For example is Tim getting stuck outside in weather and having to be wrapped in a blanket

this is a dangerous question. one time i spent an hour-long car ride describing a tim pear wiggler scenario to fey and when we parked i was like “so anyway that’s the prologue. then in part one—” and fey was like mercy, please

(my favorite pear wiggler scenarios are the ones where the pangs require complicated and internally consistent worldbuilding. it’s like 90% worldbuilding and then a series of pangs. gotta get up the chairlift before you can ski down. or something)

lately i’ve been kicking one around in my head that’s simultaneously a tim-joins-the-family-early au and also a tim-joins-the-bats-late au, with the interim time being as much pear wiggling as possible. it’s set during jason’s robin era, while bruce is working to adopt jason but running into some official red tape (possibly due to the revelation, in an adoption process functioning 1% more above-board this time, that catherine wasn’t jason’s birth mother). meanwhile, in this world tim’s mom dies and his dad is in a coma early, and due to the high-profile nature of the situation, bruce wayne (who has the means and established personal security/team of media lawyers) is considered the best foster placement for 12 y/o tim drake.

(see what i mean about needing a whole setup? i’m trying to be so brief here, and yet.)

anyway. the thing is, bruce doesn’t exactly WANT to take in another kid right now. nothing against this kid personally, but he’s in the middle of an adoption process, and also, you know, the secret night job. but he has to keep up appearances for the aforementioned adoption process. and meanwhile jason, who has not been officially adopted yet and is still settling into the wayne family, feels incredibly insecure about this little polished rich kid coming to stay with them. like, some part of jason is a bit convinced that bruce will realize it would be so much easier to have a kid like tim instead of a kid like jason.

tim, meanwhile, is quietly grieving and quietly starstruck and quietly just like. Going Through It. especially because he’s been getting targeted/bullied at school (by other kids, by a tennis coach, a few options here). he doesn’t tell anyone, but it’s getting worse, and it puts him on edge around everyone at the manor, too.

bruce, during this time, can sense the tension in the household; one night jason’s irritation boils over and bruce sees jason snap at tim over something. when bruce talks to jason about it—the two of them in the study—he reminds jason that they need to keep the foster situation drama-free because of the adoption process. also tim is a kid who just lost his parents, but—no, jason, he’s not here to replace you. he’s not a better model. jason. we couldn’t say no, do you understand? i want to keep you. this is how i get to keep you.

and of course: tim is outside the study to hear this. he had been hovering, finally working up the courage to tell bruce about the harassment at school. but he hears this, and realizes: 1) he’s already an unwanted obligation. and 2) telling anyone would be the opposite of drama-free. it might interfere with his placement, or even jason’s placement. (and whoever is targeting tim knows this, too. they’re banking on him being afraid of it. maybe they’ve even implied that they’ll get jason in trouble if tim tells anyone. so.)

tim takes matters into his own hands and comes up with a solution for everyone: he asks bruce to send him to boarding school. and for the next few years that’s where tim is—as jason’s adoption finalizes, as bruce reconciles with dick, as life goes on for the wayne family. tim is conveniently out of the way, finding excuses not to accept bruce’s invites back for school breaks. (on more than one occasion he fakes a school trip or an invite skiing with friends, and spends his spring break or winter holidays eating cereal in his dorm room, learning how to hack most gotham databases. on other occasions he actually does go on a trip, but not the school-sanctioned summer programs he’s supposed to be on. somehow he ends up with lady shiva for a summer, anyway.)

a few years later a new vigilante enters the gotham scene—almost entirely out of sight, mostly slipping the bats intel and never directly engaging. (tim. obviously.) and, around that time, damian shows back up in gotham, and ends up being the catalyst for tim coming back to the family as tim, too.

hell yeah, let’s round up some kon pangs!

i wasn’t sure if you were solely looking for timkon here, but i’ve pulled a range from kon-focused stories that aren’t necessarily timkon to kon-focused timkon to timkon feat. kon pangs. (a few of these lean a bit more angsty than specifically pangy, but all have excellent and compelling kon pain of some sort.)

🐊 Careful, Superboy by muffin_y

two interactions between superboy & robin, shortly after the events of WF3. in which superboy takes his first steps toward befriending robin, which is even harder than it sounds when you’re fresh out of the tube and still pretty new at everything. this is one of my most recent reads, and oh man the kon emotions had me clutching my chest.

📝 of worry by @adelfie

kon gets kidnapped and kryptonite’d and, to no surprise, his main concern is for everyone but himself. this is set in a post-reign of the supermen context, and kon’s pov is great and the kon & clark interactions are very sweet. (it’s also part of a larger kon-focused series!)

🏷️ Gut Feeling by @ao3time (wip)

in which lois lane finds experiment 13 before he breaks himself out, they go on a very stressful road trip, and experiment 13 takes his first shaky steps into autonomy. there’s a really juicy pang thread here fueled by a misunderstanding that made me go “oh shit, that’s brilliant.” (wip, but only one chapter to go!)

🚗 flying dreams by @cabezadeperro

oneshot where superman is still off the playing board, superboy has been kept as a lexcorp asset on a much shorter leash, and kon angst abounds. (and there might be a former robin on his security team…) so intrigued by this morsel of an au!

🔬 all lab rats go to heaven by @vibrantstarfire

kon wakes up in a lab, and has to relive his own trauma. a delicious (and incredibly tense) oneshot excavating kon’s fears re: his origin and his identity, plus a fraught yet comforting rescue to round it out.

🗓️ The Promethean Child by NerdyGay

a plotty, kon-centric au in which a Mysterious Someone messes with the timeline, and kon ends up safe in clark’s custody far earlier than he’s supposed to (not that anyone knows that). eventual timkon! it was so compelling to see how this world changed due to the timeline interference, and also really fun when the reveal finally happened.

🎬 Just like life to come and teach me a lesson every time I swear I forget it by @hmslusitania

a modern (civilian/no powers) timkon au in which kon, an actor, is shadowing tim for research, and obviously they end up falling into bed / in love with each other. this makes the list for some delicious little kon pangs re: kon having been a child star and also dealing with all the horrors of being famous without a lot of people in his corner (until now).

💳 call me cute and feed me sugar by @suzukiblu (wip)

timkon fic in which tim somehow winds up as superboy’s teenage sugar daddy. this is a delight on many levels, but the direction it goes with kon’s loneliness and perception of what he needs/deserves is soooo compellingly pangy.

🎢 I Want It That Way (series) by @wynterstars

i’ve definitely rec’d this series before, but it’s such a good one—a 90s timkon romp that gives us some kon pangs in the form of lex-related flashbacks. read for those pangs, identity shenanigans, and lots of kon figuring out his place in the world.

🪽 Ascension by Violet_Witch

i’m genuinely mad that i didn’t read it as a kid. like my main feeling so far, beyond enjoying it, is, man, this would’ve permanently rewired my brain if i read it in like 8th grade. (but that also means i get to experience it for the first time now!)

in my mind steph and cass get (officially) engaged first and tim, out of both genuine love and a surprising sense of self-preservation, decides not to say anything about the (asteroid) ring kon sometimes wears around the house until after the stephcass wedding.

(possibly this ends up backfiring even more because i also think it would be really funny if, shortly after the pre-proposal, tim and kon were on another space trip and for some reason had to—or just had the opportunity to—get married in some alien city. for mission reasons or “woke up in [alien vegas]” reasons or whatever. so then years later they have to tell everyone that technically they haven’t had an official proposal yet, no, but also they diiiiiiid kind of beat everyone to the marriage thing. so then everyone is upset anyway and the kents insist on having a backyard wedding party on the farm and bruce insists on them doing all the official paperwork so his lawyers can shore up their wills and PoAs and such, and no, he’s not crying about it or anything.)

sorry this reply is pretty late but now it’s gotta be this one from this month’s batman #2 🙏

tim, pausing behind bart & cassie as they watch: are you sure it’s a romance? people can secretly hook up with someone for years and it doesn’t mean they’re in Love haha

oh my god, your mind indeed…timkon sitcom edition…