FIC: DCFic - The Other Side - R - 4/4 - Kon/Tim/Cassie, Clark/Lex
Oh my god it’s done, there might be a few one shots after this… but the story itself is complete.
*Looks back over at stack of WiP’s, shudders.*
Kon could vividly remember a scene similar to this.
Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
Read these Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first.
TITLE: The Other Side - 4/4
RATING: R
PAIRING: Tim/Kon/Cassie, UST Clark/Lex, Alt Clark/Lex
AUTHOR: Melanie
SPOILERS: Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
DISCLAIMER: The Multiple Earths have returned and one barrier is beginning to stretch thin.
NOTE: The sections in full italics are of the Alternate Earth.
FEEDBACK: Would be lovely.
The Other Side: Part 4
Kon could vividly remember a scene similar to this.
Walking out of his room and finding Bruce and Diana and Clark and Lex all sitting in the living room, solemn faces.
Back then it had been because of him and Cassie and Tim and the fact that Bruce and Diana wanted their relationship ended.
Here, he couldn’t imagine what they would want.
He had no relationship with Cassie and Tim here, and even before whoever his counterpart had been had died, he didn’t think that other Kon had a relationship like that with them.
He couldn’t really tell though, during that one awkward lunch (never again, not in a million years, even if someone paid him to, would he suffer through that again) both Cassie (visibly so) and Tim (not so visibly, but Kon had years reading him under his belt) had seemed slightly irritated that he’d sat on the other side of the table from them, keeping Bart and Dick as buffers through the entire thing.
All eyes turned to him when he entered the room and he almost turned and walked right back out of the room.
“Conner…” Diana started and Kon frowned. Because who the hell was Conner?
“Who the hell is Conner?” he blurted out.
“Kon, language,” Clark said sharply, Lex smirked.
“Don’t even tell me he let you get away with the whole Conner Kent pseudonym thing,” Kon muttered. “Let me guess you stuck him in glasses and flannel and no one figured it out, people are morons.”
“And you didn’t?” Bruce asked, he was staring at him intently, like he could gauge whether or not Kon was lying to him by look alone. Kon wouldn’t put it past him to be able to do exactly that.
“I have a name,” Kon said firmly.
“And a last name?” Diana asked. “You would require one for school, for any legal documents.”
Kon narrowed his eyes at the group of them, Lex still looked amused and Clark uncomfortable but Diana and Bruce were staring at him like he was the most interesting thing that they’d ever seen.
What they weren’t doing was looking at him like he was something disgusting that they had to scrape off the bottom of their shoes.
He rubbed his head and his shoulders slumped, he stared at the ground.
Feeling slightly shamed. Grandma Kent would have batted him upside the head for making assumptions.
He’d been reacting to them in the same manner as he would have been reacting to the Diana and Bruce in his world, like he was being threatened.
Because almost every interaction he’d had with them had been hostile in nature, with one or both of them telling him that he was a freak, an abomination and insisting that he have nothing to do with Cassie or Tim.
“Kent-Luthor, because that was before Lex and Clark got along. They flipped a coin, I think, to decide whose name got to go first…”
And Lex had still been mad, even though Kon had refereed and it had been as fair as a superhero and a superhero in training could make it.
When Clark and Lex had finally… well Lex had wanted to petition to have his name changed to just Luthor (‘we can use the Kent as a middle name’, ‘I’ll get beat up in school’), and he’d wanted Clark to change his as well (‘we’ve got all those papers signed, we’re as close to married as we can get’, ‘we don’t even live together yet and already you’re trying to change me’) and the weekend that Doomsday had attacked they were supposed to have been finally closing Clark’s apartment up and he was going to move fully into the penthouse with them and they were going to be a family.
He missed his fathers suddenly, violently and he wished he’d gotten just one opportunity to call them that to their faces. So he could see Lex’s face crinkle into a smile that he rarely used and see Clark beam at him as bright as the sun.
He felt Clark’s arm go over his shoulders and let himself be led to the couch.
These weren’t his parents, but they were trying just as hard as his parents had at the beginning.
He was sat down between Clark and Lex like the two would protect him if Diana and/or Bruce got violent.
“So your name was Kon Kent-Luthor then,” Diana was smiling gently at him when he looked over at her. It was not an expression that he was used to seeing on her face when she was dealing with him.
And it hit home suddenly that for all intents and purposes these people were strangers to him.
He didn’t know them, didn’t know what the other Kon (Conner’s) relationship with them might have been.
“Yeah…” he rubbed at his chest, his heart hurt and he wanted desperately to go back to his room and wallow in his grief some more, “why are you here?”
“Diana and Bruce are just here to find out how you’re doing,” Lex said neutrally. “Make sure you’re in good health and everything.”
So they were here to check up on him and probably Lex and Clark and glances at both men indicated that they were quite aware of that fact, and that neither liked it very much.
Kon wanted to tell them to get used to it, for the first month after Kon had gone to live with his Lex, Batman had required them to fill out long depositions and undergo medical tests to make sure that they weren’t being brainwashed or tortured, to verify that they hadn’t been replaced by robots.
Lex had taken it fairly well; he’d only bought two or three of Bruce’s smaller companies in retaliation, and eventually everyone had relaxed.
Or relaxed as much as Batman could get.
“The Titans have expressed an interest in having Kon join them on the weekends,” Bruce said.
Kon looked over at Lex and saw him firmly biting his tongue to keep from saying ‘over my dead body’.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea at the moment,” Clark said instead and both Kon and Lex looked at him in surprise.
Of the people who’d had issues with Kon joining Young Justice and then the Titans, Clark had never been one of them.
“He should be interacting with kids in his own age instead of being cooped up in this penthouse for days on end,” Diana said firmly. Which just led Kon to believe that he was being watched by more then just the Titans.
“I’m just…” Kon stared at the table and wondered if it would look weird to pick up one of the cookies just to have something to do with his hands. “I’m not ready yet.”
******************************************************************************
Tim was waiting for him when he arrived back at the Manor, he was sitting at the table in the dining room, schoolwork spread out in front of him though Bruce could say with certainty that Tim hadn’t been working on any of it.
He looked at him expectantly, pen tapping against the paper in front of him. A list that Bruce didn’t get a chance to see before Tim closed up his books on him.
“He declined the invitation,” Bruce said simply. He shrugged out of his coat and Alfred appeared from nowhere to take it from his hands before he could set it over the back of a chair, instead settling it over his arm and scowling at him.
“He doesn’t want to come back to the Titans?”
“He says he’s not ready yet,” Bruce pulled out a chair, sat down and waited for Dick to appear.
“He says he’s not ready, or Luthor has decided that he’s not returning?” Tim was asking when Dick came around the corner.
“Clark made the statement first, Kon agreed with him and Luthor was mostly silent during the entire meeting.”
It had been… as far from normal as you could get with Clark Kent and Lex Luthor sitting side by side on a couch answering questions about their ‘son’ and talking over one another like they were friends.
Bruce had kept wanting to pinch himself, test himself to make sure he wasn’t sleeping. Wasn’t in the throes of a nightmare that he couldn’t wake from.
And then Kon had appeared, looking pale and tired and Bruce had never before thought of what Clark would have been like as a father (never mind that he thought that Lex should never be allowed to procreate period) but he and Diana had a front row seat for it.
And Kon… he’d looked at them at first like he’d expected them to attack them and then some switch had triggered and it was like he’d remembered where he was and he’d become even more pale.
The boy was quiet… too quiet. Their Kon had always been full of energy and life and Bruce had always kind of assumed that he just wasn’t all that bright, basing his assumptions on the detentions that Tim mentioned him serving after school, based on Clark’s complaints about his grades.
Maybe he just hadn’t been applying himself, because Clark, at least, had filled the role of proud parent, talking about the testing that Lex’s private tutors had been forcing Kon to undergo to find out where he was school-wise.
Excited about how far ahead he was, how smart he was.
Bruce wouldn’t be surprised to see some sticker on the bumper of Clark’s beat-up car attesting to that fact.
“So no go on the Titans then,” Dick ruffled Tim’s hair as he walked past, ignoring Tim’s glare as he pulled out a chair to slouch down in.
“Did you offer up a different team?” Tim asked.
“We mentioned that there were other options available to him,” Alfred re-appeared with a tray, Bruce eyed the glass that was set in front of him and hoped it was filled with alcohol.
Tim leaned back in his chair, not pleased, Dick looked unsurprised.
“You didn’t think he would accept the offer,” Bruce wrapped his hand around the glass, took a sip. No alcohol, he was slightly mournful for that fact.
Dick shrugged.
“He only made eye contact with Tim and Cassie maybe three times during lunch…”
“You mean that lunch where you should have been going through training exercises with the Titans and instead took Tim, Cassie and Bart to Metropolis so they could stalk Kon?”
They’d heard all about it, the first words out of Lex’s mouth when they’d arrived at the penthouse were that they might want to consider putting their sidekicks on leashes.
Dick looked unapologetic. “We were practicing stealth; obviously they need a bit more work.”
******************************************************************************
He had to check twice to verify that who was at the door was actually who was there.
Of all the people that he had thought would start showing up on their doorstep, Bart had ranked in the bottom ten not the top.
He swung the door open and was faced with Bart’s blinding smile.
“Good afternoon Mr. Kent,” courteous, well-mannered. Clark peered behind him to make sure that Tim hadn’t developed an invisibility cloak in the last three days and was using Bart as a decoy to get himself and Cassie into the penthouse.
Bart turned his head to look behind him and then turned back to him.
“Sir?”
“You’re by yourself?” Clark asked with mild confusion.
“They’re still arguing about who should actually be making first contact with Kon and I decided that we’d all be gray and in rockers before they actually came to some kind of consensus…” Bart shrugged, suddenly looking sheepish.
Clark lowered his arm and let Bart enter. Lex came out of his office, looked at Clark, at Bart and then back at Clark, shook his head and walked back in the direction of Kon’s room.
“We were going about this all wrong you know, everyone’s trying to treat Kon like he’s our Kon and no one is really sure of what exactly his relationships were with any of us. You know besides the one with Tim and Cassie, which you know about right? Because if not… well anyway I thought I’d come and introduce myself because we’re really only strangers to him and I thought maybe if we went through the introduction phase that maybe he’d at least attempt a Titans weekend…”
“Dude you should really breathe,” Kon’s voice was soft, but there was a thread of something under it that Clark hadn’t heard before.
Bart smiled at him, face wide open and happy and Kon smiled back at him tentatively. Clark took a step back but didn’t leave the room, just yet. He knew that Lex was hovering at the end of the hall, just out of sight but within hearing range just in case…
He wasn’t sure why he was thinking in just in cases; Bart had been nothing but a friend to Kon. To either version and there was no reason for him to attack. No reason for Kon to break any further then he already had.
“Hi,” Bart waved, took a deep breath and then three steps forward so that he was standing directly in front of Kon.
Clark thought, somewhat crazily, that with Bart’s last growth spurt he was now the same height as Kon because their eyes were level and they were staring at each other.
Clark took another step back and wished that one of his abilities was turning invisible. He was afraid to breathe in case it disturbed whatever Bart was attempting to do here, whatever he was doing that was working.
Because Kon wasn’t tensing up or averting his eyes, his face hadn’t closed down and he hadn’t left the room to grieve for his world once more.
He stuck out his hand and Kon stared down at it for a second.
“Hi, I’m Bart Allen,” Bart’s face was still bright and open, but his voice was shaking. Like he wasn’t sure that whatever he had planned was going to work, but that he was willing to try anything at this point
Kon looked at him and then took his hand, shaking it slowly.
“Kon Kent-Luthor,” Kon’s voice was soft.
Hopeful.
Clark realized that he was trembling and took a slow breath, forced himself to relax.
“Wow that’s a mouthful,” Bart laughed once.
“You said that before, the first time that we met.”
And Kon grinned at him.
******************************************************************************
“You really think this is a good idea?” Lex asked him.
Bart and Kon were still in the living room, there was a movie on that they were ignoring and bowl of popcorn sitting on the couch between them but they were laughing instead.
Talking.
Kon wasn’t shuddering away or hiding himself, he was sitting on a couch laughing with Bart and he was relaxed and happy.
“Look at him.” Clark gestured at the boys, young men really. If someone had told him a week ago that Bart would be the one to figure out what needed to be done he would have recommended an extended stay in a psychiatric ward.
He knew several after all. Lex was even on a first name basis with some of the doctors.
“Maybe all he needed was someone to realize that regardless of who he had been here; to him we were all strangers.”
“So if Cassie or Tim had walked up to him, introduced themselves and shook his hand instead of acting like he was their resurrected dead best friend, everything would have been okay.”
Clark shook his head.
“Not them, I think he needed someone that he didn’t have conflicting memories of. He loved them, he hated them, his feelings for them aren’t all tied up in some neat little package. He needed someone like Bart, or even Dick or Connor probably would have worked. He just needed someone to walk up to him and shake his hand and ask his name and not treat him like they’d known him his entire life. Because we haven’t,” Clark looked over at Lex who was still watching Kon and Bart, a small smile on his lips.
“It feels like we have,” Lex said softly. Face gentle and for a brief second Clark saw the young man that he’d first met.
The one that he’d dragged from a river and offered his friendship to.
In another world he’d shared his son with this man, maybe in this one he could too.
******************************************************************************
“It’s going to be fine,” Bart was saying.
It was hard in his mind to remember to call Bart the Flash instead of Kid Flash, so instead he just called him Bart and hoped that they wouldn’t have a mission before he could resolve it all in his head.
Of the three of them standing on the roof he was the only one in full costume, and he was vibrating with enough nervous energy that Tim was tempted to tell him to go run a few miles before Kon showed.
Cassie and he were in civilian clothes, Bart’s idea. The rest of the Titan’s were waiting just inside.
Tim hadn’t decided yet if this was a good idea or a bad idea, but since Bart’s plan had worked and got Kon to agree to a visit (one visit and Tim was already devising ways to make sure that a second and a third and a fourth and so on happened…), well they were going with Bart’s idea’s at this point.
“He’s probably going to be a little nervous,” Bart said.
“What’s he got to be nervous about?” Cassie murmured next to him.
He glanced over. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She looked as uncomfortable as he felt.
“You remember what I told you right?” Bart asked nervously, darting in front of them.
“Bart why don’t you go run a few laps,” Tim said quietly.
Bart took a deep breath and visibly forced himself to relax.
“No, I’m okay,” he smiled at them. “I promised him that I’d be here when he came, familiar face and all…”
Tim squinted and saw two figures approaching, Cassie tensed beside him and in front of them Bart was vibrating again.
They touched down silently, Superman’s cape blowing gently in the wind and Tim stared at the boy standing next to him.
Kon was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, plain black, no S-shield, his hair wasn’t as close-cut as his Kon’s had been.
He looked exactly the same and vastly different all at once.
He also looked nervous and a bit apprehensive and Tim and by his side Cassie stayed still.
If they scared him away now they would never get him to come back to Titan’s Tower again, Tim was 95% sure of that.
Bart moved forward, a quick hug that Kon returned hesitantly. Like he still wasn’t sure about all this but was willing to give it a try… Tim heard Cassie draw in a deep breath beside him and let it out slowly.
It served to remind him that he needed to breathe as well.
Superman stayed where he was, a silent watchful shadow and Tim had no doubt that Luthor had some satellite somewhere pointed directly at them so he could watch the entire first meeting.
Bart had a grip on Kon’s arm and was leading him toward them.
“These are my friends that I was telling you about,” Bart was saying, his eyes were telling them to calm down and not to freak out and Kon looked about two seconds away from being violently ill or diving off the roof whichever he could manage first without embarrassing himself.
“Tim Drake, Cassie Sandsmark,” Bart was all light voice and big smile. “This is Kon Kent-Luthor,” Tim started slightly at the name, even though he’d been warned.
Bruce had made mention of it, numerous times… had told him and Dick both in an incredibly droll voice that in his world Kon had never been Conner Kent.
That there’d never been an apparent need for that alias because he’d been taken in by both Superman and Lex Luthor and they’d fought over how to raise the boy (who’d been twelve, Tim couldn’t imagine how weird the world would have been for a twelve year-old Superboy as opposed to the fifteen year-old that had been their Kon).
Lex Luthor and Clark Kent had raised him in the best manner they could considering that they’d probably still been arch enemies at the beginning and Tim wondered how that had worked…
Had Kon alternated weekends depending on who was fighting who and whether or not Luthor had an evil plot in place to destroy Superman?
How Kon hadn’t been forced to choose one over the other they would probably never figure out.
But all this meant that he’d never gone to Smallville, had never been given the Conner Kent alias, had never lived on the farm with Mr. and Mrs. Kent.
Because he’d never needed to.
Tim wondered if he’d still been given the El name by Superman and decided that he had to have, Kon had responded to that name at the Tower. It had been Clark saying that name to him that had gotten Kon to release his impromptu shielding in the first place after all.
Cassie started to hold out her hand but Tim beat her to the actual action and Kon looked at him for a brief second, searching his face for something before he took Tim’s hand.
Grip strong and sure and he smiled at Tim suddenly. Behind him Tim saw Superman relax, close his eyes and bow his head.
“Hi…” Tim smiled at him; he hoped it didn’t look as uncomfortable as it felt. Because it seemed like forever since he’d last smiled, since there’d been an actual reason for him to do so.
“Welcome to the Titans.”
******************************************************************************
*Looks back over at stack of WiP’s, shudders.*
Kon could vividly remember a scene similar to this.
Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
Read these Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first.
TITLE: The Other Side - 4/4
RATING: R
PAIRING: Tim/Kon/Cassie, UST Clark/Lex, Alt Clark/Lex
AUTHOR: Melanie
SPOILERS: Spoilers, for all of Teen Titans, Infinite Crisis 1-7. That should be it.
DISCLAIMER: The Multiple Earths have returned and one barrier is beginning to stretch thin.
NOTE: The sections in full italics are of the Alternate Earth.
FEEDBACK: Would be lovely.
The Other Side: Part 4
Kon could vividly remember a scene similar to this.
Walking out of his room and finding Bruce and Diana and Clark and Lex all sitting in the living room, solemn faces.
Back then it had been because of him and Cassie and Tim and the fact that Bruce and Diana wanted their relationship ended.
Here, he couldn’t imagine what they would want.
He had no relationship with Cassie and Tim here, and even before whoever his counterpart had been had died, he didn’t think that other Kon had a relationship like that with them.
He couldn’t really tell though, during that one awkward lunch (never again, not in a million years, even if someone paid him to, would he suffer through that again) both Cassie (visibly so) and Tim (not so visibly, but Kon had years reading him under his belt) had seemed slightly irritated that he’d sat on the other side of the table from them, keeping Bart and Dick as buffers through the entire thing.
All eyes turned to him when he entered the room and he almost turned and walked right back out of the room.
“Conner…” Diana started and Kon frowned. Because who the hell was Conner?
“Who the hell is Conner?” he blurted out.
“Kon, language,” Clark said sharply, Lex smirked.
“Don’t even tell me he let you get away with the whole Conner Kent pseudonym thing,” Kon muttered. “Let me guess you stuck him in glasses and flannel and no one figured it out, people are morons.”
“And you didn’t?” Bruce asked, he was staring at him intently, like he could gauge whether or not Kon was lying to him by look alone. Kon wouldn’t put it past him to be able to do exactly that.
“I have a name,” Kon said firmly.
“And a last name?” Diana asked. “You would require one for school, for any legal documents.”
Kon narrowed his eyes at the group of them, Lex still looked amused and Clark uncomfortable but Diana and Bruce were staring at him like he was the most interesting thing that they’d ever seen.
What they weren’t doing was looking at him like he was something disgusting that they had to scrape off the bottom of their shoes.
He rubbed his head and his shoulders slumped, he stared at the ground.
Feeling slightly shamed. Grandma Kent would have batted him upside the head for making assumptions.
He’d been reacting to them in the same manner as he would have been reacting to the Diana and Bruce in his world, like he was being threatened.
Because almost every interaction he’d had with them had been hostile in nature, with one or both of them telling him that he was a freak, an abomination and insisting that he have nothing to do with Cassie or Tim.
“Kent-Luthor, because that was before Lex and Clark got along. They flipped a coin, I think, to decide whose name got to go first…”
And Lex had still been mad, even though Kon had refereed and it had been as fair as a superhero and a superhero in training could make it.
When Clark and Lex had finally… well Lex had wanted to petition to have his name changed to just Luthor (‘we can use the Kent as a middle name’, ‘I’ll get beat up in school’), and he’d wanted Clark to change his as well (‘we’ve got all those papers signed, we’re as close to married as we can get’, ‘we don’t even live together yet and already you’re trying to change me’) and the weekend that Doomsday had attacked they were supposed to have been finally closing Clark’s apartment up and he was going to move fully into the penthouse with them and they were going to be a family.
He missed his fathers suddenly, violently and he wished he’d gotten just one opportunity to call them that to their faces. So he could see Lex’s face crinkle into a smile that he rarely used and see Clark beam at him as bright as the sun.
He felt Clark’s arm go over his shoulders and let himself be led to the couch.
These weren’t his parents, but they were trying just as hard as his parents had at the beginning.
He was sat down between Clark and Lex like the two would protect him if Diana and/or Bruce got violent.
“So your name was Kon Kent-Luthor then,” Diana was smiling gently at him when he looked over at her. It was not an expression that he was used to seeing on her face when she was dealing with him.
And it hit home suddenly that for all intents and purposes these people were strangers to him.
He didn’t know them, didn’t know what the other Kon (Conner’s) relationship with them might have been.
“Yeah…” he rubbed at his chest, his heart hurt and he wanted desperately to go back to his room and wallow in his grief some more, “why are you here?”
“Diana and Bruce are just here to find out how you’re doing,” Lex said neutrally. “Make sure you’re in good health and everything.”
So they were here to check up on him and probably Lex and Clark and glances at both men indicated that they were quite aware of that fact, and that neither liked it very much.
Kon wanted to tell them to get used to it, for the first month after Kon had gone to live with his Lex, Batman had required them to fill out long depositions and undergo medical tests to make sure that they weren’t being brainwashed or tortured, to verify that they hadn’t been replaced by robots.
Lex had taken it fairly well; he’d only bought two or three of Bruce’s smaller companies in retaliation, and eventually everyone had relaxed.
Or relaxed as much as Batman could get.
“The Titans have expressed an interest in having Kon join them on the weekends,” Bruce said.
Kon looked over at Lex and saw him firmly biting his tongue to keep from saying ‘over my dead body’.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea at the moment,” Clark said instead and both Kon and Lex looked at him in surprise.
Of the people who’d had issues with Kon joining Young Justice and then the Titans, Clark had never been one of them.
“He should be interacting with kids in his own age instead of being cooped up in this penthouse for days on end,” Diana said firmly. Which just led Kon to believe that he was being watched by more then just the Titans.
“I’m just…” Kon stared at the table and wondered if it would look weird to pick up one of the cookies just to have something to do with his hands. “I’m not ready yet.”
******************************************************************************
Tim was waiting for him when he arrived back at the Manor, he was sitting at the table in the dining room, schoolwork spread out in front of him though Bruce could say with certainty that Tim hadn’t been working on any of it.
He looked at him expectantly, pen tapping against the paper in front of him. A list that Bruce didn’t get a chance to see before Tim closed up his books on him.
“He declined the invitation,” Bruce said simply. He shrugged out of his coat and Alfred appeared from nowhere to take it from his hands before he could set it over the back of a chair, instead settling it over his arm and scowling at him.
“He doesn’t want to come back to the Titans?”
“He says he’s not ready yet,” Bruce pulled out a chair, sat down and waited for Dick to appear.
“He says he’s not ready, or Luthor has decided that he’s not returning?” Tim was asking when Dick came around the corner.
“Clark made the statement first, Kon agreed with him and Luthor was mostly silent during the entire meeting.”
It had been… as far from normal as you could get with Clark Kent and Lex Luthor sitting side by side on a couch answering questions about their ‘son’ and talking over one another like they were friends.
Bruce had kept wanting to pinch himself, test himself to make sure he wasn’t sleeping. Wasn’t in the throes of a nightmare that he couldn’t wake from.
And then Kon had appeared, looking pale and tired and Bruce had never before thought of what Clark would have been like as a father (never mind that he thought that Lex should never be allowed to procreate period) but he and Diana had a front row seat for it.
And Kon… he’d looked at them at first like he’d expected them to attack them and then some switch had triggered and it was like he’d remembered where he was and he’d become even more pale.
The boy was quiet… too quiet. Their Kon had always been full of energy and life and Bruce had always kind of assumed that he just wasn’t all that bright, basing his assumptions on the detentions that Tim mentioned him serving after school, based on Clark’s complaints about his grades.
Maybe he just hadn’t been applying himself, because Clark, at least, had filled the role of proud parent, talking about the testing that Lex’s private tutors had been forcing Kon to undergo to find out where he was school-wise.
Excited about how far ahead he was, how smart he was.
Bruce wouldn’t be surprised to see some sticker on the bumper of Clark’s beat-up car attesting to that fact.
“So no go on the Titans then,” Dick ruffled Tim’s hair as he walked past, ignoring Tim’s glare as he pulled out a chair to slouch down in.
“Did you offer up a different team?” Tim asked.
“We mentioned that there were other options available to him,” Alfred re-appeared with a tray, Bruce eyed the glass that was set in front of him and hoped it was filled with alcohol.
Tim leaned back in his chair, not pleased, Dick looked unsurprised.
“You didn’t think he would accept the offer,” Bruce wrapped his hand around the glass, took a sip. No alcohol, he was slightly mournful for that fact.
Dick shrugged.
“He only made eye contact with Tim and Cassie maybe three times during lunch…”
“You mean that lunch where you should have been going through training exercises with the Titans and instead took Tim, Cassie and Bart to Metropolis so they could stalk Kon?”
They’d heard all about it, the first words out of Lex’s mouth when they’d arrived at the penthouse were that they might want to consider putting their sidekicks on leashes.
Dick looked unapologetic. “We were practicing stealth; obviously they need a bit more work.”
******************************************************************************
He had to check twice to verify that who was at the door was actually who was there.
Of all the people that he had thought would start showing up on their doorstep, Bart had ranked in the bottom ten not the top.
He swung the door open and was faced with Bart’s blinding smile.
“Good afternoon Mr. Kent,” courteous, well-mannered. Clark peered behind him to make sure that Tim hadn’t developed an invisibility cloak in the last three days and was using Bart as a decoy to get himself and Cassie into the penthouse.
Bart turned his head to look behind him and then turned back to him.
“Sir?”
“You’re by yourself?” Clark asked with mild confusion.
“They’re still arguing about who should actually be making first contact with Kon and I decided that we’d all be gray and in rockers before they actually came to some kind of consensus…” Bart shrugged, suddenly looking sheepish.
Clark lowered his arm and let Bart enter. Lex came out of his office, looked at Clark, at Bart and then back at Clark, shook his head and walked back in the direction of Kon’s room.
“We were going about this all wrong you know, everyone’s trying to treat Kon like he’s our Kon and no one is really sure of what exactly his relationships were with any of us. You know besides the one with Tim and Cassie, which you know about right? Because if not… well anyway I thought I’d come and introduce myself because we’re really only strangers to him and I thought maybe if we went through the introduction phase that maybe he’d at least attempt a Titans weekend…”
“Dude you should really breathe,” Kon’s voice was soft, but there was a thread of something under it that Clark hadn’t heard before.
Bart smiled at him, face wide open and happy and Kon smiled back at him tentatively. Clark took a step back but didn’t leave the room, just yet. He knew that Lex was hovering at the end of the hall, just out of sight but within hearing range just in case…
He wasn’t sure why he was thinking in just in cases; Bart had been nothing but a friend to Kon. To either version and there was no reason for him to attack. No reason for Kon to break any further then he already had.
“Hi,” Bart waved, took a deep breath and then three steps forward so that he was standing directly in front of Kon.
Clark thought, somewhat crazily, that with Bart’s last growth spurt he was now the same height as Kon because their eyes were level and they were staring at each other.
Clark took another step back and wished that one of his abilities was turning invisible. He was afraid to breathe in case it disturbed whatever Bart was attempting to do here, whatever he was doing that was working.
Because Kon wasn’t tensing up or averting his eyes, his face hadn’t closed down and he hadn’t left the room to grieve for his world once more.
He stuck out his hand and Kon stared down at it for a second.
“Hi, I’m Bart Allen,” Bart’s face was still bright and open, but his voice was shaking. Like he wasn’t sure that whatever he had planned was going to work, but that he was willing to try anything at this point
Kon looked at him and then took his hand, shaking it slowly.
“Kon Kent-Luthor,” Kon’s voice was soft.
Hopeful.
Clark realized that he was trembling and took a slow breath, forced himself to relax.
“Wow that’s a mouthful,” Bart laughed once.
“You said that before, the first time that we met.”
And Kon grinned at him.
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“You really think this is a good idea?” Lex asked him.
Bart and Kon were still in the living room, there was a movie on that they were ignoring and bowl of popcorn sitting on the couch between them but they were laughing instead.
Talking.
Kon wasn’t shuddering away or hiding himself, he was sitting on a couch laughing with Bart and he was relaxed and happy.
“Look at him.” Clark gestured at the boys, young men really. If someone had told him a week ago that Bart would be the one to figure out what needed to be done he would have recommended an extended stay in a psychiatric ward.
He knew several after all. Lex was even on a first name basis with some of the doctors.
“Maybe all he needed was someone to realize that regardless of who he had been here; to him we were all strangers.”
“So if Cassie or Tim had walked up to him, introduced themselves and shook his hand instead of acting like he was their resurrected dead best friend, everything would have been okay.”
Clark shook his head.
“Not them, I think he needed someone that he didn’t have conflicting memories of. He loved them, he hated them, his feelings for them aren’t all tied up in some neat little package. He needed someone like Bart, or even Dick or Connor probably would have worked. He just needed someone to walk up to him and shake his hand and ask his name and not treat him like they’d known him his entire life. Because we haven’t,” Clark looked over at Lex who was still watching Kon and Bart, a small smile on his lips.
“It feels like we have,” Lex said softly. Face gentle and for a brief second Clark saw the young man that he’d first met.
The one that he’d dragged from a river and offered his friendship to.
In another world he’d shared his son with this man, maybe in this one he could too.
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“It’s going to be fine,” Bart was saying.
It was hard in his mind to remember to call Bart the Flash instead of Kid Flash, so instead he just called him Bart and hoped that they wouldn’t have a mission before he could resolve it all in his head.
Of the three of them standing on the roof he was the only one in full costume, and he was vibrating with enough nervous energy that Tim was tempted to tell him to go run a few miles before Kon showed.
Cassie and he were in civilian clothes, Bart’s idea. The rest of the Titan’s were waiting just inside.
Tim hadn’t decided yet if this was a good idea or a bad idea, but since Bart’s plan had worked and got Kon to agree to a visit (one visit and Tim was already devising ways to make sure that a second and a third and a fourth and so on happened…), well they were going with Bart’s idea’s at this point.
“He’s probably going to be a little nervous,” Bart said.
“What’s he got to be nervous about?” Cassie murmured next to him.
He glanced over. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She looked as uncomfortable as he felt.
“You remember what I told you right?” Bart asked nervously, darting in front of them.
“Bart why don’t you go run a few laps,” Tim said quietly.
Bart took a deep breath and visibly forced himself to relax.
“No, I’m okay,” he smiled at them. “I promised him that I’d be here when he came, familiar face and all…”
Tim squinted and saw two figures approaching, Cassie tensed beside him and in front of them Bart was vibrating again.
They touched down silently, Superman’s cape blowing gently in the wind and Tim stared at the boy standing next to him.
Kon was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, plain black, no S-shield, his hair wasn’t as close-cut as his Kon’s had been.
He looked exactly the same and vastly different all at once.
He also looked nervous and a bit apprehensive and Tim and by his side Cassie stayed still.
If they scared him away now they would never get him to come back to Titan’s Tower again, Tim was 95% sure of that.
Bart moved forward, a quick hug that Kon returned hesitantly. Like he still wasn’t sure about all this but was willing to give it a try… Tim heard Cassie draw in a deep breath beside him and let it out slowly.
It served to remind him that he needed to breathe as well.
Superman stayed where he was, a silent watchful shadow and Tim had no doubt that Luthor had some satellite somewhere pointed directly at them so he could watch the entire first meeting.
Bart had a grip on Kon’s arm and was leading him toward them.
“These are my friends that I was telling you about,” Bart was saying, his eyes were telling them to calm down and not to freak out and Kon looked about two seconds away from being violently ill or diving off the roof whichever he could manage first without embarrassing himself.
“Tim Drake, Cassie Sandsmark,” Bart was all light voice and big smile. “This is Kon Kent-Luthor,” Tim started slightly at the name, even though he’d been warned.
Bruce had made mention of it, numerous times… had told him and Dick both in an incredibly droll voice that in his world Kon had never been Conner Kent.
That there’d never been an apparent need for that alias because he’d been taken in by both Superman and Lex Luthor and they’d fought over how to raise the boy (who’d been twelve, Tim couldn’t imagine how weird the world would have been for a twelve year-old Superboy as opposed to the fifteen year-old that had been their Kon).
Lex Luthor and Clark Kent had raised him in the best manner they could considering that they’d probably still been arch enemies at the beginning and Tim wondered how that had worked…
Had Kon alternated weekends depending on who was fighting who and whether or not Luthor had an evil plot in place to destroy Superman?
How Kon hadn’t been forced to choose one over the other they would probably never figure out.
But all this meant that he’d never gone to Smallville, had never been given the Conner Kent alias, had never lived on the farm with Mr. and Mrs. Kent.
Because he’d never needed to.
Tim wondered if he’d still been given the El name by Superman and decided that he had to have, Kon had responded to that name at the Tower. It had been Clark saying that name to him that had gotten Kon to release his impromptu shielding in the first place after all.
Cassie started to hold out her hand but Tim beat her to the actual action and Kon looked at him for a brief second, searching his face for something before he took Tim’s hand.
Grip strong and sure and he smiled at Tim suddenly. Behind him Tim saw Superman relax, close his eyes and bow his head.
“Hi…” Tim smiled at him; he hoped it didn’t look as uncomfortable as it felt. Because it seemed like forever since he’d last smiled, since there’d been an actual reason for him to do so.
“Welcome to the Titans.”
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