Chapter Text
‘Experiment 13’ is a bit of a misnomer.
He’d been the hardiest among a multitude of cell lines injected with hybrid DNA and inundated in enzyme-rich solution. There had been many before him, beginning as a single cell, cleaving into two, then four. And eight and sixteen and—a bust.
(Some of these details Kon knows solely because of files retrieved from Cadmus databases. He’d read hundreds of pages of notes and jargon he could only partly understand during a fit of paranoia.
Issue with nutrient solution. Possible contaminant; teratogenic properties? No further division taking place, cause unclear; assay cell contents to investigate.
Did Tim pore through every detail with a fine-toothed comb while raiding all those labs for cloning paraphernalia? When he tried and failed, nearly a hundred times, to make another Superboy?)
When the first hundred-twenty-eight pieces of him remained viable, less than a week later, Cadmus gave Kon his first name: sample E-M3-209. His second was as number thirteen, having graduated as the latest of twelve clones to survive the full gestational period.
Once Cadmus deemed him stable enough to transfer into the incubation chamber he’d eventually burst out of, they watched him grow. And when he was big enough, electrodes were hooked to his temples to seep into his emerging consciousness, still a tiny protostar, semi-gaseous and converging, condensing.
____
The world is quiet and empty. Sound does not travel in vacuums.
Hello, whispers Cadmus, trespassing through the darkness in a low crawl. You are destined for great things.
Light. The whir of machines muffled by liquid.
Hello. You are experiment 13, but soon you will be the next Superman. You belong to Cadmus. You will do as we say.
Thirteen. Superman. Superboy. He has no true name. No identity. He wishes he had a real name.
We are on a planet called Earth. It is a large, vibrant place with countries, oceans and cities. People. Animals, plants. Unenumerable ecosystems in forests, caves, in the furthest depths of the sea that even light cannot touch. It is full of life. And we give life to you.
Project Cadmus is currently established near Metropolis, a megacity located in the eastern United States. You belong to Cadmus. You will be great. You will be revered. You will do as we say.
What is a country? A political state. What is an ocean? A large body of saline water. It is full of plankton, bacteria and fish. What is a—
What is he? He will be Superman.
Who is he? Who am I?
The Earth rotates on its own axis as it orbits around the sun, completing one revolution every twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes and four seconds. The sun is a yellow dwarf star that serves as the centerpiece of our solar system. It is ninety-three million miles from Earth. It is the source of your power. At night, the sky is dark, and we can see our natural satellite, the moon. We can see the stars.
Thirteen has never seen a fish, or the sea. He does not know what the moon looks like. He knows it is round. That it glows; that only one side of the lunar surface is viewable from Earth.
He’d like to see the moon for real.
Hello. You are experiment thirteen. You will be Superman. Cadmus is your home. You will do as we say.
No one tells him what to do.
He doesn’t want—he doesn’t want this. He wants to go outside. They’ll start implanting the code words soon if he doesn’t get out. He has to get out. He wants to go outside. He wants to see the night sky.
The monitors nearby flash with a warning; a significant absence of slow brain waves in the past seventeen minutes—too persistent to be REM sleep.
Thirteen’s nutrient solution is doused with sedative. He is paralyzed.
Hello. You are—
There is a power surge. Shouting. A call for security.
Thirteen staggers out, choking on his first gulps of air. So frigid, unlike the tepid, syrupy warmth of his chamber. He crumples to his knees; thirteen has never used his legs before. The electrodes detach from his skin with wet pop, pop, pops following a struggle with gravity and his own insistent tugs. His lungs clear; fluid spills out from his windpipe, through his nostrils and lungs, dribbling down his chin. It burns, and he can hear for the first time without the inch-thick buffer of glass—
The world is so loud. His brain, startled to full alertness, tries to classify everything Cadmus taught him, like an endless slideshow reel. Terabytes of information flash through his awareness until it blots together into one incoherent mess.
Thirteen wobbles—hello—My how you’ve grown—you are—
Kon. His name is Kon-El. He clenches at his hair. Everything is loud and sharp; his skull thrums and tightens, building more and more pressure.
The lights have turned red, swooping across the laboratory space in broad circles. It draws hard lines against the boundaries of shadow that fill the unlit room. Kon is surrounded by people, all of them shouting. Alarms blare from above. In the background is the wheeze of disconnected pressure gauges, machines spitting liquid.
Heart hammering, coughing up water and spit, Kon scrambles to his feet, struggling to find purchase on slippery linoleum. Someone lunges at him—tries to pin him down.
With a yell he thrashes, newborn and uncoordinated. Wrestling himself free with a forceful kick, Kon attempts to stand again right as another figure tries to sneak up from behind.
Kon whirls, snatching their forearm. With his strength that would be enough, but his fingers act on autopilot, clamping down like a vise.
And he twists.
The bones give away like a pair of toothpicks, the sharp crack wiping out all other noise. A scream pierces the air. Kon throws them to the ground, their body colliding into equipment in a blur of green and red.
And yellow, and yellow and green and—
Tim?
“Tim!”
Kon sprints over, his earlier clumsiness all but gone. With shaking hands, he digs Tim out of a pile of metal and tubing.
Tim’s face is completely bloodless, his good hand trembling as it clenches his broken arm. Kon gathers him up, mind spiraling around a useless loop of what has he done what has he done how could he, slithering around his torso until it feels as if his ribs will shatter.
“I’m sorry,” Kon says, dizzy, throat still burning—this time with bile, rancid against the roof of his mouth.
This isn’t real. This can’t be real; during Kon’s initial escape he’d tied up the head scientist before escaping through an air duct. Robin and Impulse came later. The costume is wrong, too; Tim is Red Robin now. Red and black. Taller, gaunter.
This isn’t real.
The terror is.
“Kon,” Tim wheezes. “It’s okay. Breathe.”
They are alone. Tim’s body is laid against cold tile, the emergency beacon lights dancing against the angles of his face. There is red against the red of his suit, red against the deeper red of the blood leaking out through torn muscle, wetting fabric.
“I’m so sorry,” Kon says.
Tim’s expression goes eerily blank. Not the determined neutrality that he wears on the field; his eyes are hard as they fix onto Kon’s face. The air grows acrid and viscous, slow like sap.
Kon tries to reach for Tim’s ruined arm; his powers can probably set the bone. It’s bent outwards, pink and ivory-white bone poking out of flesh.
Tim tenses. “Don’t.”
“I–”
“Haven’t you done enough?” Tim says, breathing labored. Are his ribs broken, too? “It’s in—in your programming. You’re a program. You’re not meant to fix things.”
Tim would never talk to him with so much malice. Through the haze of panic and raw, raw fear he questions what is going on.
Kon argues anyway, like he can’t control his speaking. He is a secondary presence in his own head, locked in his own body, just like he was when—
“I’m more than that.”
Tim scoffs. “No. You’re not.”
“I’m not a weapon. You told me so. I’m more than that; you told me I was,” Kon insists, voice growing thick. “Tim. Please. You’re hurt; let me help. I can get us out of here.”
“You did this,” Tim counters, voice discordant and out of sync with his lips. “And I was wrong. I was wrong to have faith in you. It’s not your fault. I know you want to be good, Kon, but that’s not—”
____
Kon wakes up slowly and silently, with hot tears streaked down his face.
____
It’s three-fifteen in the morning. Kon unlatches his bedroom door as carefully as possible, floating even though the tower’s flooring is firm, unlike the creaky wooden boards of the Kent farmhouse.
His reflection yields a paler complexion than normal, especially under the stark, unforgiving washroom lights. Kon gets this inexplicable urge to punch the glass, to let its razor-sharp pieces scatter to the floor. At the moment, he doesn’t like himself much.
Tense up. Relax. Inhale. Exhale. His ribs ache.
He twists the cold water tap on in an effort to bring down the swelling around his eyes.
The stupid thing is that he knows; he knows he’s his own person—it’s a whole behemoth of insecurities Kon has agonized over ad nauseam. There’s no point in dredging up shit he’s supposed to have moved on from.
The deep recesses of his mind, to his great misfortune, beg to disagree.
Unsettled as ever, Kon rubs at his eyes, frustrated with himself. He switches the lights off and hops back up to a float, navigating his way out into the common area; a change of scenery ought to do him some good.
____
Out of everyone at the tower, it’s Tim he runs into. Of course.
With Tim freshly back with the Titans, it’s not the least bit surprising to see him sitting cross-legged on the couch, still in his suit. While his gloves are discarded on the low table nearby, his cape is on, insignia clipped over his sternum. His computer is perched on his lap. His head droops; partway to nodding off, Tim jolts and shakes himself back awake.
Kon touches down to walk over, already devising a game plan to annoy Red Robin into going to sleep. “Are you seriously working?” he asks, peering at the display. “Dude, get your ass to—this isn’t a report.”
Tim yawns and murmurs, “Hi. Almost done.”
“Done... playing solitaire?”
Another yawn. “Mm,” Tim hums, returning his attention to the game, “gonna get a high score.”
“In solitaire.”
“Did I stutter.”
This is a mere tier below the time Kon witnessed Tim petting and baby-talking Redbird. The inevitable wave of fondness is enough to alleviate the heavy weight in Kon’s gut, if only briefly.
Kon takes a moment to absorb all the details, hoping Tim is too loopy to notice him looking. With the pretence of watching Tim drag his queen of clubs to another position, he categorizes all the ways this Tim stands apart from the one in his dreams.
This Tim has a real heartbeat. Red-and-black body armor instead of green. Longer hair that reaches his nape, broader shoulders.
No domino. Dry eyes. Arm in one piece—
“Are you gonna sit down?” Tim’s mouse cursor clicks on an ace, a two, then a three. And, because Kon’s never been terribly difficult to read: “What’s on your mind?”
With a sigh, Kon does the easier thing first: he hops over the back of the couch to sit on the cushions, shifting to ensure a healthy foot of space between himself and Tim. He tucks his hands under his thighs, left leg bouncing.
Tim glances over, tapping the spacebar to pause his solitaire game. His right arm lifts, reaching out, only for his hand to halt midair when Kon bristles.
“Are you okay?” Tim asks, frowning.
Oh boy, that’s Tim’s pensive face, ready to ransack his way into Kon’s pity party. Great.
Tim had been the one to send Kon’s DNA samples for analysis. Who’d found out what Kon was created to be—who, in the same breath, decided it didn’t matter.
And Kon hurt him.
Tim is resting his elbows on the hard surface of his computer, carefully casual. A clear cue for Kon to speak up.
“I dreamt about… Cadmus. Being fed information. That part was whatever,” Kon says, face in his hands. Words are a struggle. Helplessly, he tacks on, “But then you where there too, for some reason, and… your arm. I.”
Tim blinks, taking a quick moment to fill out the blanks. He says, almost conversationally, “You broke my left forearm. It took six weeks to heal; by the time you rejoined the team the cast was off.”
And then he extends his arm, holding it out.
Kon can only stare.
“Grab it,” Tim instructs, using his civilian register—the tone he reserves for friends and family. When Kon still fails to react, a note of authority dribbles in as he says, “Clone boy. Grab my arm.”
Kon does as asked. Jaw clenched, he buffers his fingers with TTK before wrapping his hand around Tim’s slender wrist. Thumbing the underside, he can feel the steady rhythm of Tim’s pulse. Extending his field further shows him tendon, muscle, and bone.
Tim’s left arm has, in fact, more than just two shrunken fracture calluses—Kon had expected one through the radius, plus another to match through the ulna. Instead, he can count four; some are newer than others, the bumps weaker and spongier.
For a long while, Tim sits patiently, letting Kon poke and prod.
Eventually, he pipes up, “I’ve broken this arm multiple times. My right, too. It comes with the gig.”
“If you wanna keep arguing that you’ve had worse to make me feel better I will lose my fucking marbles,” Kon fires back, words quick and sharp. More hushed, he adds, “I know it was a long time ago, and that it was mind control, but—” He sucks in a harsh breath. “I’m still sorry. I could’ve killed you.”
Tim shakes his head. “You know, the cool thing about me,” he says, voice gone quiet and petal-soft, “is that even when I didn’t care whether I lived or not, I was pretty goddamn hard to kill.”
Kon sighs, eyes glued to his feet. His hand is still encircled around Tim’s arm, trailing up to the bend of his elbow.
“Also, who has the worse track record with dying, between the two of us?”
Well, Kon thinks, that’s—that’s rude.
“For fuck’s sake.” Kon throws his head back and groans, but it’s nullified by the upward twitch of his mouth. “That was terrible.” And definitely meant to lighten the mood. Tim is playing him like a harp, and he knows it; he grins back, wriggling free to knock Kon on the shoulder.
Kon knows what grief did to Tim—how it drove him to self-punishment. All those tragedies happening in rapid succession, puncturing his wobbling foothold at the hull. Kon hadn’t been there for most of it, but he can imagine it well enough; Tim sinking under his own desperate anger, murky water rising so incrementally that Tim was already blue in the face by the time he’d realized he was drowning.
And now he’s trying to make a joke about it, for Kon’s benefit.
Something tells Kon that they’re going to be just fine.
“Don’t even out the scoreboard.”
Tim inches closer. “I’ll do my best,” he says. Pursing his lips, he adds, “Do you want to talk more about it? About stuff that’s bothering you.”
Kon fidgets. Following a pause, he answers, “Maybe not now. But—thanks. For offering.”
Tim shrugs. “Hey. You’d do the same.”
____
For some reason, Kon ends up watching Tim play several additional rounds of solitaire—as lame as it is, it’s soothing. Gradually, his body gets heavier, head lolling to the side.
Kon falls asleep upright, sometime between Tim switching from solitaire to Galaga.
When he stirs, the first thing Kon notices is this: he’s slumped against the couch, alone. The second is that it’s still dark out.
And third—Tim’s cape is draped over his back.