An El, but like, lowercase

Kon: The air up here was thin, and it felt like he was stuck in the in between, toes dangling dangerously off the edge even as he floated miles above any surface. He had a choice to make now, as everyone did, to do the easy thing or the right thing and he cursed into the vast nothing that this was his burden to bear. 

The logo mocked him from its place, shining and new, on the side of the satellite. Drake security stood in bold red in flashy, modern, stylized font against the chrome polished machine. Tim, it seemed, had spared no expense when it came to his gadgets. It was surveillance masquerading as safety, oppression disguised as the future, though, if Tim and the rest had their way this would, indeed, be the future. 

It wasn't one Kon could stand for. Millions must have gone into this launch. Where could that money have gone? Schools, rehabilitation centers, food banks, shelters... the list was endless and yet...

And yet Kon still loved him. His heart ached in his chest. 

He narrowed his eyes at his own reflection in the shiny surface, his jaw tightening until it became nothing but a knot under his skin and his hands curling into fists so tight that his sharpied nails came away with the faintest trace of blood that smeared almost imperceptibly against the satellite as he pressed his hands against it. The metal crumbled under his fingertips and soon he and the satellite were nothing but a glowing white hot streak in the sky. A comet made of heartbreak and fury. 

Tim could play God, but his retribution would be facing the wrath of one. 

He landed in a crater of his own making, the artful stonework leading to the manor rippled and cracked under the stress of his landing and the smoking lump of metal and circuitry fell from his hands with a solid thunk. 

"Drake." He greeted, his voice low and dangerous. "Been busy, have you?"

Tim: He'd gone back and forth on the budget for media coverage. Bruce had already provided more than enough funding for the small company itself, and it's major projects. Bruce had also said that every movement the business made should be opposite or at the very least opposing to the night job. Hiding in plain sight, a rare but well-used tactic. In the end, Tim figured it would be better to not draw a massive crowd for the ultimately underwhelming satellite launch, and let the news figure out their own headlines. Still, the value of the craft, the tech itself, wasn't something to shrug at, not even to a trust-fund junkie like himself. It was a lot, but the ends would justify the means. In its current state, it was a glorified signal-booster, a hub for information to be encrypted and kept close to the user. With this launch, Drake could go Global. 

He hadn't felt so proud of something since... Well, since he'd been right.

It had been an unusually sunny day in Gotham City, and Tim woke with the bright yellow rays streaming through thick, drawn, black-out curtains. He began going through his normal routine, a soft smile gracing his face as he wandered into the Manor's massive kitchen, alive with the smells of a famous Pennyworth Continental Breakfast and the one scent he'd zeroed in on from the moment he opened his eyes: Coffee. He'd poured himself a hearty cup, taking a swig to get the initial jolt awake, when the high-pitched alarm started to blare from the grandfather clock in the main hall, the hidden entrance to the Cave.

The Proximity alarm. But who-?

He didn't have much more time to think before the foundations of the mansion shook, the harsh crash rattling his eardrums and shaking his already sore legs. When the near-quake conditions settled, he'd made sure to look for the butler and his assurance that he was alright. Tim didn't have time, he didn't have the right energy to run and get into costume and race out the hidden exit to come on the manor with shock and awe as Red Robin. Whoever this was would have to settle for Tim Drake-Wayne. Snagging his Gotham Knights varsity from the back of his dining chair, he ran to the front door of the manor and swung it open, squinting at the bright daylight reflecting off of space-grade metal-

Blinking his eyes to adjust, the bird started with pure confusion. That... That was his logo. That was his stamp. That was his satellite.

Wide, grey eyes searched for answers, looked for a possible flaw in the near-unsalvageable parts, but found they didn't have to search long. 

"... Kon?" Came the first question, slightly broken with something he couldn't quite place. "Wh-... What the hell are you doing?!"

Kon: He could hear Alfred moving around the kitchen, no doubt making a fresh pot of coffee for Tim, with his panama grown beans, each pound costing more than most spent on coffee in a year and for what? For the luxury of doing it? To keep up appearances? The manor was soaked in decadent opulence, from the high custom gates to the exotic flowers specifically cultivated to handle the bitter Gotham winters. It was sickening and the longer he stood there the more his hands trembled against his thigh. 

The sun was high in the sky, its heat bearing down on the back of his neck as he glared over purple tinted lenses. They were a new pair, not the sleek, fashion-forward sunnies Tim had gifted him for his birthday two years ago that Kon had obsessed over not breaking. He had always been so careful with them, spending an exorbitant amount of time polishing the lenses and tightening the screws. He had dropped them only once and had nearly cried at the sight of the long scratch along their lenses' surface. Tim had simply gotten him a new pair. 

He was so kind sometimes. To those he loved. 

It was a shame he didn't love the world the same way Kon did, not out of principle but because of the people. 

But the people were nothing but bodies to them,  interchangeable to Tim and to Bruce and to Clark and to Lex. Pawns in a game or hazards on the job site. They didn't care about the man with everything he owned in a shopping cart, about the woman stumbling like a ghost along the street at two A.M, arms littered with more bruises than seems possible for such pale skin stretched thin over cracked knuckles. 

They were just problems, reasons why they needed to stalk the nights, why they needed to develop weapons and body armor, reasons why they needed satellites in the exosphere.

"What am I doing?" He asked, his voice tight and high with a pleading edge to it, begging without begging for Tim to understand. "What are you doing‽" 

He floated out of the crater, glassy eyes lingering over Tim. He looked so normal like this. Softer. If it were any other day maybe he would be greeting him with a hug, tucking the bird's head under his chin and smiling at the lingering smell of coffee and the metallic tang he carried when he had been wrist deep in a piece of tech. Maybe they would be happy to spend the day together, snickering as they turned their phones off and left their girlfriends wondering what trouble they would get into today. 

But it was not any other day, Kon had pulled Tim's hopes and dreams out of the sky on purpose and Tim had shattered Kon's entire world without ever realizing it was happening. 

"Brother Eye is wrong, Tim. Can't you see that?" His jaw tightened, his mouth clamping shut as he dropped to his feet. "You don't. You really can't see what you're doing, how close you are to turning the entire world into a surveillance state at the mercy of an orphan dressed like a bat and a boy dressed like a bird." 

He turned away with a scoff. All this money, all this power, all the intelligence flowing around his stupid fucking head and this is what he did. "I won't let you do this Tim. It's not right."

Tim: It was easy to forget that Tim worked with literal Gods. His scientific nature had made him near-Atheistic for years now, seeing the power that one man, even one alien could hold, almost dashing the thought of some over-seeing entity that lived in the space between spaces. The people he knew, outside of those that operated nearly strictly out of Gotham and the surrounding 'burbs, were just friends, acquaintances, people he'd met far too casually to be considered even work-related. He forgot he was living among people that could grind him into dust with a look, that could break him in half without even trying. He knew this, everyone without the blessing or curse of super-powers knew they walked among giants without any means of stopping them at full power.

This display, ripping a rocket-launched hunk of technology from a physical and very tangible orbit from their fragile atmosphere... It was terrifying.

What might even be worse is that Kon had the brains to back all that brawn. Sure, he didn't use it often (Kryptonians, the gruff voice echoed in his head, have very hard heads), but it was still in there, whenever he needed to reach back and recall implanted information. Tim had forgone the 'Lex Luthor' narrative years ago, to attribute anything Kon was to that man felt like the most horrible disservice to his friend. 

Friend? Is this what friends did?

Tim's brow creased, a scowl forming slowly on a face without a mask. He set his jaw tight as he listened to the accusations, the scolding he was receiving. Clouded, frozen breaths were explicit evidence of the bird attempting to keep his cool, to try and calm the racing heart that rattled his chest. He called the emotion back to the first time he'd put on the red, yellow, and green costume; the first time he'd come face to face with the Clown Prince of Crime himself; the first second he'd burst through the doors of his Father's final home before he saw the pool of blood Jack Drake had died in; when he'd first heard the words 'Stephanie Brown is Missing'. Tim Drake felt Fear. 

"Conner," the words finally came, slightly shaky from what he hoped the other would assume was the cold. "This isn't what you think. This is about keeping the world safe. Everything I've ever put into this company is to help the world from outside of a mask. No one has access to the Eye but me and the family." Let anyone try, he silently dared the world.

He just couldn't see what he saw, that this world was terrifying. Not everyone gets to die and come back, not everyone gets kidnapped and comes back. "This is for the Ra's of the world, this is so when we have another attack like Prime that we're ready with a solution, and we can take care of it." No more casualties, no more mourning, no more fear.

Tim Drake felt his hands shaking.

Kon: He was scared, and maybe that was the worst part of all of this. All this terror and all of it so misplaced. There was something so painfully human about it, an exemplification of the worst of their species. Conner had descended from the sky and his best friend’s heart had begun racing, his pupils had dilated, his breath had quickened and his lip quivered the way it did when he was a little scared of fighting, a little scared of what he would find, a little scared of dying. 

Was that really what Tim thought of him? Still? Had his fight with Prime only proved to the man (a boy then, they were all just kids who were trying to fill impossibly large shoes years ago) that he was capable of feeling someone’s blood on his knuckles and keep going anyway? 

His eyes flashed dangerously, a mix of unbearably hot rage and pitifully deep sorrow flowing through him as he turned away. 

“No one has access to the Eye but me and the family.” 

Kon moved so quickly that he was merely a blur, his face twisted in horror as he flew up to have a better view as he scanned the grounds of the manor. The cave was nigh impossible to find, but Kon had his ways, weak points where the lead was thin, a near perfect memory of looking at some early schematics that Tim had excitedly showed him one night when they were just teenagers.

 He needed to find the mainframe and destroy it. It was what was right. He could feel it in every atom in his body.

“Because you,” he spat, “and them,” he gestured helplessly toward the manor, “you’re incorruptible, right? Not like the rest of the world, you’ve never been like them, huh?” he scoffed, “like me.” He said, more to himself than to Tim, his voice lost in the wind that whipped around him. He rubbed at his eyes harshly, ashamed at the tears he felt pooling around the heat. 

Apt, for how he felt about Tim now. Tim would have found the moral behind it once upon a time, the lesson to be learned. Had he always thought he was so above them all? Was any of it just Tim being Tim or had everything simply been keeping the team together and functioning at top efficiency to protect against the next disaster. 

Toy soldiers on the shelf for him to play commander with until he found a bigger, better play-set. That’s certainly how it felt now. He wondered if Cassie felt the same, if that was one of the reasons she had pulled away. Did she know that Tim would stop caring the second one of them stopped being an asset? 

Conner wouldn’t have believed it a year ago but now...

“I did take care of it!” He bellowed. He did. He had died for this world, for this team, for this man. “And I didn’t need to keep the world under a microscope to do it. I refuse to allow you to take their freedom, Tim. It’s their liberty! It’s their right!” His teeth ground together, the sound of it almost enough to distract him from the churning in his gut. 

“What’s next Tim? You want to take away their privacy, what about their free will? Can’t commit a murder if the implant in your brain doesn’t let you, right? That’s a small price to pay for world peace.”

Tim: Sometimes Tim forgot he was an ant. If Conner had really wanted to, he could’ve thrown the satellite into the Manor and destroyed the age-old, vine-climbed bricks. He could’ve sent Tim up to the same orbit where his tech had once sat amid the great outer Ozone layer. He could’ve had this entire city leveled faster than any of the bats in the cave could infest the skies, black out the dim stars and the cold, unforgiving moon. Tim almost wished he’d throw a punch, break his jaw, a few ribs, just so that he had something more to get mad at than something he could replace with a few extra budget cuts. It could be even more of a public project… But that’s 

what Tim was afraid about.

Somehow, someway, Conner had found out. He wasn’t sure how, and he wasn’t sure exactly how much he knew, but it was enough to make a meteor in the yard.

Clenching his shaking hands into tight fists, Tim put on his harshest glare, following the flying clone into the sky, spreading his stance as if he could chase after a Super on a mission. There were frantic looks, attempting to work at a worrying speed. He wouldn’t find anything, he couldn’t. Not if he wanted to destroy the basement hub of computers where Drake sat in Central Gotham. Even if Bruce wasn’t in his near literal ivory tower, there was no mistaking anyone, or anything that got in and out of that building, even if it was faster than a speeding bullet. The fact that he hadn’t gone on a rampage, that there wasn’t a blooming bruise taking up half of his face that gave it more color than the rare ray of sunshine dared to… It was showing restraint. The restraint of someone who knew how to use their powers, who knew exactly what they could do and what they could be used for.

Conner had always been so ready to be the good guy. He was Tim’s Superman, and he was still protecting the people.

How long would that last if he was acting like this?

“It’s nothing like that!” Tim yelled into the sky, the bite finally registering in his bark. “You’re not made to be a fucking martyr, Conner!! Did you forget-...” Tim held his tongue, a million screaming thoughts all tearing each other apart, the pressure building in his chest so much that he felt if he couldn’t find what to say then he might forget how to breathe properly again. He felt the sting of tears at the corners of his eyes, and he wasn't sure if it was the heat of an anger long-burning or the smog of the city kicked up with gravel and dirt. Over and over and over again, silent mantras and monologues:  I tried to bring you back, I tried to reclone you, you have no idea how much I mourned you, I’m doing this so we can finally have a fucking break, I’m doing this so we don’t have to stress ourselves out so goddamn much- 

Boom- 

The foundations of the mansion shook, the harsh crash rattling his eardrums and shaking his already sore legs.

“Why don’t you fucking trust me anymore?!”

Kon: Tim’s hands were trembling, out of fear, out of anger, at this point it was all the same to Kon, all just the ashes of the love that once existed, vibrant and alive, between them. Now it was just the bitter dust of a crumbling friendship, soot lost in the wind as it whipped around him, violent and almost painful against his cheek, just like his words. 

“Then what is it like, Tim?” His eyebrows drew together, the exasperation the only thing stronger than the anger fueling him. Tim was so many things, so much to so many people, so much to him, but right now, all Conner could see were his faults. How closed minded he could be, his single-minded focus on his version of justice. He was like Batman, that way. 

Kon wondered if the comparison would still make Tim wince like it did when they were young, or if it had become a source of pride for him, locked away in his cave, hiding from the faces of those lives he pretended to care about. 

“Did I forget what, Tim?” He spat through gritted teeth. Had he forgotten the feeling of blood dripping down his temple, the busted capillaries around his eye, the broken arm, how thin the air had been as he thought of Cassie and plummeted back to Earth, knowing he wouldn’t rise from the crater he and prime would scar the surface with but content that, at the very least, it would continue to persist without him, because of him?(edited)

He could see the tears pooling in Tim’s eyes and for a second his face fell. He drifted lower, his hand tapping against his bicep before reaching out, the need to fix, to comfort, too strong to ignore. For just a moment Tim was just a kid, wrapped in red and green and yellow, domino mask in hand and a small smile on his face as his eyes lit up with trust, yes, but most of all with love.

And then he yelled. It brought Kon back the present, where Tim was nothing more and nothing less than a man too caught up in himself to see what he had become and Kon was the only roadblock between him and irrevocably damaging his own legacy. 

Kon had made Tim promise once that if he were to ever stare into the void for too long, that if the Luthor inside of him was too much to ignore that he would stop him, no matter the cost. That no price was too high to stop him from becoming the villain. Now was the time for Kon to do the same for his friend. For his best friend. 

For his brother. 

“Because you no longer deserve it.” 

He flew forward, grabbing Tim by the robe and bringing him to his eye level. “Disable the program, Tim. Or-or you’ll be just like the rest of them, and I will stop you.”

Tim: It always happened in a blur. Dealing with the super-powered. In the back of his mind, Tim knew that the idea of super-powers was really just taking the human as a baseline, when it… Really wasn’t the case. He’d grown up in the cape seeing Dick, seeing Bruce, interact with their respective teammates and friends with the same causal nature as he’d seen in sappy teen flicks. He didn’t know that same friendship until Young Justice was pushed together from their mentors getting sick of them not having the same connections to each other that they had. They were there to help each other, no matter the cause, through thick and thin. So what the fuck was Conner doing now? How was this supposed to help? Tim’s fear-filled brain tried to surface any sort of logical thought, something he could ask without sounding like an asshole, something that wouldn’t reveal how much he really knew about the hero’s happenings (or, at the very least, his assumptions. Coordinates can only do so much).

“This is me trying to protect everyone! Even you guys! If… What the hell am I supposed to do if you’re gone?” Tim needed his own superpowers. That’s where the Eye was coming in. The data stream had been slow, a patch-work beta of a program that worked. Catching Metas and Mutants and Aliens and Gods in the act, monitoring their development, identifying how they could be accessed, assisted, apprehended. There would be no more Primes, no more Inertias, no more Ra’s al Ghouls.

The memories flooded back to him like he was living the last moments of his life. He watched with silent awe as the other drifted closer mid-air, something as beautiful and dangerous as the snowy ash of radiation fallout. Had they been just a few years younger, Tim might’ve flinched, anticipating something friendly with force, or maybe even a lecture on a different topic. He might’ve seen the utter seriousness in those eyes as he went on a self-destructive bender to save the world. He might’ve been able to see something he wished he would’ve noticed a little bit earlier, something he might’ve seen just now.

Just before he exploded.

Just before the powder keg burst into flame.

Trust was broken on both sides, sealed by Tim being lifted up into the air, and the hard pounding against his ribs threatened to give him a heart attack. He could pass out, he could let the overexertion on his central organ take him for the next few hours, something to show just how fragile he was against someone like Conner, an example of why he needed that satellite in the sky. But his brain wouldn’t let him, it would only bring the same pressure against his skull, threatening to burst with the pain that made him squeeze his eyes, wishing this was all some strange, vivid nightmare brought on by the last half-drank cup of coffee of the night. There’s no way his Superboy would act like this, threaten him with God knows what he did to the aforementioned them.

“Then do it.” His voice shook almost with a sob, unable to hold the tight seriousness it once had. He could only bank on the hope that his friend hadn’t fallen too far, that there was still some semblance of his clone boy in that thick skull. And right now, that hope really felt more like the caffeine-induced nightmare he wanted this to be. “Treat me like the villain. Maybe this time you'll get out alive.”

Kon: His chest heaved; his leather jacket still dewy from the remnants of ice from high in the atmosphere slowly melting. He felt unimaginably heavy, his arms, his eyelids, his heart, all of them felt tethered to the ground, pulling him down, down, down, and yet he continued to float, his fingers aching as they curled further around the cotton of Tm’s shirt, the terrycloth of his robe. 

“This isn’t protection,” he shot back, angry and miserable, the words feeling like acid on his tongue, “it’s control.” 

The fact that Tim couldn’t see that was heartbreaking. He had dangled helplessly in the atmosphere for hours before this, his hand skirting along the side of the satellite and hoping that once his palm ran over the paint it would change from Drake to anything else. Luthor corp, maybe, or LordTech. Anything, anyone, but his friend.

His Tim. His Robin. 

But that hadn’t been the case. He had been forced to come to terms with their divergence and now it was time for Tim to do the same. There would be no more Bats flying in to apprehend petty criminals while those who destroyed the planet went on making their millions, no more broken bones and traumatic brain injuries, no more hospital bills to push these people further into debt, further into crime, further into suffering. No more watchful eye, laying in wait for someone to do the wrong thing, meet the wrong person, plan the wrong act, think the wrong thoughts.

Not on Conner’s watch. He wouldn’t allow the people of this city to live in paranoid apprehension while a coffee-addled man with delusions of grandeur stayed hidden away in a cave while his machines watch and learn and intimidate and prey. 

His eyes flashed, a split second of white-hot heat the likes of which he had never felt before and then dimmed, leaving only disappointed green eyes in their wake, the hurt they held palpable in the air around the two men. He floated down slowly, setting Tim onto his feat with an almost gentle care before he let out a long-suffering sigh. This wasn’t protection, or guilt, or fear. It was cruelty, Kon could feel it in the way that Tim’s words rolled off his tongue, poisoned by whatever bitterness had overtaken him. 

“Goodnight, Tim.” He spoke, soft. He reeled back his arm and flew away before the man could hit the ground.

Tim: It had all happened in a matter of seconds. Everyone says that’s all it takes: a few seconds to see your life flashing before your eyes before you’re gone. Tim had plenty of moments that could’ve been considered his last, enough to recall that it might be a bit too scary to mention out loud. But this time, the inky blackness of doom had curled around his mind tighter than ever before. His expression had tried to make up for it by glaring harder, by daring the alien clone to do what he must’ve come here to do. His defenses were up, mounted, and ready to be thrown through the planet like some kind of missile. It was the first time he started to see his memories play out, rapid fire, when the world slowed on heavy breaths and racing pulses. Between memories of late night pictures of a curly-haired Robin, between bricks to the face and bloody boomerangs, he saw that same leather jacket. It had been newer, less battered and bruised, he thought he remembered it stiffer. There was a winning smile that had bothered him for some reason, a cocky attitude to boot that had the sore memories of ground teeth and budding migraines. He remembered the small embers in his stomach watching all of those eyes’ attention on someone else, remembered late nights trying to clone the same dna with 97… 98… 99 failures. He remembered lost hope and incomplete promises. .

Where had this Conner come from? It felt like there was something missing, some kind of clue or motive that he hadn’t caught in time. What wasn’t he getting? The Brother Eye program was for everybody, for everyone that felt unsafe on this planet. He was going to help the helpless find peace at night, to let them know that the deities that walked among them were just as human as they were. The clone was banking on hope, as he had for far too long, that goodness was inherent in every living being. Tim might’ve thought the same thing once upon a time, when they were both laughing over the same dumb joke, when they could pull out a practiced combo attack after the 50th run in the training room. It was something that had weaned over time, over the mourning, the loss, the suffering he’d witnessed and been subjected to. He wasn’t like Conner, he wasn’t like any of his teammates: He was utterly and miserably human. He had no choice but to adapt to ensure his survival, the survival of his loved ones. He wasn’t going to let Stephanie fear for either of their lives yet again, though the current situation was a moment of hyper-hypocrisy. Ice-blue eyes squinted again, the hints of a snarl on his cheeks. Tim felt himself slipping further into the darkness, fading out the edges of his vision, sinking into the farthest recesses of his mind. From those same memories came flickers of brightness, a soft glow among the despair that choked his throat. Late nights talking nonsense, staying weeks at a time together to keep their Team running. The utter relief at seeing him alive, celebrating a slight bit too late because he had other shit to get through his system first. Crying on his shoulder when too many left. Stealing a discarded shirt to see if he would notice and still keeping it folded among the others. It was those moments of warmth that felt ice cold now, the betrayal severing any kind of care those moments might’ve held. The heat… The warmth… .

What the fuck was going on with his eyes?! The shock had him blinking, nausea settling in his stomach, a momentary blackout having him thinking for a moment that his heart might’ve already stopped beating. He wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t moving. Not even when he felt his feet touch the ground again. He had been… Soft. There wasn’t anything visibly scarring or bruising, and it felt… Like more Betrayal. Watching the Super take off into the dark Gotham sky felt like another unfulfilled promise, and he felt scorching, angry tears start to prick at the corners of his red-hot glare. A whirlwind of emotions (emotions he only within the past year found he could feel again without being ashamed, without acting like a bat) pushed back against the black coils that threatened to take him over before, a confusion over what to feel mixing in with the harsh scratching inside his skull. Undercutting it all was a need to get the satellite back into the sky, running through blueprints of something more stealthy to hide from prying eyes, recalling any Lead suppliers he can possibly call. Shaky legs had him slumping against the old wooden doors, gripping at the polished handles for stability as he took a gasping sob of a breath. Conner was wrong about him, he was wrong about the Eye. This was the next step, and he just couldn’t see it because he was already high enough to be at the top of the proverbial food chain. He couldn’t see it because he nearly turned him to ash at that moment. A low whisper entered the silent cacophony, freezing his hands and the heart that dropped to his churning stomach. .