always with the Dick jokes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
irrelevant) wrote2010-12-08 09:05 am
irrelevant) wrote2010-12-08 09:05 am
Entry tags:
[fic] this far away from what we've been (DCU)
this far away from what we’ve been
Tim Drake, Kon-El, Krypto | PG | ~2300 words
notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iesika, a belated fill for one of her birthday prompts: Tim/Kon, in Luthor's busted up lab in Adventure Comics #3; porn or not, up to you, but I'd *love* Tim crying.
The roof is lower than or the same height as the roofs around it, with edges that aren’t real stable.
Krypto’s surprised yip is swallowed by the sound of crumbling masonry, but Kon catches him by his cape and tugs him clear, landing them on more stable ground. Ignoring the crawling sensation that feels like Tim staring a disapproving hole in the side of his head, he lets Krypto go and turns slowly in place.
The neighborhood is nothing special; fifty years ago it was probably a happening place, but it’s gone out of style since then and neglect set in a while ago. The building itself is old, grungy brick, about as far away from five star as anything gets.
When Kon stops turning he’s facing Tim. “Not really your style,” he says, hooking his thumbs through his belt loops.
“Whose style?” Tim says and disappears over the back wall.
Kon sighs – he’s been doing that a lot since he got back – but he says, “Let’s go, boy,” to Krypto and follows Tim down, even though he’s starting to think he should’ve just gone home.
Actually, he thought so back at the lab. But Tim was sitting next to him on the funeral slab of an extinct bad idea that was almost Tim’s, Tim’s too-long hair was messed up from wearing a freaking cowl, and Tim was looking sideways at him from under his shaggy bangs and saying, “The box was my last lead. I’m done for the night.”
Making a question out of what should have been a statement.
And Kon should have said school, chores, thanks but no thanks, man. He should have said sorry, I can’t, but his mouth fell open and he said (asked?): “I’ll stick around for a while?”
He gave Tim as much of an out as he’d gotten, knowing Tim doesn’t take outs if he offers them first. He had a feeling Tim wasn’t going to take this one before he opened his mouth, and sure enough, Tim didn’t.
He took Kon up out of the catacombs. Took him back up to Paris’s complicated rooftops and took off without an explanation before Kon could offer him a ride.
Kon swore under his breath as he watched him swing away. Standing on air next to Kon, Krypto cocked his head to one side and barked a soft question.
“Don’t ask me,” Kon said. “I can hear his heartbeat, not what’s going on inside his screwed up brain.”
He punched the air to feel it ripple around him, and also because he won’t ever punch Tim again. Krypto whined a little, butting his head against Kon’s hip. Kon reached down and rumpled his ears. “Come on. I already crossed non-alienation of friends off.”
And he wasn’t about to re-add it to the list, not if he could help it.
Catching up with Tim didn’t take long, not that he’d expected anything else. Since this part of the evening was Tim’s idea, he figured Tim would stay visible and findable, for a while anyway.
Krypto at his heels, he hovered high enough over Tim to not freak other people out and low enough to let him know he was there. He was maybe three seconds behind him when Tim landed on the hotel roof.
Now he’s in a white-washed room with two single beds that’ve seen better days, crouched down on an area rug so thin it might as well not be there. The muted pound of the shower cuts off as he tugs at the note he just fixed to Krypto’s collar.
“Don’t wake her up if she’s asleep,” he says, scratching up the side of Krypto’s jaw to his ears. “And don’t give it to her at all unless I’m not back by morning, okay?”
Krypto’s tongue lolls out in a canine grin. His chin is in Kon’s hand and his eyes are rolling back into his head in ecstasy, but he gives Kon a quiet “Whuff” of assurance and licks his wrist.
Kon grins. He says, “Thanks a lot, you worthless mutt, I’ve seen where that tongue’s been,” and scratches some more, hitting all the good spots, including the hard-to-reach place on the back of Krypto’s neck.
He’s still scratching, telling Krypto what a dumb dog he is with his mouth while he shows him something completely different with his hands when Tim comes out of the bathroom.
He doesn’t actually hear him come. Superhearing doesn’t mean much to Bats: they know how to make themselves sound harmless the way a poisonous spider crawling across the ceiling sounds harmless. He doesn’t hear footsteps or the creak of the door opening, he just knows, between one second and the next, that Tim’s standing behind him. He knows Tim’s watching, and he’s known Tim long enough to know he’s amused.
Giving Krypto’s ears one last rumple, Kon stands, shakes his head and says, “Totally worthless. Get gone, mutt.”
Krypto shakes himself, making his cape and ears flap. “Rrrf!” he says, and rises into the air.
“Remember,” Kon reminds him. “After she wakes up.”
Krypto’s tail is a blur. He darts forward and licks Kon’s cheek— “Hey!” And then he’s gone, out the window, nothing but a red and white streak on the skyline.
“Not that I have any interest in getting between you and your phone hate,” Tim says from behind him, “but I do have a cell.”
Tucking his hands into his back pockets, Kon turns around and grins at him. “Nah. She doesn’t sleep too well as it is. I’d just wake her up for good and then she’d get an early start on chores. Probably do mine, too, and she doesn’t need that.”
“Understood,” Tim says in the same closed off voice he stopped using back at the lab. His eyes are as blank as his freaky white lenses, but his hair is floppy and loose, still wet from his shower. As Kon watches, a drop of water falls and catches in his lashes, making him blink.
He blinks again and the drop falls the rest of the way down, and he pushes away from the wall he’s leaning against. He’s wearing a pair of loose track pants and nothing else, but he’s moving like he’s still got the cape on, like he always does when there’s no one around who shouldn’t see what he really is.
There’s a backpack and a small duffel bag, both black, both neatly zipped, sitting against the wall opposite the beds. Tim walks past Kon like he’s not there and crouches down to dig through the duffel.
Kon stares at the remnants of Tim’s shower beading the reservoir of his spine and feels the same way he did the first time Prime sucker-punched him, a roiling stomachful of pain, surprise and nausea, and god, why did he think this was a good idea?
Tim’s been a bad idea since Kon walked back into Titans Tower and Cassie hugged him and Tim didn’t.
A month later it’s like he’s still staring at Tim over Cassie’s shoulder while Tim stares at Nightwing, at Bart, at anything but Kon. He’s still trying to catch Tim’s eyes and failing, and Tim’s back is still to him, a curving year’s worth of scars Kon doesn’t recognize.
He counts them, hurts his brain trying to figure out what kind of knife made the angry-looking, half-inch wide slash at the base of Tim’s spine while Tim tugs a t-shirt as red as the scar out and pulls it down over it. Pulls it all the way down, hiding the rest of them, and then he zips the duffel and moves on to the backpack, and Kon’s not surprised that his goal is his laptop.
He’s also not surprised when Tim sits cross-legged on the floor with a bed at his back and opens the laptop without looking at him.
Surprised is not even close. That would be more like pissed.
Or it would be if there was any point in getting pissed off at Tim. Tim would just wait patiently until Kon ran out of pissed off, then he’d finish whatever he was doing when he got interrupted.
Drawing his hands out of his pockets, Kon walks over to Tim’s bags. He pushes them down the wall with his foot; he hears the quick in of Tim’s breath, but he’s not kicking, just pushing, and Tim stays silent.
Kon keeps pushing until the space across from Tim is empty. He turns around and sits down with his back to the wall and looks at Tim.
Tim looks back; somebody touching his stuff without permission gets his attention faster than just about anything but crime. Frowning, he closes his laptop and sets it aside.
Kon props his forearms on his bent knees and lets the back of his head tap the wall.
“Reality just shifted one-hundred and eighty degrees,” Tim says, and Kon snorts.
“Because I don’t want to use your phone?”
Tim pulls his knees in and wraps his arms around them. “No.”
Kon feels the sigh coming, and he just doesn’t care. “Tim, man… you want me gone?”
“No.” His head is bent, his hair in his face. His knees are bony as hell, a couple of sharp angles under the formless slide of the pants. He’s playing with the fabric, pulling it tight, letting it loose, but the shape of him underneath it never changes.
“You were gone long enough,” he says, and he looks up at Kon from under his bangs, and Kon feels the seam of years he heat-melted shut in his brain the day Dawnstar and Wildfire hauled him out of the chrysalis crack open. “A thousand years is a long time for coma-level brain activity,” Tim says in his dry, disconnected voice, still looking out through his hair.
Kon’s stomach turns to water faster than it did down in dead-smelling catacombs lined with desiccated skulls; faster than it did in the ruins of Luthor’s cloning equipment. Down there, away from the sky and the sun, he’d felt the distant rumble of the subways coming through the walls and up through the ground and thought that he was damned if he was going to spend the rest of his second life hanging out with his best friend in the worst places on earth.
Tim’s eyes are focused on Kon through his bangs, like he’s watching Kon through a blind. His voice is everything except distant when he says, “Did you dream?”
Kon feels himself jerk, not fast enough to stop it. He sees the corner’s of Tim’s mouth twitch.
“I do,” Tim says, knocking the rest of Kon’s breath out of his lungs. “My father died. You and Bart died. I think I was too angry. Then Bruce was gone and I started dreaming,” he says and turns his head, resting his cheek against the bed.
His hair falls away from his face with the movement, and there’s another scar riding the edge of his jaw. It’s thin, almost white; Kon wonders if it’s the reason he let his hair grow.
There’s something else on his cheek, too. A clear gleam Kon thinks is just the moonlight hitting his skin, but then Tim rolls his head back the other way and he’s crying.
Because he’s Tim, he doesn’t do it normally. He’s not shaking or sniffling or making noise the way most people do. He’s just sitting there with his wet, white, gleaming face and his scars and no expression at all.
“Did you?” he asks again, and Kon doesn’t know how to give him what he’s asking for. He doesn’t know how not to try.
“Yeah,” he says slowly, trying to talk without thinking about anything, but the crack is open and there’s stuff he knows is in there even if he can’t see it yet. “There was something. Not really dreams. It was…”
Color without light. Speed without coordinates.
Like flying forever through the same unchanging patch of sky, never moving.
Sometimes he thought someone was screaming, but he didn’t have any ears, didn’t have a mouth or a voice, and he couldn’t scream back.
“We’ve switched places,” Tim says, his mouth gleaming wet, moving against his pain. “You’re the responsible one. I’m the one who needs to be watched for his own good.” He smiles.
Kon swallows the need to tell him to stop.
“One-eighty,” Tim says almost dreamily, smiling worse than a scream.
Kon’s hands are knotted into fists on his knees. He makes his fingers uncurl, lays his hands palm down, flat on the floor.
They used to give him shit for talking about his TTK all the time, Bart mimicking him, Tim rolling his eyes behind his mask.
Then he got older and his Kryptonian DNA started really kicking in; new powers, cool superpowers with an S. They’re even stronger now, after, and he sometimes forgets he’s got some advantages Clark doesn’t.
The crack is widening inside his brain, minor fault lines splitting off from the main one down fragmented memory paths. Tana is laughing at him, grinning as he pulls her toward him across the bed without moving anything but his mind.
Anything that’s touching what he’s touching.
He’s already sitting on the floor. Doesn’t need for his hands to be down there, but it’s good to feel the floor cool and stable beneath his palms when he reaches without reaching.
Tim makes a small, choked-off sound. His eyes shut tight and his head falls forward on his neck like he can’t hold it up any longer.
Tim, who carried all of them for so long.
Kon lets go of his TTK and Tim falls into him and his skin is cool and smooth where it's not scarred under his t-shirt and Kon’s hands, and his cheek is wet against Kon’s neck.
Kon wraps his arms around him. He turns his head so he can see the sky through the window and waits for dawn.
Tim Drake, Kon-El, Krypto | PG | ~2300 words
notes: For
iesika, a belated fill for one of her birthday prompts: Tim/Kon, in Luthor's busted up lab in Adventure Comics #3; porn or not, up to you, but I'd *love* Tim crying. The roof is lower than or the same height as the roofs around it, with edges that aren’t real stable.
Krypto’s surprised yip is swallowed by the sound of crumbling masonry, but Kon catches him by his cape and tugs him clear, landing them on more stable ground. Ignoring the crawling sensation that feels like Tim staring a disapproving hole in the side of his head, he lets Krypto go and turns slowly in place.
The neighborhood is nothing special; fifty years ago it was probably a happening place, but it’s gone out of style since then and neglect set in a while ago. The building itself is old, grungy brick, about as far away from five star as anything gets.
When Kon stops turning he’s facing Tim. “Not really your style,” he says, hooking his thumbs through his belt loops.
“Whose style?” Tim says and disappears over the back wall.
Kon sighs – he’s been doing that a lot since he got back – but he says, “Let’s go, boy,” to Krypto and follows Tim down, even though he’s starting to think he should’ve just gone home.
Actually, he thought so back at the lab. But Tim was sitting next to him on the funeral slab of an extinct bad idea that was almost Tim’s, Tim’s too-long hair was messed up from wearing a freaking cowl, and Tim was looking sideways at him from under his shaggy bangs and saying, “The box was my last lead. I’m done for the night.”
Making a question out of what should have been a statement.
And Kon should have said school, chores, thanks but no thanks, man. He should have said sorry, I can’t, but his mouth fell open and he said (asked?): “I’ll stick around for a while?”
He gave Tim as much of an out as he’d gotten, knowing Tim doesn’t take outs if he offers them first. He had a feeling Tim wasn’t going to take this one before he opened his mouth, and sure enough, Tim didn’t.
He took Kon up out of the catacombs. Took him back up to Paris’s complicated rooftops and took off without an explanation before Kon could offer him a ride.
Kon swore under his breath as he watched him swing away. Standing on air next to Kon, Krypto cocked his head to one side and barked a soft question.
“Don’t ask me,” Kon said. “I can hear his heartbeat, not what’s going on inside his screwed up brain.”
He punched the air to feel it ripple around him, and also because he won’t ever punch Tim again. Krypto whined a little, butting his head against Kon’s hip. Kon reached down and rumpled his ears. “Come on. I already crossed non-alienation of friends off.”
And he wasn’t about to re-add it to the list, not if he could help it.
Catching up with Tim didn’t take long, not that he’d expected anything else. Since this part of the evening was Tim’s idea, he figured Tim would stay visible and findable, for a while anyway.
Krypto at his heels, he hovered high enough over Tim to not freak other people out and low enough to let him know he was there. He was maybe three seconds behind him when Tim landed on the hotel roof.
Now he’s in a white-washed room with two single beds that’ve seen better days, crouched down on an area rug so thin it might as well not be there. The muted pound of the shower cuts off as he tugs at the note he just fixed to Krypto’s collar.
“Don’t wake her up if she’s asleep,” he says, scratching up the side of Krypto’s jaw to his ears. “And don’t give it to her at all unless I’m not back by morning, okay?”
Krypto’s tongue lolls out in a canine grin. His chin is in Kon’s hand and his eyes are rolling back into his head in ecstasy, but he gives Kon a quiet “Whuff” of assurance and licks his wrist.
Kon grins. He says, “Thanks a lot, you worthless mutt, I’ve seen where that tongue’s been,” and scratches some more, hitting all the good spots, including the hard-to-reach place on the back of Krypto’s neck.
He’s still scratching, telling Krypto what a dumb dog he is with his mouth while he shows him something completely different with his hands when Tim comes out of the bathroom.
He doesn’t actually hear him come. Superhearing doesn’t mean much to Bats: they know how to make themselves sound harmless the way a poisonous spider crawling across the ceiling sounds harmless. He doesn’t hear footsteps or the creak of the door opening, he just knows, between one second and the next, that Tim’s standing behind him. He knows Tim’s watching, and he’s known Tim long enough to know he’s amused.
Giving Krypto’s ears one last rumple, Kon stands, shakes his head and says, “Totally worthless. Get gone, mutt.”
Krypto shakes himself, making his cape and ears flap. “Rrrf!” he says, and rises into the air.
“Remember,” Kon reminds him. “After she wakes up.”
Krypto’s tail is a blur. He darts forward and licks Kon’s cheek— “Hey!” And then he’s gone, out the window, nothing but a red and white streak on the skyline.
“Not that I have any interest in getting between you and your phone hate,” Tim says from behind him, “but I do have a cell.”
Tucking his hands into his back pockets, Kon turns around and grins at him. “Nah. She doesn’t sleep too well as it is. I’d just wake her up for good and then she’d get an early start on chores. Probably do mine, too, and she doesn’t need that.”
“Understood,” Tim says in the same closed off voice he stopped using back at the lab. His eyes are as blank as his freaky white lenses, but his hair is floppy and loose, still wet from his shower. As Kon watches, a drop of water falls and catches in his lashes, making him blink.
He blinks again and the drop falls the rest of the way down, and he pushes away from the wall he’s leaning against. He’s wearing a pair of loose track pants and nothing else, but he’s moving like he’s still got the cape on, like he always does when there’s no one around who shouldn’t see what he really is.
There’s a backpack and a small duffel bag, both black, both neatly zipped, sitting against the wall opposite the beds. Tim walks past Kon like he’s not there and crouches down to dig through the duffel.
Kon stares at the remnants of Tim’s shower beading the reservoir of his spine and feels the same way he did the first time Prime sucker-punched him, a roiling stomachful of pain, surprise and nausea, and god, why did he think this was a good idea?
Tim’s been a bad idea since Kon walked back into Titans Tower and Cassie hugged him and Tim didn’t.
A month later it’s like he’s still staring at Tim over Cassie’s shoulder while Tim stares at Nightwing, at Bart, at anything but Kon. He’s still trying to catch Tim’s eyes and failing, and Tim’s back is still to him, a curving year’s worth of scars Kon doesn’t recognize.
He counts them, hurts his brain trying to figure out what kind of knife made the angry-looking, half-inch wide slash at the base of Tim’s spine while Tim tugs a t-shirt as red as the scar out and pulls it down over it. Pulls it all the way down, hiding the rest of them, and then he zips the duffel and moves on to the backpack, and Kon’s not surprised that his goal is his laptop.
He’s also not surprised when Tim sits cross-legged on the floor with a bed at his back and opens the laptop without looking at him.
Surprised is not even close. That would be more like pissed.
Or it would be if there was any point in getting pissed off at Tim. Tim would just wait patiently until Kon ran out of pissed off, then he’d finish whatever he was doing when he got interrupted.
Drawing his hands out of his pockets, Kon walks over to Tim’s bags. He pushes them down the wall with his foot; he hears the quick in of Tim’s breath, but he’s not kicking, just pushing, and Tim stays silent.
Kon keeps pushing until the space across from Tim is empty. He turns around and sits down with his back to the wall and looks at Tim.
Tim looks back; somebody touching his stuff without permission gets his attention faster than just about anything but crime. Frowning, he closes his laptop and sets it aside.
Kon props his forearms on his bent knees and lets the back of his head tap the wall.
“Reality just shifted one-hundred and eighty degrees,” Tim says, and Kon snorts.
“Because I don’t want to use your phone?”
Tim pulls his knees in and wraps his arms around them. “No.”
Kon feels the sigh coming, and he just doesn’t care. “Tim, man… you want me gone?”
“No.” His head is bent, his hair in his face. His knees are bony as hell, a couple of sharp angles under the formless slide of the pants. He’s playing with the fabric, pulling it tight, letting it loose, but the shape of him underneath it never changes.
“You were gone long enough,” he says, and he looks up at Kon from under his bangs, and Kon feels the seam of years he heat-melted shut in his brain the day Dawnstar and Wildfire hauled him out of the chrysalis crack open. “A thousand years is a long time for coma-level brain activity,” Tim says in his dry, disconnected voice, still looking out through his hair.
Kon’s stomach turns to water faster than it did down in dead-smelling catacombs lined with desiccated skulls; faster than it did in the ruins of Luthor’s cloning equipment. Down there, away from the sky and the sun, he’d felt the distant rumble of the subways coming through the walls and up through the ground and thought that he was damned if he was going to spend the rest of his second life hanging out with his best friend in the worst places on earth.
Tim’s eyes are focused on Kon through his bangs, like he’s watching Kon through a blind. His voice is everything except distant when he says, “Did you dream?”
Kon feels himself jerk, not fast enough to stop it. He sees the corner’s of Tim’s mouth twitch.
“I do,” Tim says, knocking the rest of Kon’s breath out of his lungs. “My father died. You and Bart died. I think I was too angry. Then Bruce was gone and I started dreaming,” he says and turns his head, resting his cheek against the bed.
His hair falls away from his face with the movement, and there’s another scar riding the edge of his jaw. It’s thin, almost white; Kon wonders if it’s the reason he let his hair grow.
There’s something else on his cheek, too. A clear gleam Kon thinks is just the moonlight hitting his skin, but then Tim rolls his head back the other way and he’s crying.
Because he’s Tim, he doesn’t do it normally. He’s not shaking or sniffling or making noise the way most people do. He’s just sitting there with his wet, white, gleaming face and his scars and no expression at all.
“Did you?” he asks again, and Kon doesn’t know how to give him what he’s asking for. He doesn’t know how not to try.
“Yeah,” he says slowly, trying to talk without thinking about anything, but the crack is open and there’s stuff he knows is in there even if he can’t see it yet. “There was something. Not really dreams. It was…”
Color without light. Speed without coordinates.
Like flying forever through the same unchanging patch of sky, never moving.
Sometimes he thought someone was screaming, but he didn’t have any ears, didn’t have a mouth or a voice, and he couldn’t scream back.
“We’ve switched places,” Tim says, his mouth gleaming wet, moving against his pain. “You’re the responsible one. I’m the one who needs to be watched for his own good.” He smiles.
Kon swallows the need to tell him to stop.
“One-eighty,” Tim says almost dreamily, smiling worse than a scream.
Kon’s hands are knotted into fists on his knees. He makes his fingers uncurl, lays his hands palm down, flat on the floor.
They used to give him shit for talking about his TTK all the time, Bart mimicking him, Tim rolling his eyes behind his mask.
Then he got older and his Kryptonian DNA started really kicking in; new powers, cool superpowers with an S. They’re even stronger now, after, and he sometimes forgets he’s got some advantages Clark doesn’t.
The crack is widening inside his brain, minor fault lines splitting off from the main one down fragmented memory paths. Tana is laughing at him, grinning as he pulls her toward him across the bed without moving anything but his mind.
Anything that’s touching what he’s touching.
He’s already sitting on the floor. Doesn’t need for his hands to be down there, but it’s good to feel the floor cool and stable beneath his palms when he reaches without reaching.
Tim makes a small, choked-off sound. His eyes shut tight and his head falls forward on his neck like he can’t hold it up any longer.
Tim, who carried all of them for so long.
Kon lets go of his TTK and Tim falls into him and his skin is cool and smooth where it's not scarred under his t-shirt and Kon’s hands, and his cheek is wet against Kon’s neck.
Kon wraps his arms around him. He turns his head so he can see the sky through the window and waits for dawn.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2011-05-16 06:01 pm (UTC)(link)Finally I have to thank you for this wonderful story and I have a big plea - please write a longer multi chapter story about this plot - fragile, delicate Timothy so shattered after connors death, bruce death, his fathers death and also bart and stephanie gone, dick taking robin away from him and Timothy has to cope with all that and Connor tries to comfort him and tries to help him to recover - it would really make me and also other readers happy. I adore your writing. Really. Thank you very much.
PS: are you on fanfiction.net?