’t bring him here to make you do anything, or to do anything for you. The situ-” Batman stopped and sighed. “It’s up to you. You have the right to share your own life with whomever you choose, and…I trust your judgement. If you want to tell him, you have my…blessing.”

The words sounded supremely awkward coming from Batman. Kon couldn’t imagine what family dinners were like.

Robin arched a brow. “And if I don’t?”

“I would prefer it,” Batman answered, “But so long as discretion is maintained in the other aspects of our work, there are…worse ways to handle the situation. Besides, his visits to Gotham were becoming more frequent. It’s a problem.”

“You know,” Robin said, sounding significantly less hostile than before, “If you don’t want him in Gotham, coming clean about this might not be the most effective means.”

Batman sighed again.

“Hey,” Kon called, prompting two pairs of white lenses to turn in his direction. “Hi. Yeah. I’m still here. As fun as it is to be talked about like I’m not in the room, does someone maybe wanna clue me in on whatever it is you’ve decided I can know now?”

Robin looked at Batman. “Can we have some privacy?”

Batman gave Kon a long, scrutinizing look over his shoulder. “I’ll be in the lab.” Then he retreated in a flourish of black fabric. 

In less than a minute, it was just Kon and Robin, lit by the glow of the computer screens.

“So…” Robin started, shifting from one foot to the other. “You met the Drakes?” It was weird to see him flip from berating Batman to a sudden uncertainty.

“Not really,” Kon said. “I was outside. Bart met them, though.”

“Oh.”

“Are the Drakes…friends of yours?” Maybe that sexy lady was Batwoman. 

“Oh! No. Well. Kind of? It’s complicated.”

“Right.”

“What did Bart say to them? Why was he there?”

Kon bit the inside of his cheek, beating back the swell of frustration that rose at the reminder of his earlier failure. “It’s nothing. He’s been helping me with some stuff. It doesn’t matter.”

An intense look came over Robin’s face. Kon couldn’t tell if it was positive or negative. His voice was delicate when he said, “I have a feeling it matters a lot.”

“Whatever,” Kon said with a shake of his head. “Are you going to tell me what you and Batman were going on about?”

Robin let out a little sigh as the corner of his mouth quirked up. “I think I am.”

Kon’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“Can you-” Robin took a few stilted steps forward until the two of them were only inches apart. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“Rob?” Kon tried. “You alright?”

A huff of air left Robin and Kon felt it on his throat.

Then a small, leather-wrapped hand took his own in its grasp. The touch had his breath catching. Physical contact wasn’t a foreign thing between them, but it was never so…deliberate.

The grip on his hand turned it palm-up and raised it in the scant space between their bodies. That was strange too, but still, Kon did not stop him. He didn’t do anything except hold very still, until Robin’s other gloved hand came up and started tugging on the cuff of his sleeve.

Irrational panic spiked up his chest. Kon’s free hand flew up to stop Robin before he could expose the fragile little name on the inside of his wrist. “What are you doing?” he asked, heart hammering between his lungs.

A long moment passed where they just looked at each other. Eye to lens. Face to mask. Just when Kon thought he couldn’t go any longer without blinking, Robin reached up to peel his domino off without letting go of Kon’s hand.

And like every time Robin revealed his face, it caught Kon a little off guard. Like he forgot how much detail there was in his eyes. He was so used to finding expressions in the twists of Rob’s mouth or the scrunch of his forehead, while the white lenses and matte rubber framing remained vacant of emotion. Each dark eyelash and the streaks of blue in his irises appeared almost as though they were under a magnifying glass. Robin was worrying his lower lip between his teeth and Kon couldn’t figure out why it drew so much of his attention.

No more words were spoken, but that time when Robin reached for his sleeve, Kon let him. He couldn’t have felt more vulnerable if he were being stripped naked. The leather of the gauntlets was cool against his skin. Slowly, slowly, Robin pushed the fabric up, revealing the name on his wrist letter by letter. When the whole thing was visible, Robin took a breath so crawling, Kon thought that maybe he’d slipped into the double-time that Bart experienced. A thumb rubbed over the D, like he was trying to smudge it. Of course, the black lines remained immovable.

Somehow, what happened next made perfect sense. In fact, Kon would have been a little miffed if Robin hadn’t chosen that moment to unstrap and ease off his gauntlet before unwinding the long, flesh-toned strip covering most of his forearm. 

The wrapping fell inch by inch to reveal pale skin and stark veins and shiny scars. 

And ink black lines looping and stretching like they wanted to touch as much skin as possible.

Robin lined up their arms so they were wrist to wrist.

Name to name.

On his best friend’s body, his own name - the name he loved - was printed for all the world to see, and an inch away, was the name the person it lived on belonged to. They curved around each other like yin and yang. 

Kon-El

and

Tim Drake

Chapter Text

Kon expected to feel some great, overwhelming surge of emotion. Like the soundtrack of his life would crescendo into a thundering leitmotif that tied in a lifetime’s worth of significant but small moments.

It seemed like there should be a boiling anger at the injustice of the world, at the cruelty of being left in the dark for so long. Or surprise, maybe. Bone-deep shock at the revelation that his soulmate had been under his nose the whole time. He waited to run head first into a brick wall of fairy tale infatuation. It felt like a good time to start crying.

But the processing of his hunk-of-junk brain wasn’t sudden at all, or even all that intense. No, it all just made too much sense for that. It wasn’t surprising and he wasn’t angry and there wasn’t a fantastical notion of love-at-first-name.

Instead, Kon felt real. He was more aware than he’d ever been of the pores in his skin and the rubber of his boot soles and the lazy absurdity of life. Kon had always been a character, a hero, a figurehead, the personification of what a bunch of random people and he himself thought he should be. He was something less than natural, and certainly distant from normal, but standing there, wrist to wrist, during what was perhaps the most pivotal event of the rest of his life, Kon felt human in the most safe, satisfying way.

It was a little offensive to his more dramatic tendencies that his reaction was so subdued, but his more dramatic tendencies had done jackshit for his quality of life, so they could shut up.

He managed to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth to ask, “How long have you known?” His voice didn’t even have the decency to reflect the tension of the moment by being hoarse or shaky or anything.

“Pretty much since you came out of the tube,” Robin answered. Tim, actually. Robin-Tim. Tim-Robin. Timbin.

At some point, Robin-who-was-Tim-but-Kon-couldn’t-quite-wrap-his-head-around-that had gone back to cradling Kon’s wrist, but in his now-bare hand. The cold touch of his exposed fingertips was like a little butterfly beating its wings into a soft landing on his forearm.

“Why-” He stopped before the rest of the question could come out like an accusation. A dozen reasons why Robin would keep him in the dark came to mind, not the least of which was his own notable assholery.

“Why didn’t I tell you sooner?” Robin Tim followed anyway. Tim Tim Tim. Kon didn’t respond, so he kept going. “At first, it was a liability thing. You know how we are around here about our identities.”

That was one way to put it. The average nuclear bomb had less security than a Bat’s civilian identity.

“Then…” Tim’s face did something weird. “I don’t know. There always seemed to be a reason not to. You were with Tana, and all the way over in Hawaii, and there was the team to think about, and… you said that thing about not having a soulmate.”

Kon could’ve smacked himself. Tana’s memory was a still-tender bruise he mostly just tried not to poke at, but the fury and hopelessness he’d felt during her death was distant. He couldn’t remember half the things he’d said and done in his grief. That didn’t mean other people couldn’t, though. What had it been like in that moment, when Tim listened to his supposed other half announce that he didn’t have a soulmate at all?

“I didn’t mean that,” Kon said, then realized it was redundant. “I mean, I did, but I was wrong. For a long time, I just thought that my mark was put there by Cadmus. Then, a little while ago, I found out the truth, and that’s when I started looking for my- for you.”

"Oh." Tim's cheeks turned pink and it made something swoop in Kon's chest, like his heart was leaping out of the nest to take flight. "I wish I'd- if I'd known sooner, that you were looking for me, I'd've told you. Screw Batman."

A startled, breathless laugh jumped out of Kon's throat. "I can't believe Batman finally got us together. Oh my god, I can't believe Batman is my father-in-law." Holidays were gonna be weird.

Tim turned redder. "Okay, first of all, we're not married yet, so you don't have in laws."

Not yet, Kon thought to himself.

"Second of all," his soulmate continued, "Batman isn't my father?"

"Oh." Kon's brow furrowed. "I always kind of assumed he adopted you or something after your parents died."

"What?" Tim looked at him like he was crazy. Like the Bat Clan wasn't known for having the weirdest, most inexplicable family dynamics on the planet. And that was coming from a guy whose "parents" were a deranged scientist and Superman, both of whom mostly refused to acknowledge his existence. "I'm not an orphan," Tim went on, bewildered. "Actually, the people you saw earlier tonight, at the Drake Estate? That was my dad and stepmom."

Stepmom? Odd. Kon would've guessed Tim was related to the woman with the similar raven hair, athletic build, and Awooga Factor.

"So you have, like, a real family then." For some reason, that put a lump in Kon's throat. He really didn't have any family to introduce his soulmate to. He had his team, and Roxy and Dubbilex. Kara, maybe. No real family.

The corner of Tim's mouth twitched up. "Something like that." His thumb was swiping hypnotically back and forth over his own name on Kon's wrist. "My actual mom died a couple years ago. I wish you could've met her," he said, sad and soft. "And I don't have any grandparents or aunts and uncles or anything. I have Nightwing. He's basically my brother."

That's gonna be a freaky shovel talk, Kon mused.

And then it hit him. His soulmate. His best friend. The guy he laughed with and argued with and had been all over the galaxy with. It was kind of perfect. Maybe the universe knew what it was doing after all.

"Woah," he said, in awe of that. "I just realized you're my soulmate."

There was no mask in the way that time to hide the quirk of Tim's brow and the amused twinkle in his eye. "Took you a minute to figure that out?"

"No, I mean- like, my soulmate is Robin. That's so cool." Talk about bragging rights.

Tim gave him a wide, beautiful grin. "Oh yeah? Well, my soulmate has superpowers. Beat that."

"My soulmate is the prettiest guy I've ever seen," Kon shot back without thinking about it.

Tim went beet-red. He chewed on his lip, and that time, Kon understood exactly why it captured so much of his attention. "Is it too soon to ask if I can kiss you?" Tim ventured.

Kon's winged heart flapped enthusiastically around the inside of his chest, ready to burst from his body entirely. "'Too soon?'" he echoed, almost scoffing. "I'd say we have a lot of time to make up for."

And so they did.

"Woah! Slow down, champ! Somethin' chasing you?"

Tim stumbled to a slower pace, trying to effect an air of belated casualty as he crossed the living room. "Just, ah, wanna get my homework done, dad. So I can chill for the rest of the night."

Fortunately, his father didn't question his flimsy excuse, too absorbed by the model plane he was polishing at the coffee table. Dana, stretching on the floor, had a knowing look in her eye, but she was cool enough not to say anything about it. Not in front of his dad anyway.

"Just don't sprain another wrist, alright, bud?" his dad said, referencing the brace that had only recently come off after one of his 'skateboarding accidents.'

"You got it, boss!" Tim tossed over his shoulder, already wheeling up the staircase.

He kicked his bedroom door shut behind him, threw his schoolbag in the corner, and toed off his shoes before flopping onto his mattress, already hitting the starred contact in his phone.

His heart thudded at four times the speed of the ringing, anxious to get to the best part of his day. After several rings, a familiar click echoed from his phone's speaker, followed by an even more familiar friendly greeting.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Mrs. Kent," Tim said, tapping his toes against the duvet.

"Oh, Tim! How are you, dear?"

"I'm good, how are you?"

"Can't complain. I assume you're calling for Kon again?"

Tim was glad she couldn't see his blush through the phone. "Yeah."

"Wait just a minute, I'll fetch him for you."

Several long seconds of silence stretched over the receiver. Tim chewed at the inside of his cheek, turning onto his side so he could press his phone between his ear and pillow, freeing his hands to peel off his forearm wrap. Maybe, with the latest development, he wouldn't need it much longer. Not outside of the cape, anyway.

"Hey," a breathless voice came from the other end of the line.

Tim's cheeks stretched with a wide smile at the sound of his soulmate's voice. "Hey."

"What's up, buttercup?"

Tim fought back a giggle. He could just picture Kon leaning against the kitchen wall, twirling the landline cord around his finger, rebellious edges softened by a hand-me-down flannel and some Midwestern slang. "You tell me," Tim teased. "Anything you wanna share with the class, Mr. Kent?"

The new name shimmered on his wrist in the afternoon light bleeding through the curtains. Kon's Kryptonian name was still the dominant next, but the fainter Conner Kent seemed to hover over it. Almost like a holographic bookmark that showed different images depending on how it was angled. He hadn't shown it to anyone else yet, too nervous to share his changed mark, but he had a sneaking suspicion that only one of the names would be visible to another viewer at a time. Maybe his wrist would show Conner Kent while he was at school and Kon-El during patrols. Only time and research would tell.

"How'd you hear about that?" Kon asked. "Smallville High doesn't have a computer system for you to hack."

"Ha-ha," Tim drawled. "I didn't have to hear about it, goofus, it's on my arm."

"Oh!" Kon sounded surprised considering it was his name. "I didn't realize it was- I mean, yeah, I started school here last week and obviously I couldn't give them my real name, so Ma said Kon could be short for Conner and, like, of course I had to have the same last name as them. Well, I guess I didn't have to, but it just made the most sense. I didn't think it would- I mean, my name is still Kon-El."

"Oh, yeah, my mark still says Kon-El, it just also says Conner Kent now. It's weird. But in a good way! I'll show you next time you're here."

"Oh." Kon sounded relieved.

"Also," Tim said, "When did Mrs. Kent become Ma?"

"She keeps giving me this look, Rob. She threatened to revoke cookie rights if I didn't start calling her Ma."

Tim couldn't stifle his laughter at that. It was gratifying to know there was finally someone in his soulmate's life looking out for him. It had taken a lot longer than it should have, and Tim was sort of holding a grudge against Clark for that, but hearing about his soulmate getting some long overdue mothering was nice. It lessened the tightness in his chest that had lingered ever since Kon left Metropolis for amber pastures.

The move had been good for him, and sorely needed after Kon's apartment got totaled, but it sucked not being close enough to take the train to him anymore. Two hours by super-flight was enough for weekend visits, but not much more.

"So you're settling in alright then?" he couldn't help but ask.

"You don't have to worry about me, Rob," came Kon's fond response. "Kansas is boring, but the Kents are really nice and I've got plenty of big open skies to run around in. Plus, the food is a heck of a lot better than whatever I could scrounge up on my own."

Heck, Tim silently parroted to himself. All that parenting was really making a difference.

"And it's kinda nice," Kon went on, "You know, sharing a last name with real people. Ones who are alive."

He was joking, but Tim could tell it meant a lot to him; his whole entire soulmark wouldn't have changed if it didn't. He'd read all the way to the end of the singular web forum on dual mark names. There was a part of Kon, however deeply hidden, that had latched onto his new family and made it a part of his very being.

Tim traced the shimmering letters on his arm. With any luck, it would hold out a while longer without anymore heart-attack inducing changes. Not until they were older, at least. Then maybe it could say Conner Drake. Or Kent-Drake. Tim wasn't picky.

And maybe, in that distant future, Kon would get to see what it was like to have his mark turn into something else for a change, if he started going by Tim Drake-Kent. Or something like that.

"I'm glad," Tim said at last. "It's a good name. It suits you."