metalogs | CLOSED to Kon | Click here to find out if you're a Betty or Veronica

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CLOSED to Kon | Click here to find out if you're a Betty or Veronica

Who: Tim Drake

lowercase_el
What: Tim wants Kon to check out this super cool and in no way suspicuous personality test.
When: Today
Where: Their apartment
Content Warnings: Will update if needed

[ It's quite late. 7 AM, actually, and Tim is usually in bed by 4. Instead, he's at his computer, juggling browsers and tabs to get everything arranged just right. Websites that shouldn't be open, but he may want to come back to are timmarked It's like bookmarked, but instead of clicking the icon, he copies the URL to a plain text file on his desktop so the links won't accidentally follow him around on a phone or other device. The general idea is looking like he stayed up late reading up on something and then got caught up in something fun and interesting to people named Tim, but just a bit boring. That seems to fit with how Kon views Tim's interests.

The personality quiz - What Are Your Chances of Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse - is on the last question and ready to be submitted when Kon wakes up. Tim has already taken it multiple times to fully troubleshoot it and knows that he will receive a 64% chance of survivability, which will label him as Zombie Snak: White Castle Edition with a couple sentences explaining that he's probably still dead meat, but they're going to have to work for it. It's a good, but not unbeatable score, and the result is funny despite having to get through 100 sometimes dry questions on this, the self-proclaimed "MOST ACCURATE ZOMBIE QUIZ EVER".

He's not sure if he's on his fifth cup of coffee, or his first, that's how far the lines between Wednesday-Thursday-Friday are currently blurred. Between patrols, work, and designing a third online quiz capable of spitting out a meme results and sending Tim a copy of the responses to certain questions so that he can use them to complete an application to immigrate to Xinthal on Kon's behalf, just in case.

It's pretty tricky to create a quiz thats land on fun and interesting and a bit boring but not tooboring, and this is the . If Tim nails the snore too hard, Kon won't make it through the quiz, and this is his best opportunity to sneak in more agricultural questions tucked in amongst the "real" questions, stolen from various other online quiz makers. The first two quizzes he made - I Can Guess What Kind of Soup You Like Based on Where You Want to Vacation (he hates himself for that one because that is not something that equates, but he did want to make sure that an island nation wouldn't be too much of a reminder of Hawaii and CADMUS) and Are You a Geordi or a Data - had built up to this one, both in length and dryness.

Tim sips his coffee. If this works, he should probably do it for Bart as well. Even if he's in the Alliance, there's no guarantee that everything will go smoothly. The metahuman climate is escalating quickly towards what Starling had described, and Tim would prefer his friends have a legal exit strategy.

For now, all that's left is to wait for Kon to wake up, click submit, complain about the results until Kon takes it himself and then, finally, sleep..

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[He wakes up without an alarm most days because sleeping in until seven is hard and it doesn't take much time after the sun is up before his body does the half-alien equivalent of going "ah our morning coffee."]

[Back at Cadmus, he would threaten lifelong vendettas if anyone drank the last of the pot of caffeinated coffee in the Cadmus cafeteria and only left the decf. but after some of his more Kryptonian physiology kicked in, he kind of really only drinks it for the taste now.]

[The sun on the wheat in the morning is everything.]

[The clickity clack of a lot of typing is what filters through his brain first. Then the sunbeam on his face through a gap in the blinds. He curls towards it like a sunflower and starts to rouse, wondering what Tim was typing so furiously. He sits up in bed, hair mussed and stretches like a cat, groggy and relaxed.]

Mr'ning.

[He throws his legs over the side of the bed and floats to his feet because it always is first instinct before walking. He only lands in the kitchen because it puts him closer to the fridge and counter. He turns on the coffee machine.]

You want some coffee? Is it bedtime for you or an all-dayer?

[It's like an all-nighter but for bats.]

[ Barely looking at Kon, Tim shakes his paper cup of convenience store coffee at Kon to show, via sloshing, that he's still working on his last cup. The fact that it isn't even one of the chain convenience stores says a lot about the quality of the coffee: it's essential motor oil. ]

Evening.

[ He's not typing any more, just clicking here and there on the last few questions of the quiz, the page more than 50% ads and the wait between questions annoyingly long. ]

I'm going to bed in a sec - oh, come on! I'm at least a 90 in this context; I'm not dying in the zombie apocalypse.

[~~Boy, it's a good thing Tim's not from that miniseries where the zombies do get him.~~]

Are you taking an online quiz?

[He doesn't say: "Another one?"]

[It's not that he's not the type of person to do that. Like...Kon doesn't know the many secrets Tim's phone holds.]

[It's just that he rarely sees him not working and even if he does something not-worky...online quizzes? He'll scrape himself away for a movie sometimes or an outside non-work activity, but he's very focused and goofy quizzes don't really have the same vibe of someone watching a movie because one hour and forty two minutes happened to fit into his current schedule and he's had that movie penciled in since oooh four years ago.]

[TV and movies can be measured in units of time he can work into his schedule if he's really desperate to see something. Going places to do stuff can let him exercise some energy or be curious and he only has to stay exactly as long as he wants. Books can be complex enough to engage his brain. But quizzes? Dumb and time-wastes.]

[But maybe this is just a Tim, at home, in his jimjams thing? Maybe this is where he channels all his dorky "choose your own adventure" feelings now that he doesn't meet other teens in a basement and play pretend he's a hobbit anymore. Figuring out which Star Trek captain he's most like.]

[Kon should want that for him, right? Dumb and fun is good for him. Maybe this is just... since he's really a few Tim's in a trench coat, with only one having gone through That Year, making him closer to how he was when they met.]

[Still, it's not the first quiz Tim's brought up and this time Kon's wondering if he's going to leave it to just doing it himself. Tim doing online quizzes? Sure, whatever, maybe he's hooked on Buzzfeed. The actual for-real news they did sometimes had tech news that he might actually be interested in and he could've been sucked into their nerdy quizzes based on pop culture, turned it into a habit from there. Maybe they relaxed him like word puzzles.]

[Tim even sort of nudging a quiz or two at him? Nerdy friend thing.]

[Tim doing another one and nudging it at him? That'll start to be sus. But he doesn't give him any suspicious looks or say anything about it, nor does he ask to look at the quiz, just pours himself a glass of orange juice. He turns around to face him and leans back on the counter to drink it.]

Listen, the quiz isn't able to listen to a 50-page bullet point plan about natural land barriers, the freezing point of corpses, and how people brave out the Alaskan winters and live off the land in the bush all the time.

Those bubbles and one sentence answers just can't look into your soul and see the lil' nerd with five organizers deep down inside.

...And right up there on the outside.

[The insults are said very warmly though. He's smiling, and "nerd" may as well be a pet name in that tone.]

It'd get the right answers if it was willing to get to know you better. It's the quiz's loss, okay? You can do better, go fight with someone in the youtube comments since you get to actually be smarter than people instead of just thinking you are.

[He downs the rest of the juice and goes back to getting things out for the coffee.]

Edited 2022-10-01 03:13 (UTC)

I don’t have organizers. You can’t burn the plastic.

[ Tim goes over the steps of his plan - create quiz, do quiz where Kon can see, bemoan insufficient score, and leave Kon the opportunity to best Tim’s score. It should work. Yes, Kon’s matured over the years , but Tim doesn’t think he’s entirely lost the taste to one up him as long as it’s silly and good-natured.

He huffs, and it’s not even an act. ]

Internet comments are a hive of scum and villainy.

[ He sits back in his chair and folds his arms, staring at the screen like it’s maligned his family name. Tim can just follow Kon’s movements out of the corner of his eye. Kon is completely uninterested. How can he work this? If he can’t recover the use of this quiz, then he can’t rely on this method of information extraction again. He has to make it work. ]

The quizzes don’t answer me back, beating the same uninformed drum over and over because truthiness is a rampart impenetrable to facts. I’ve been banned from Am I the Asshole three times.

[ He’s been awake too long for this, and Tim’s so close to have everything he needs to fill out the paperwork. There’s no immediate rush, but he’s got Starling’s warning floating around in his head and the knowledge that this sort of government paperwork takes months to push through. Tim gambles on pushing the quiz again, because he doesn’t want to delay for something so minor. ]

The problem is that the quiz conflates surviving the zombie apocalypse with building an agrarian society. I don’t need to be the farmer. I just need to keep the farmer alive.

[ That’s good. Don’t look at Kon, just look at the screen. ]

[Hmmmmm.]

[Another attempt to get him to take another quiz, in so many days. He doesn't know the purpose but why direct him? Why emphasize farming?]

[It's too direct and that almost throws him off because he'd expect Tim to be more subtle. Maybe he's being too paranoid Tim's pulling a squirrely and Tim's just not as much that guy now? Then again, it's past Tim's bedtime. He could just be slipping.]

[The "protect the farmer" thing is where it slips just enough. It makes him think of Tim's face as he sat there in a Paris sewer, a tear rolling down his cheek, saying 'My best friend died.']

[Maybe there's more of his timeline's Tim in there than he thought.That's the hard part, isn't it? Figuring out the mix. How much of the bubblier YJ old-school attitude is natural? Or how much is it that he's got a lot of life experience to figure out how to mask paranoia or anxieties or the controlling-thingy he can do better?]

[How strong is the fear and how worried is he that he can't "keep the farmer safe," when Tim himself was tied down and tortured as the world watched? ]

[Kon's thinking is easy to mask with just groggily mixing your coffee, though, not even a pause of his hands. He puts some sugar into black.]

Okay, one, you go to actual hives of scum and villainy all the time.

[He turns around and faces Tim while leaning against the counter and sipping his coffee, acting like he does almost every morning.]

[He redirects the convo to something random from earlier on, something that a friend would probably be more interested in than online quizzes and farming: juicy deets. He knows something random older in the convo is a natural segue away from being steered.]

Two, what'd you get banned for this time?

[Either it'd be for something important or something funny, either thing he'd normally want to know.]

[It looks and sounds as natural as it ever would have been. Would have. Past tense.]

[Just like Kon doesn't entirely know everything about nu!Tim he takes advantage of something Tim also doesn't know about him - he didn't stay the same, flash frozen as the farmbro in the t-shirt. He ran a whole farm. He lied to protect a good woman with the first words he said in another dimension, and kept lying to protect her child. He played it cool, saying or doing the right things to get Lord Opal's men off his butt and off the property without bringing something down on the farmhouse.]

[You just...you can't just throw down without any caution when there's a baby to protect. And feed. And shelter. You can't. Back in the day, he'd had the same instincts with little clone Jimmy Harper, too.]

[When you deal with dumb lugs like Opal's men, you keep quiet and play dumb. You flatter. You fake normalcy. You subtly redirect. You pretend you grew up in a town you've rehearsed and asked lots of questions about, that doesn't have many that haven't been forcibly relocated for various sad reasons. You kneel and show throat if you have to. You pretend that you're a married man and yessir that's your daughter, cute as a button, please don't hurt her.]

[Scared like you're the one that needs to be afraid of them touching a teeny tiny hair on her head. Scared like you're not holding Lophi behind you with a hand firmer than the one that's pretend shaking, as she shields her baby, reminding her you're not scared at all and won't stop being their shield. You've already discussed this, you'd all try to play the part of scared farmers but they'd be doomed the second it seemed like they might get Martha's little bib so much as mussed by a stray breeze.]

[The problem wasn't winning the fight, though. It was "where do I take them when they're after us?" The act had to last as long as it could.]

Edited 2022-10-01 07:52 (UTC)

[ They're "both" in there. He's the same person in his essence, but two separate instances of the same universe has given him memories like a two-tone acrylic pour. The longer he lives with them, the harder it is to distinguish the striations and layers. The newer ones have less heartbreak, but Tim can see that he is less in them. Less of a friend, less serious. Without Kon and Bart inserting themselves in his life, nothing stepped up to fill that void.

He's thought about what happened in Paris a lot recently, about the older memories in general, using them to inform the plan but also to alleviate any concerns he had about it. Tim knows he's overstepping, but it's not that bad in comparison. It's not trying to clone your best friend to have a physical doppelganger messed up; he's only trying to guarantee Kon a place on the lifeboat.

Because... he can't really protect him. Couldn't before, can't now. Can't even protect himself, and he's still coping with measures like staying up at least 30 hours to ensure a consecutive 8 hours sleep at least once a week. The one thing the original memories tell him is that Kon won't ever agree to being held back for his own safety. It's the infuriating part of the appeal - except, no. There's no appeal. That was several universes ago, and it was DOA from the start.

What's important is Kon will forgive Tim if he finds out. He did before.

Tim refreshes the quiz and starts over, but he'll ride out the tangents and pick his spot before trying to rope Kon into taking it. ]

Yes, but in the actual hives of scum and villainy, I can survive on schadenfreude and the knowledge that I am going to personally put some of them in jail. I also get to punch people in the face sometimes. Can't do that online.

[ Even though Tim is sometimes convinced that some online influencers harm enough people that a swift kick to the kneecap is absolutely warranted. ]

Speaking of, I saw Fantasstic's last TikTok.

[ He somehow manages to twist the name in his mouth that makes that second S audible without damaging the cadence of the moniker. ]

And to answer two, I went through a 17 comment volley with someone who thought the earth was flat before they finally broke me and I called them a dope. Rule number one is "be civil", and they take it seriously.

[Kon grins at the mental image of Tim getting overly worked up at someone thinking the Earth is flat and yet not walking away.]

[The grin fades though when his brain backtracks to Fantastic's Tiktok. He'd normally laugh a little at the "ass" added in the name, but there's not much else that's funny about the whole thing?]

What'd that idiot do now?

More of the same. I think I’m moving beyond hate watching at this point. I’m starting to read things into how many vocal tics and filler words he uses, and that’s when I know I’m going off the rails. I start treating every stream like watching Bruce or Luthor give a press conference.

[ Tim spins in his chair to look at Kon. ]

You know why I don’t like him? He’s like a photonegative version of you. All the power in the world, but, unlike you, he’s awful. Plastic, flattened, shallow. I don’t think he cares about anyone, and there are millions of people who genuinely admire him. What a waste.

[Kon looks a little pleased at the comparison. Being the photo-negative good twin of an asshole is still a compliment. If Fantastic is everything wrong then Tim is saying Kon's everything right.]

He reminds me of how I was when I was younger, except with, y'know, the moral backbone of an overcooked noodle. Like he never grew out of his shallow fame hound phase and just dug right in there.

Even at my worst, I hated seeing anyone get hurt.

At your worst, you were nowhere near this bad. You liked being a famous hero and showing off, yes, but you genuinely liked being a hero and helping people. That’s why you wanted to show off.

[ Tim tabs over to where he has one of Fantastic’s social media accounts pulled up. He scrolls for two seconds, barely making it three posts before his eyebrows are up so high his forehead might crack in half. He goes back to looking at Kon. ]

You were always more than that. That’s why we’re having this conversation. A lot of people thought you were worth having as a friend. Where are his friends?

[ Tim back to the quiz, refreshes and starts taking it again. ]

Why are they all so off putting? An influencer, a mass murderer - because that’s essentially what Atomight is for not speaking out against the treatment Featherfall clone, and the woman who he brought on to be his right hand at 14. And yes, I realize the hypocrisy here, but Bruce didn’t take me on after allowing the Justice League to massacre hundreds of Jason Todds.

[That sure is a lot of open praise. He's not sure what to do with it.]

[But he does look flattered.]

[Then Tim brings up some of his biggest frustrations with this world's Justice League.]

It's like they don't get it's not just about fighting bad guys. You're supposed to put your money where your mouth is and be an example.

You can't fight things that are wrong like you have a right to if you're so morally bankrupt your only way out is filing a chapter 7.

[ Stoking Kon’s ego wasn’t the intent, just a nice side effect. Tim won’t continue to beat that drum, but their lives here are considerably bleaker. If Kon can take something good from Tim’s complaining, why shouldn’t he?

Besides, happiness tends to make people more agreeable. ]

Chapter 7? As manufactured as they are?

[ Tim lets out an exasperated fff of air. ]

No, they’d file chapter 11 because there no personal repercussions for any of them. They handle the big things, but it’s like the only core belief is the corporate belief. I don’t think any of them have ever taken a stand in their lives.

[ Click click. Click. Click click. ]

How long would it take to explain how to supervise the day-to-day operations of a farm?

[ He’s got something in his teeth, and he’s not letting it go until he figures it out. It’s just not what he’s pretending it is. ]

[The farming thing. Again.]

[Well, Tim's just going to keep picking away at it so he might as well answer and see where it goes.]

I don't know, a while. It's not as simple as a lot of people think. That's why there are agricultural colleges because sometimes they come up with better farming practices and people taking over their parents' farms feel like they need more education on it.

Ma and Pa actually have a bunch of subscriptions to Ag magazines and journals. You have to know some science stuff. Animal husbandry is also a whole thing, because it's not like a vet comes for every birth and you need to know some health stuff in the day to day to prevent things from getting bad. You definitely need to know anatomy stuff. Like you need to know enough about cow feet if you want to do the hoof trimming yourself instead of hiring somebody every time.

[Farming isn't easy. There's science involved, and a lot of problem solving. Ma and Pa Kent were very straightforward people, but they were also smarter in a science and book-learning sort of way than some people might have given them credit for. A lot of farmers were.]

[And Kon was the same. He'd picked up a lot.]

I just had to kind of wing it in Gemworld, especially since the plants and animals are different. Luckily, Lophi had handled the farm as much as her husband so she was able to teach me, and a lot of stuff I've learned from Ma and Pa translated over.

Edited 2022-10-17 08:26 (UTC)

[ Again. Although Kon gives him something to go on, shakes some branch of synapses that coughs up the knowledge that the Kent farm has both cattle and crops. Another that he could probably get the specific information needed by pretending to be a high school student and calling up local farms to see if any would let him interview their foreman to plug any holes in the application.

He’ll have to make do with that, because the knowledge transfer from Kon would take too many pointed questions. The quiz, it seems, is a dud. ]

So… what you’re saying is: I’m zombie food.

That's why in a real zombie apocalypse people would only survive in communities. Gotta have the guy who knows how to create a chokepoint to kill zombies and someone that knows how to milk a cow.

[He finally puts his coffee down and comes over, acting curious.]

[He is curious but it's not really about the quiz. But Tim's guiding questions seem related to it.]

So, what, does it ask stuff that's more than just about foraging and fighting zombos?

Edited 2022-10-19 06:26 (UTC)

[ Tim looks almost wistful. ]

I would scout the Weathertop of apocalypse locations to build the town.

[ He leans to one side in his chair and has to stop it from spinning by planting a foot on the table leg. If he wants Kon to get involved, he has to give him room to do that.

He scrolls up to the first question and takes his hand off the mouse as a silent invitation. ]

Crop rotation. Storage temperatures for harvested crops to prolong their life. Fuel economy - which, why?

[ Because there are best practices when running large farm equipment. Tim wrote the test - he's had to learn more than he lets on to do it. Still, it's all very high level. Too high for this zombie setup, really - he had to identify where Kon's knowledge was as per the skilled trades description. He doesn't care how to precisely milk the cow. ]

Fuel economy's because most farm equipment runs on gas or diesel. When it's gas you need the right grade for that kind of equipment and need to know how much fuel stuff is gonna use.

[Now feigning interest, Kon puts his coffee down and finally comes over to take a look.]

I've never seen a quiz like this that actually asks farming questions. I wonder if it was made by some 4H nerd.

[He takes over the mouse and clicks on an answer to see more questions.]

Edited 2022-10-20 05:52 (UTC)

Right. No putting jet fuel in the Redbird.

[ There are at least three different types of fuel in the Batcave. It's a miracle that the cave doesn't explode more often between that, testing chemicals, and munitions.

Tim laughs tiredly at the 4H reference, pulls his feet up onto the chair. ]

Oh no, I'm getting rural refs now. This is all Bart's fault for making me go to that fair.

Scoot, I wanna see if I can out-farm-nerd this thing.

In a way that my past self would be horrified by.

[He wants a closer look at this weird quiz without Tim breathing down his neck. He needs space to dig around.]

[ That worked? Holy smokes, he waited out Kon stubbornness and won?

Tim scoots out of the chair with a stretch. ]

Yeah, okay. It’s yours.

[ He will let Kon finish the quiz out from the comfort of bed. Tim crosses the room and face plants directly into the bed without turning it down. Sleep soon. ]

But if the result is not zombie food, then it’s mine.

Edited 2022-11-13 05:54 (UTC)

[So he wants to look at it after. Hmmm.]

[Kon know he can just wait this out. Tim's exhausted and if anything is going on with this, Tim thinks he's drawn him in. He'll know that Kon might get distracted by the internet and plan to look at whatever is going on with this quiz in the morning.]

[So he just takes his good ol' time so that he won't be able to do anything but fall asleep. Tim's beddy bye is Kon's morning and afternoon, so he can do this allll day.]

[Kon's handled him as much as he needs to get a good look at this computer so he takes his time with it.]

[Sometimes he wonders how much like Lex that makes him now, the being good at handling difficult people and seeming natural, but the good thing is he'd have pretty damn far to go. Slowly backsliding into bad habits is never going to let you catch up with the guy who no-scope 360-ed his way into the pit in a earnest desire to someday be Satan's roomie.]

[Besides, reporter's instincts tripping, snooping through someone's stuff, and play-acting a little at being disarming is a time-honored Super tradition, too. No harm in letting this timid, flattery-effusive bespectacled reporter near the hallway with your technically-public filing cabinet, right Mr. Mayor? Isn't it Lois Lane you need to watch, making a racket with hard-hitting questions to your campaign manager over there? (Or sometimes it was the reverse and and Clark was the one being distracting by awkwardly spilling a drink on someone. He'd heard quite a few of their stories, Ma and Pa thought it was hilarious).]

[It'll be years before he fully sorts it all out but he's starting to finally realize he's some of the good and maybe some of the bad from both of them - and a few things all his own.]

[He answers the quiz and gets to the end. The result is that he scores high because of the farming and how homesteading would be necessary yada yada yada.]

[The questions are...weird. He starts with googling them, changing up the wording in different ways and using the right search terms to account for variations.]

[The writing style is a little...different on some of them. Like someone needed extra questions and plagiarized them but didn't have the time or energy to worry about converting them to their use.]

[Like...maybe someone putting together a quiz with a ridiculous number of searching questions. Someone aiming for enough of the questions to be very colloquial and informal to offset a bunch of very precise ones about farming.]

[And so, the possible creator of the quiz becomes suspect and he has a suspect for it. But why?]

[There are a few other quizzes in the quiz-maker's profile but no dates listed. Not much work was done on them, they seem to be basic, like they're just there to fill out a profile. He clicks "View source" and digs around in the source code of the page to see if there's something flagging them with a date somehow and finds it folded into the actual quiz number in the link for each. It's not that Tim isn't smart enough to hack the server of some quiz site to change it, but he probably didn't expect Kon to go ham with trying to suss it out.]

[They were all made after the recent shift in the stuff with the guilds because Tim's not a time traveler. He'd have to have hacked it to change any of them and didn't bother because he never expected Kon to look.]

[Kon then searches for other zombie quizzes on both the same site and on the greater web at large, looking at the questions of the first ones that pop up as he goes. And he finds some that were on the quiz Tim handed over, just worded differently. But not differently enough, hence why it sounded like some questions were copied from other sources.]

[They were and he didn't take the time to reword them that much.]

[But Tim doesn't have the advantage of a billionaire's wealth backing him anymore. He's back to an annoying day job outside a board room (in the place of school), back to spreading himself thinner.]

[And Kon knows that, as much as his best friend clearly cares about him, and holds him up as one of the best people he knows, it has never been a secret to either of them that Tim is smarter. Especially since Kon has often outsourced the brain stuff to Tim when they're doing hero stuff together.]

[Tim's never seen him have to figure out something alone. He always does it even if it's harder.]

[It takes him a few hours, but he manages to figure out what other quizzes most of the questions were stolen from. And it becomes clear that the farming questions are standing out because none of the other zombie quizzes mention farming and there just aren't a lot of farming-based quizzes on the site. What normal internet-savvy person made farming quizzes? Nobody. What farmer doodled around making quizzes? Again, none of them.]

[So he turns to the internet at large for those. Clark taught him the more fiddly search terms one time, when he was working on a paper. How you can narrow things down with certain phrasing, or leave things set up as blanks to fill in. He also showed him alternate search engines that those kinds of terms still work on since google is a bust anymore.]

[Altering the phrasing enough is how he finds the citizenship application online, and the specific questionnaire for immigrant applicants that are farmers, a very long pdf that asks variations of a bunch of those farming questions.]

Tim.

[He huffs it under his breath.]

[But still, it could be coincidence right? Unless...]

[Was he so confident Kon wouldn't snoop that it's somewhere in the stacks of junk on his desk? Kon stands up quietly and looks down at the stacks of papers, his eyes briefly glowing blue. He's able to look layer by layer with X-ray vision to avoid the sound of any papers shuffling.]

[When he's done looking, when he finds it, he's not angry enough to wake him up but he is very, very angry. At Tim doing this behind his back. At Tim trying to handle him and manipulate him into doing the quiz.]

[But he waits and lets Tim sleep because he needs it. He doesn't want him to not get it and then be out there fighting crime even more sleep deprived than usual.]

[He takes the time to read about this island country of metas. He doesn't actually have anywhere to be today, it's a day off from work and he has no other plans beside normal patrols.]

[No, he waits until the afternoon, when Tim is finally stirring a little. That's when he pulls the half-finished application out of the stack and tosses it on the blanket near Tim's feet.]

[When Tim wakes up he'll see the papers on the bed and that Kon has pulled the wheely chair around to be right in his line of sight when he wakes up. He's sitting with his arms crossed. He does not look pleased.]

Edited 2022-11-30 12:54 (UTC)

[ The nice thing about his healing factor - although not if you ask Tim - is that, when it kicks on, it forces him to sleep better, deeper and longer. All that energy has to come from somewhere, and so Tim’s racked out almost as soon as his head hits the pillow. He’s not unwakeable, but it would take a lot more noise than Kon’s investigation makes to rouse him.

He gets almost six hours before he starts to drift out of dreamland. There’s a brief attempt to deny he’s awake, closing his eyes tighter against the afternoon sun, but it’s closely followed with a stretch and a gold old eye rub. Maybe Kon left the coffee pot on. Tim will drink 8 hour old coffee.

On that hopeful thought, Tim opens his eyes and gets an eyeful of angry Kon. He’s not instantly awake but instantly alert. His fuzzy brain lands on something’s wrong, so he’s rapidly disentangling himself from the blankets to get up. ]

What’s wrong? It’s not another invasion?

[ His foot kicks some papers off the bed, and Tim watches them fall. He recognizes lines and bolded text of the form. It hadn’t been on the bed. It had been mixed into a hundred pages of photocopies, mostly dealing with the engineering of teleportation technology. Kon wouldn’t have read it.

Tim turns back to Kon, with a guarded expression. He doesn’t seem remotely sheepish - if he reads anything, it’s defiant (and sleep-rumpled). Okay. Kon found the immigration forms for the meta country. How doesn’t matter, so he doesn’t ask. Doesn’t say anything, just waiting on the response.

There will be no monologuing, only direct responses. If Kon hasn’t put together what Tim’s been up to, Tim won’t do it for him. ]

[Because Tim is just waiting for him to, what, actually confirm what he knows? Kon picks the papers back up.]

"The Applicant states that the above is true and accurate to the best of their knowledge" - that'd be that I know all that farming stuff you fished around for answers to - blah blah something something and wow, I gotta say, kinda weird I don't remember signing this but that sure is my signature, huh.

[He flips the page around and wonders if Tim got it digitally or just practiced so well he could mimic it perfectly.]

I don't know why I actually need to say this, but you can't just change someone's citizenship without their knowledge! Why do I need to say this, Tim?! Who does that?!

Am I that bad of a roomie you want to emigrate me to another country? You could've tried passive-aggressive post-its first!

[He knows that's not it, that this is not because he needs to do the dishes more, but the joke is there and he's feeling very sarcastic right now.]

[ Tim forged the signature. He’s quite good at it, actually, having started with Jack and Dana’s signatures for sick notes. He can do all of his family and most of the Titans. He also memorized everyone’s blood types. Never know what you’re going to need.

But he’s not giving up the methodology. ]

It isn’t a citizenship change. Starfallen don’t have citizenship by default in this world, even if they came from another version of same country that they arrived in.

[ There’s case law. He won’t quote it.

Who does that? Tim has no idea who else would try this stunt. Emigration had been suggested by Frances Starling, and Tim sees the sense in it. At the very least, to try and arrange it preemptively, because it would be too late to start the slow process by the time it was needed. Kon wouldn’t have let him - he’d see it as a coward’s move.

He’s not engaging the rhetorical questions. There’s no answer for why he has to say it. Doesn’t bother denying fishing for the responses, either - Kon is right and has the proof in his hands.

But Tim isn’t sorry. ]

Having citizenship doesn’t mean you have to live there. It has nothing to do with you as a roommate.

[ If he can quietly wait out the anger and take the lecture, maybe he can get Kon to see the light. ]

I get that you think this is going to protect me, I get that. But it doesn't change that the way you do this stuff sometimes is so messed up!

[The "so messed up" is more emotional than angry. It's frustration at being manipulated and hurt that Tim would try it knowing about his issues of being controlled.]

It's not even just doing the stupid application without me knowing. You set up a fake quiz to get me to answer the questions, then tried to manipulate me into taking it. Do you really not get how screwed up that is?

[Sometimes it feels like Tim is inches nearby but somehow a million miles away.]

I don't like to be tricked, Tim! I don't like being manipulated. I don't like people trying to control me and decide what I'm doing. It's my life.

I get to choose the direction. I get to choose the risk. That's mine.

[He hates when people try to control him. The whole rebel thing is what his friends know as being an essential part of him and the truth of it is that it was just basic necessity. It wasn't something he learned to do to try to be a stronger person, he had to learn to rebel just to control his own destiny and be his own person, in a way none of his friends will ever be able to fully understand.]

[What had Waller said that one time? "Let him speak. It'll help me learn if he's gone defective and needs to be locked in a warehouse with the rest of our damaged property."]

[ He'd become a rebel to be allowed to just...be.]

Your heart is in the right place, but tricking me into it? That's a Luthor move. [Shots fired.] And I'm not putting up with it.

[There's a flash of blue teke and the papers erupt into shreds in his hands, then fall to the floor.]

[And he's not the one that's going to pick them up.]

If you try it again I'll just have it revoked.

[ He does absorb much of the lecture. He deserves it - how many times has he seen Bruce overstep the rights and concerns of other Justice League members? The objections aren’t invalid.

When you get caught, it doesn’t matter if you’re right. Tim was sloppy and put too much faith in Kon not noticing because Kon hadn’t noticed. This is no one’s fault but his.

It’s fixable. He can get Kon to agree, or do it without him knowing. It won’t be any more manipulative than what’s already occurred. Tim has the information he needs on the server now. He can recreate the forms. It’s fine. He’ll be the Luthor here. If it ends up being needed, Kon can hate him all he wants, but he’ll be safe and Tim will try not to be fucking smug about it and -

He’d been watching the scraps fall to the ground when Kon threatens to revoke the citizenship if Tim does it anyway. Like he followed every step of Tim’s thought process.

Tim’s not mad or malicious. He thinks he should feel sick, but there’s just… nothing. Kon’s so determined to be an idiot that he’s willing to outright sabotage Tim’s work to prove some stupid noble point, because he’s got to be stupid and noble, and Tim is wrung out, all hope of a failsafe gone. ]

Letting someone get what they need and ripping it away? Now that’s a Luthor move.

[ He delivers it numbly and without emphasis. With no real plan, he stands there blankly, his eyebrows pinching together. Eventually, he starts looking for his shoes. ]

[It's the equivalent of a nuclear bomb dropped on the conversation.]

[Maybe if it weren't so personal, maybe if Luthor hadn't broken him so much to bend him to his will, maybe if it wasn't a hotbed of semi-recent trauma he'd catch the "get what they need" part. Maybe then he'd understand that doing something like this is emotional armor for someone deeply, deeply traumatized.][But it's still too much of a grenade drop. There isn't just anger, there's actual hurt. When Kon said it, he was trying to get Tim to understand what it was making him feel like, and yes, that meant it was dramatic. But this feels like Tim just intending to hurt.]

[His expression makes it clear the hit landed. His voice is quaking with emotion when he speaks.]

I know you want to wrap me up in cotton, but you can't.

I'm going to take risks and it's probably going to suck. Like I'm going to out Guardian as a clone and tell people why I'm not joining a Guild. Because the clones here need to see they deserve to come out of the dark.

I don't do hiding in the shadows, Tim. Because I can't live that way and be me.

Edited 2022-11-30 20:29 (UTC)

[ He’s aware of the impact crater. That’s why Tim’s trying to put himself together enough to not look like a person in crisis when he leaves, because that’s how he feels.

And he shouldn’t. There’s no one physically hurt, and all threats are theoretical in a vaguely defined future. Then, why does Tim feel like he has to trach himself to breathe? Why is he locked into this fight or flight response? He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t want to know because analyzing it won’t lead to anything good.

So. Shoes. Hoodie. He keeps face to the door and his back to Kon and acts like he’s not listening. But he is.

And the threat to out Guardian as a clone hits for total devastation. The guilds’ response to the Featherlight clones - the world’s opinions on clones in general - that’s why Tim is doing this. Fear of what could happen if it becomes common knowledge. Kon’s not only wrecking Tim’s plans; he’s going to bring about the worst case scenario himself. Tim actually sways. ]

You can’t.

[ He sounds wrecked. Like Kon just flicked away any mask he had until it blinged off into the horizon like Team Rocket. Does he have to beg for Kon to have one damn iota of common sense? ]

I mean, you can. You don’t have to be their example. They already have a better example than you: Frances Starling. And they don’t want her, Kon! They’ve got hundreds of martyrs already. They’ve made it very clear that unregistered metahumans are sub-human and aren’t entitled to human rights unless they deign to give them. Just - this isn’t your fight. Just be a normal hero until we can all go home!

[ His phone. He can get Kon’s phone and lock him out of his accounts. No. Get him perma-banned. Has Kon ever logged in on Tim’s computer? Could Tim get into it that way?

Too risky. Has to be the phone. He has to pick Kon’s pockets. How can he cover it? He can’t go for a bump; it would stand out too much, and no crowds to hide any other accidental touching either. A hug would be weird, unless -

What difference does pride make, when Kon’s apparently actively trying to make himself a target and invulnerability’s not as invulnerable as advertised? Tim ducks his head down and lets wet eyes spill over into tears. It’s the opposite of hard. He just has to stop trying not to cry. God, he really is as manipulative as Kon thinks he is. ]

Tim...

[ His expression softens. ]

Look, I know it's -

I know it's risky, I just -

This is what we do. Anyone that wears the S. This is who we are. Sometimes, someone has to be the example, and stand up for people that barely anyone else is helping...

[And he can't argue this while Tim's crying.]

Tim, I'm sorry. I just need to do this.

[He goes over to hug him. Slowly, to see if he even accepts it.]

[ He didn’t mean to cry this hard. It’s like a leak springing in a water pipe. Once sprung, just putting his thumb over the hole isn’t going to stop anything. It’s all just compounding.

Tim doesn’t like crying, or being vulnerable, so the very act is making the act work, like a high pressure leak further damaging the pipeline.

Doesn’t like it when people are stupid. Kon is, for this phenomenally bad idea. Tim is, for surrendering to tears over it.

Doesn’t like not being in control, and he’s not even control of himself right now, so how can he be in control of the situation?

It’s some stupid genetic quirk to make Tim question nature over nurture when he’s not wrapping one arm himself to steady himself. As for Kon coming in for a hug? Truth be told, Tim’s not even looking. He’s trying to process this mess. The plan is currently get the phone, get out, and try not to get into a motorcycle accident, but it’s getting lost in the chaff.

I know it’s risky. As he continues to justify making boneheaded plans to lead an equal rights fight, because of course he is, why wouldn’t he? There really isn’t going to be any way to stop him, barring kryptonite or an equally heavyweight meta getting involved.

Someone else can be the example this time. Someone else can be the one who gets beaten to death and their friends can kneel over them and wonder if they’re cold because it’s the Arctic or because it’s too late for CPR and know because their brain just never stops that Superman would’ve tried if the internal damage wasn’t so significant as to make it a lost cause. Someone else can know what that kind of hopeless feels like.

Feels like right now. It’s not irrational. It’s not. The government has only a tenuous control on the metahuman population, and they’re not going to take this lightly. He’d argue, but no one listens to people when they’re this upset. Kon wouldn’t listen even if Tim was perfectly composed, he’s built from moral conviction. ]

Edited 2022-12-02 03:00 (UTC)

[ Since Tim is pretty much curling in on himself, Kon doesn't feel right about going in for a hug, but he does place his hand on his shoulders. ]

[ It's close enough to make a grab for the phone - and Tim probably would succeed if Kon hadn't always decided he was going to sticky the thing in his pocket with teke for the next little while. Just in case. ]

It doesn't have to just be thoughtless, okay? Like if you want to put gps trackers in my socks - provided you don't already have some in there - I'm all for it. Anything that'd let Bart be there in half a heartbeat we can do.

[ It’s just so -

Perfunctory.

Tim thinks about the way Kon and their other old teammates have hugged him in the past. Hugged - more like tackled. Yes, those were joyous, and this is not. But even Bruce hugs better than this, when he has reason to suspect Tim needs it.

As it’s his own fault that he’s this upset (his plans plural, his fears, his damage), Tim doesn’t have the grounds or tools to ask for a comforting hug. He shoves Kon away, better nothing than pity. ]

Don’t.

[ And there is a grab for the phone lost in the push. Despite getting his fingers on it, he couldn’t lift it. Damn it.

Frustrated, alone, and with no cards left to play, Tim will head for the door. ]

GPS trackers won’t stop everything.

[ He needs to be anywhere else. Lick his wounds in private and figure out how to stop this. Maybe Steph would help - she’s gone to extreme measures to protect herself. ]

[Kon doesn't go after him. It's pretty clear he hadn't want to be touched and he can only imagine how much worse his reaction would've been if Kon had outright hugged him, held him the way he wanted to.]

[He doesn't have long to feel terrible about it before he feels the tug on his phone and knows that yes, he had reason to keep a tight hold on it.]

[ Anger flares on top of the guilt of making Tim cry. ]

[ Is this really where they're at? ]

[Why is this so hard? He thought all he had to do was get back home, with his family, and with his friends, and then everything would be okay again. It'd be like it was before. Or at least a different he could adapt to like he had to adapt to everything.]

[But it hasn't been like that at all. The world forgot him and moved on. The thing he'd been waiting his whole life for, had dreamed about, got handed to someone else and it seemed like it happened without a thought. (Someone more legitimate, someone who was actually wanted.) And things with Tim are...fraught sometimes. Hard.]

[It's easier with Bart because he and Bart don't have multiple timelines bouncing around their heads. Things have changed over time, especially after Bart became Kid Flash, but navigating the new Bart isn't impossible even if sometimes it's deceptively more difficult than it seems.]

[Also, most importantly, Bart wasn't the one left alone in his grief. He felt one loss, but he was the second. (Or really, the fifth, when you count the others like Steph and all three of Tim's parents.) ]

[Kon stands there, shoulders drooping, too angry to just cave into Tim's demands or forgive the boundaries he crossed, but also not wanting to make him more miserable.]

[So he just...lets him go. Without a word. Instead he bends off to clean the shreds of the application off the floor.]

[ Tim bolts once he’s in the hallway, a brisk walk turning into a job down the stairs, and a run to where he’s stashed the motorcycle today.

He just wants to get clear. Of the apartment. Of Kon. Of … whatever set this off, because it wasn’t just the papers.

Kon can still hear him, if he wants to. He has to be mindful of that, so he takes the time to breathe and bring his heart rate down before driving off. If only he knew where he was going. ]

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