#superboyswonderboy

It was dark out, the stars shining like beacons from far off shores—bright and cold and pure. The moon stared down on the world, its face a sliver away from perfectly round, its light casting silver and shade onto the earth below. Conner looked at Tim, sleeping beside him. He knew that they were on recon and that they should both be awake and that Tim would kill him for letting him sleep, and yet Conner couldn’t bring himself to wake him.

Tim never let anyone get this close to him in his waking hours. He was always closed off, his personality compartmentalized, the pieces of him broken off and subdivided and put together in a way that sometimes built a completely different person. But here, in the darkness, he was just Tim, curled against Kon, subconsciously seeking warmth and the touch of another. And Conner, for whatever reason, didn’t push him away. In fact, he found that he quite like the way Tim curved against him, his wiry frame softened by the gentle embrace of sleep, he breath a soft touch of white frost against his neck.

Tim in the moonlight was someone different entirely. He wasn’t Robin, he wasn’t the Replacement, he wasn’t even Tim Wayne. He was someone gentle, with sleepy smiles and murmured words made nonsensical and by sleep, like riddles only Conner could decipher. He was soft and warm and entirely Conner’s. In the daylight Tim would never admit the things he did on rooftops in Gotham—his fear, his regret, his overwhelming loneliness and isolation. In daylight, Tim wouldn’t tell Kon that he sometimes felt like a balloon floating up and up into the atmosphere and that Conner was the only thing keeping him tethered to the ground. 

In the light of stars a million miles away, Conner saw Tim as he really was. He was someone entirely human, with the lilac shadows that curved under his too blue eyes softening and blending into the darkness of his mask, and his skin so white that it sometimes seemed almost transparent, so that Conner could see the veins outlined like the map of his soul in the hollow of his collarbones and the line of his jaw, tiny capillaries that were traceries of his dreams on his eyelids. He was all determination and iron will and fragile hope, turned into a marble statue that stood for so many things. But more than anything, he was Conner’s best friend, plain and raw and so achingly beautiful in so many ways.