Chapter Text
The warmth of the yellow sun lamps is heavenly. Normally Kon complains on and on and on about how they’re not anything like the real thing, but right now he kinda wants to punch past Kon in the face for talking shit.
It’s a lot, for sure. He’s already getting a migraine from the sensory overload of getting his senses back in full after days of nothing. But he’s finally got strength back into his bones, at least a little, and it’s such a relief that it’s taking a supremely conscious effort not to pass out right here and now.
Outside the ship, Kon can faintly hear the utter chaos of the situation below; explosions and shouting and fighting. He isn’t overly concerned with it, though, considering he can hear Kara hollering abuse all the way from the lower stratosphere, and anyway Hal had just streaked in with his merry band of galactic green crime-fighters a few minutes prior, so they probably have it handled.
Right now, he’s just… focused on Tim.
Bruce had run the tests himself to confirm before heading to the helm to backseat takedown: he’s fine. His white blood cell count is elevated past his usual baseline, and he’s drugged, obviously, but he hasn’t been overdosed or otherwise damaged by it, at least not visibly.
Maybe the aliens switched up the dose after it made him sick the first time. Maybe his makeshift mask had filtered out the worst of it. Maybe he’s secretly nursing a monster infection from any number of causes while they were in captivity, and he just isn’t spiking a fever yet. No way of knowing, really.
For now, at least, he’s still knocked out. But his breathing’s even, and his heart rate is only slightly elevated; Kon can hear him again, can see and feel the rush of blood and flex of sinew. Can track each flush of air that fills each lung before gushing out to fog against his oxygen mask.
Breathing and beating. Warm and alive. Kon still really, really wants him to wake up, but until he can, this is enough.
The Javelin has a decent but fairly barebones medical zone. He’ll feel better once they get to the actual Watchtower hospital and do a full workup, but for now he’s content to just stay awake—to stand guard over Tim and soak in the bright yellow lights over the bed.
Mmm, warm. And Tim. Warm and Tim. And… probably cameras still, if he’s being honest, but Batman and Oracle are probably the only people who check plane footage. Kon’s already used to being stalked by them.
A little knock at the doorframe snags his attention, but it’s just Queen. The archer offers him something like a sympathetic smile that still, somehow, manages to look rogueish. “You holding up in here, kid?”
Supposedly, all the regular, non-powered humans were meant to stay onboard the ship for the rescue, just in case they needed to extract immediately. Dick Grayson, it seems, had decided he was an outlier not to be counted, but Kon can hear him cutting loose down there, too, so at least he’s having fun.
Green Arrow isn’t someone he’s spent a whole lot of time talking to—all he knows about the man is that he used to be a partier worse than Brucie Wayne, that he’s got a bow and arrows, and that Bruce has inexplicable personal beef with him the likes of which Kon hasn’t even seen aimed at Gotham’s actual rogues, but he seems nice enough at least.
It takes him a second to find his voice, half asleep as he is. “Yeah,” he finally manages. “All good here.”
Queen nods like he’s expecting the answer. “Hal says they’re wrapping up down there—the Lantern Corp will deal with the whole…” He flicks an errant hand, brows raised. “Enslaving people thing. But Spooky says we’ll be headed home soon.”
“Spooky?”
The older man laughs. “Batman, I mean. Everyone’s eager to get you home—you’ve got some worried folks back there.”
Yeah, Kon bets. It’s really only a matter of time before Bart and Cassie zap back up here to suffocate him and Tim in well-meant overbearing fussing—once they’re done taking their pounds of flesh from the aliens down planetside for making them worry in the first place.
And, oh man, Ma and Jon must be freaking out, too. And the rest of Young Justice, active and otherwise. Not to mention the rest of Tim’s batty family, who are already going to be extremely grumpy about being left out of the rescue.
Kon’ll be surprised if he gets more than five seconds alone with Tim for the rest of the foreseeable future, once their friends come back to the ship. Tim’s gonna be cranky about it, too, and cranky when Bruce insists he takes a break from work and rest, and cranky when his siblings start pestering him constantly day and night, and especially cranky if he ends up getting sick.
The thought somehow still makes him smile, buried in Tim’s (still unwashed, ugh) hair. Tim can be as grumpy as he wants, now that there’s no fear of voyeuristic alien zookeepers taking issue. He deserves it, anyway, after putting up with Kon’s skittish never-ending panic attacks for the last half a week all by himself.
Kon can be the stable one, now. Hopefully. Probably. If he can’t be, there’s half a dozen others who can be, at least. Maybe they can both just freak out and have a cry together about it, actually, and it can be someone else’s job to make them count breaths for the inevitable comedown.
That sounds nice.
For now, though, Kon just huddles, close and watchful. The sun lamps warm them both. Queen nods once, friendly, before rejoining Batman at the cockpit.
Kon presses gentle fingers to the bare skin of Tim’s neck. Watchful. Protective. He’s careful, feather-light—the collar hadn’t left any bruising, had been perfectly tightened to avoid injury without hanging loose, but he can still see it like a phantom wound and treats it accordingly.
He doesn’t mean to fall asleep. He means to keep vigil, the way Tim had for him the first three nights in that creeptastic shit-awful zoo enclosure. To make absolutely sure they’re safe, all the way until they’re back on Earth and far away from any ill-meaning cameras and crowds.
As Tim would say, though, he’s kind of a sleepy bitch right now. He’s been up for, like, thirteen hours, and he’s recovering from red sun radiation, and he’s tired. The screaming replays over and over and over until he’s twisted up in pretzels and exhausted, and it doesn’t take long before he’s slumping overtop him.
His friends, at least, are kind enough that when they make it back to the ship—laughing, joking, splattered here and there with alien blood—they pause. Violently shush the Justice League, like that’s something they’re allowed to do, and shoo everyone else out except Nightwing, even Batman.
The lights dim to nothing. Cassie draws the privacy curtains, and Bart babbles about the rescue as quietly as he’s able, like the sleeping pair of superheroes can hear a word he’s saying. Dick settles fondly on Tim’s side, content to listen to them squabble, and eyes the shadow of Bruce’s lingering cape peeking beneath the curtain.
Nobody disturbs them, though. Just keeps their careful guard, ranks closed around their stolen members.
Kon sleeps, warm and undisturbed, and dreams of absolutely nothing at all.
“I mean, what’s the point of working out if I can’t help my little bro wrangle a couch?”
“Other than beating up crime?”
“That’s—listen, that’s its own thing,” Dick argues, and grunts, presumably shifting around to get his half of the loveseat unwedged from the elevator. “One could even argue that is working out. For the purposes of helping my little brother move couches.”
“Shut up, Dick.”
Kon bursts out laughing. Dick’s head swivels from the hallway and grins when he spots him, and Tim’s head pokes curiously from the elevator a moment later. He rolls his eyes as soon as he does, hefting the brand-new couch without any trouble at all.
“Sorry it took so long,” his partner says, crooking a dry smile at Kon’s obvious amusement. “The angle was stupid. Had to cram it like six different ways to fit. I’m starting to consider taking Kara up on just flying furniture through the windows, identities be damned.”
“I’m pretty sure Kara’s still fuzzed from her megaparty offplanet two days ago,” Kon points out, but the door swings open to his left, courtesy of TTK. “She’d break any windows that got in the way.”
They’ve lingered long enough, lining up the couch for best access, that the elevator’s had time to go down and back up again. Kon hears the faint ding like a comm link.
“I mean.” Tim shrugs, and the whole couch moves with him as Dick wiggles it through the gap. “I am rich, so…”
“And yet you’re making us do all the heavy lifting! Get out the fuckin’ way,” Jason snaps. He’s got three boxes, all overlarge and penned in sharpie and all, of course, teetering precariously against his hip. “Useless, all of you.”
“Oh my god, can you stop bitching for three whole seconds,” Tim retorts, and pushes hard enough that the couch squeals free through the doorframe. “Ah! Jeez.”
“Yeah, little wing,” Dick pipes from inside. Kon magnanimously keeps the door open for Jason to pass through, rather than letting it close in his face like he wants to. “Think of it like family bonding!”
“I didn’t ask for any ‘family bonding’ you oversized—”
Kon hears Tim’s aggrandized sigh as the door shuts, and in fact can still hear them squabbling long after he zips down the stairwell. Perks of being super-human: Walls and floors and indeed several blocks will never be enough to block out Wayne siblings fighting with each other.
Back downstairs, Kon finds Cass somehow balancing three squares of sectional on one shoulder. Steph is carefully balancing a fourth from the lip of the moving van, tongue poked out in concentration like she’s playing human jenga. Or couch jenga? Evil jenga, regardless.
“You make that any taller, you’re not gonna fit through the door, battie,” he calls, and Steph laughs brightly.
“Fewer trips,” Cass tells him, smirking.
“Don’t break our new sectional,” Kon warns, but it’s a toothless threat and they both know it. “Tim probably spent like a million dollars on it.”
“Tim spends a million dollars on everything,” Steph protests, but obligingly hops down with the fifth in hand instead of stacked on Cass. “He’s a trust fund baby! Can’t trust him with money.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that or he’ll stop paying every time you drag him out for brunch.”
“No he won’t,” Cass points out, still holding the stack of couch segments without so much as a tremor. Sometimes Kon forgets she isn’t kryptonian.
Kon sighs, but he can’t keep the twitching smile off his face as he acquiesces. “No, he won’t.”
Steph’s infectious laughter makes Cass giggle, too, as they both shuffle around at the door to make the unwieldy stack of couch fit into the lobby. No doubt they’d be getting stared at, if Tim had left any other rich-person apartments occupied.
It’s a nice apartment. A little bigger than their last one, even, with deep, luxurious baths and a rooftop garden, and—it’s nice. Kon likes it. He’s a little horrified on an instinctual level at how much it costs, but you don’t date a Wayne without being forcibly desensitized to price tags.
He’d just… liked their last apartment, too, at least until it warped to be synonymous with ‘zoo cage.’
Kon sighs. He does not wanna think about all that right now.
Instead, he focuses on TTKing a frankly absurd amount of boxes through the door after a quick check to make sure nobody was around to see it. It’s a bit of a Tetris game at the elevator, but he manages a good two dozen of the ‘RR stuff’ boxes and a handful of ‘master bed’ ones.
It’s been a pain, honestly: moving. A necessary pain, but annoying nonetheless; Tim had had to deconstruct all the hidden compartments and closets of their old apartment and re-plaster it all for the next tenants, and between Tim’s day and night jobs and Kon’s superheroing and all their families’ superheroing and day jobs and whatever, it’s been nothing short of impossible to actually schedule a move.
Purging most of their furniture for trauma-related issues might have made it a bit easier, except it means now they have to haul all the new shit upstairs, too, and it all smells weird and feels different and nothing looks the same. Which is the point, obviously, but.
Hmph.
He’d liked the old apartment!
At least this one has bigger windows. Kon thinks, after the last two and a half months stuck exclusively in Gotham, that he’s gonna be spending a good chunk of time in his foreseeable future just sunbathing in the living room.
Kon’s inordinately fond of Gotham, really! It’s where the bats are, and where Tim’s from, and where he can usually be found batting or working or what have you. But god damn is it cold and overcast most of the time. Just because Kon can fly above the clouds for a few hours to sunbathe doesn’t mean it isn’t gloomy!
Kara helps unload the elevator while Tim and his siblings/ex orient the furniture, with Kon keeping the doors open everywhere in the new apartment. With five bats and two supers, it doesn’t take long to get the rest of the boxes upstairs and stacked in the correct rooms; to unroll the new rugs and unpack some immediate essentials that can’t wait for tomorrow.
They order a shit ton of pizza instead of bothering to cook anything; promised payment for a day’s work. Tim gets his own quarantine pie with his monstrous ham, onion and artichoke-heart toppings so that nobody else has to risk cross-contamination. Kon hums around his Hawaiian, pleased and relaxed.
The new sectional is comfy, of course. Like Tim would accept anything less. To their right, Cass, Tim and Steph are in some three-way debate about Twilight ships. On the loveseat across the table from them, Jason mutters something to Kara that has her shooting soda out her nose, cackling. Kon’s already swapped the shitty fluorescent apartment lights out for the warmer, dimmer ones they both prefer.
Tim is leaning more and more heavily into his side as he eats and laughs and argues with his family. He’s exhausted, as any human would be after a full day of moving and hauling and rearranging, and he’d been the one to organize most of the move in the first place. But he seems content for now, a warm and heavy weight that settles his nerves.
Eventually, though, everyone finishes eating and packing up leftovers. The sun dips low over the city skyline, and they make their goodbyes as the other bats file one-by-one to the zetas Bruce had installed the week prior, hidden in the apartment beneath theirs behind a false wall. Kara just hugs him once tightly before waving and taking off through the patio doors.
Dick murmurs something soft and warm to Tim’s hair as he squeezes him, dropping a kiss to the crown of his head and laughing when Tim scowls and bats him away. He’s the last to leave, and then they’re alone in their new Metropolis apartment, surrounded by boxes and new furniture. At least the blankets and throw-pillows are the same—a last ditch shot of familiarity.
It’s good. Already Kon can tell it’ll be easier than that first week, when they both tried to tough out the tension steeped into every second breath, the both of them forgetting and remembering and forgetting where they were until they finally gave up and relocated exclusively to their Gotham apartment. It’s just… also sad, too.
Normally, Tim would stay up hours longer than him, but he’s not on shift for patrol today, and he’s already delegated enough WE work in preparation for the moving weekend that he’s got nothing else to do. He flumps like a zombie into bed the moment everyone’s gone, and Kon laughs quietly before floating over to join him.
“Ughh,” Tim groans. He’s still fully dressed and everything. “Let’s never move again.”
A joke jumps to the forefront of his mind about not getting kidnapped by aliens, but he shakes it loose. Too soon for both of them. “Agreed,” he says tactfully instead. “But we’re not done moving yet, sunshine. Still gotta unpack everything tomorrow.”
“I should have hired out.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’d have gone over swimmingly when they found random batarangs and shurikens in the kitchen boxes,” Kon teases. He still sets his TTK to the tense, balled-up rocks in Tim’s neck and shoulders, though, and laughs again when he makes a sound in response that would’ve sent his brothers into a coma.
“Every gothamite has at least one or two,” he grumbles after a moment, waylaid by the massage. “Sometimes you can get them on eBay, even.”
Kon snorts. “Real Gotham batarang for sale. Genuine goon blood dried on wing; may belong to famous crime-lord Penguin. Five hundred dollars or best offer.”
“You joke,” Tim muses, then shudders again as Kon presses the force against his spine, eyes sliding closed. “Agh. Mm. But you’re—not far off.”
The windows are all in the wrong places. The curtains are brighter, too, creamy white and patterned with soft-looking florals. Tim had even taken the liberty of getting a different bed frame. Kon exhales, slight and whispery.
“You should change, Robbie,” he reminds him, nudging his arm with his actual hand. “You’ll fall asleep in your clothes.”
“In a minute,” Tim mutters, which means he’s definitely falling asleep in his sweaty dayclothes. Oh well. “Just resting my eyes.”
“What are you, forty? You sound like Ma.”
“If you want me to get up, you’re gonna have to stop—ah—doing that first,” Tim grunts, even as he stretches his arms up under his pillow and sighs like a languishing cat. “Feels nice.”
“Yeah?” Kon smiles to himself and, obviously, doesn’t stop. “Not surprised. You’ve always got actual rocks up here.”
“I hauled like six chairs and a million boxes today, fuck off. I’m sore.”
“Bet you wish you had tactile telekinesis right about now,” Kon teases, injecting all the swagger he can into his voice. “You know, the most useful and versatile superpower of all time, that even Superman doesn’t—”
Tim seems to find the Herculean strength necessary to roll over and smack him in the face with a pillow, and Kon just snickers into the fabric. “God, shut up. You’re insufferable. Lay down.”
“Dude, I gotta change.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yes I do,” Kon tells him, amused. “That’s gross.”
“Just a little nap,” Tim bargains, and makes a noise of protest when Kon shifts to get up. “Just a little one!”
“A little nap at nine PM? Sure, sunshine.” He rolls his eyes, but it’s fond anyway. “Just give me two minutes.”
“So what I’m hearing is you hate me,” Tim concludes, and squawks when the pillow he’d assaulted him with picks itself up and whaps him over the head. “Hey!”
“You are the most melodramatic little dude I have ever met,” Kon tells him factually, and Tim huffs.
“Jason’s worse than me,” he mutters.
Kon can’t help but choke when he laughs. “Jason’s not a little dude. He’s built like a goddamn refrigerator.”
“Oh, so we’re on to short jokes now?” Tim rolls enough to raise one stark arching brow at him, but he’s smirking too. “You sure are eager to try out the new couch.”
“Okay, Mr. Just a little nap. Whatever you say.” Kon rolls his eyes, but still makes quick work of peeling off his dirty clothes and changing into comfy PJ pants. Boxers-only sleeping is for non-superguys whose various friends and family might shout for help or holler an emergency at three in the morning without warning.
Eventually he slides back into bed, already resigned to Tim dirtying their brand-new sheets. Oh well. He’s sure one of them will bleed on it eventually, anyway.
“Hi,” he murmurs when Tim’s eyes slit back open, clearly having dozed off a bit in the few minutes he’d been left to lay there.
“Hey.” Tim’s mouth curves halfway to a tired smile, then fades back. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah.” It’s not really a lie. He’s been—doing better, really. It’s just strange. “You?”
“Yeah, m’fine,” Tim dismisses. “Glad it’s over.”
He means the move, probably. The worst of the physical labor and the stress of planning and organizing it around his day-job. Kon’s mind, of course, still jumps to the zoo. To the weeks of nightmares, and the few days of Tim’s spiking fever where he had to cope with the hospital setting. To Tim scoping over and over and over for cameras that couldn’t possibly exist.
He slides in close beneath the blankets, close enough to feel Tim’s body heat. Tim smells like sweat and packing peanuts, heart beating low and slow as always. Kon tracks one inhale and the next, and when he moves impulsively to drag him bodily into a cuddle, Tim just laughs quietly and goes with it.
“Yeah,” Kon agrees, softer than he means to. “Me too.”
He feels Tim’s answering smile quirk against his collarbone and feels the words all the way down to his bones. He’ll miss the old apartment, but—it wasn’t home, exactly. This place can be home too, eventually. It really doesn’t take much these days.
Anywhere with Tim can be home, if he wants it to be. Even that stupid enclosure could’ve been.
With that thought in mind, soft and sanguine, Kon exhales and settles in to rest.