iesika

Close to Home

2

Wednesday

Living on a farm meant you had to get up early. Kon knew that. He was resigned to it. That didn’t mean he was happy about it.

He dragged himself out of bed at sunrise and pulled a robe on over his boxers. It didn’t help that he’d been up late the night before; he’d torn the house apart for cameras, and then run his little errand for Tim. Then, when he’d gotten back, he’d continued tearing the house apart – until Martha came down and made him clean it all up. She didn’t seem nearly as disturbed by the camera thing as he did. She wouldn’t even let him check her room.

Kon half stumbled, half floated down the stairs, toes dragging on every other step, and drifted out the front door toward the barn. Milking the cow had been his job ever since the damned thing had tried to kick Martha. It had learned pretty quickly that Kon kicked back. It didn’t give him much trouble anymore, and the fresh milk was delicious. Kon just wished he didn’t have to get up at the ass-crack of dawn to get it.

When he was done with the milking, he set the pail on the porch for Martha and grabbed a big, telekinetic handful of chicken feed from the bin beside the steps. He let it trail through his fingers all the way to the chicken house.

Chickens were pretty damned stupid. They still hadn’t figured out that pecking him was a dumb idea. When he got to the second nest-box, a big white leghorn tried to maul his wrist. "Seriously?" he muttered. He flipped her upside down and let her hover, kicking at nothing, while he liberated the eggs she’d been sitting on.

"You," he grumbled, pointing at the dumpy in the eggless corner nest-box. "Big fat slacker. I feed you, you feed me, comprende?"

The chicken tried to bite his finger.

"Yeah, okay. We’ll see who’s Sunday dinner," he said.

Still, nine eggs wasn’t a bad haul. He amused himself by balancing them end-on-end as he headed back to the house. There would be coffee by now – sweet, blessed nectar of the gods. Most people would think that was hyperbole, but Kon had met gods. Barda could put away a whole pot by herself.

Tim opened the screen door for him.

"Um," Kon said. He almost dropped the eggs.

"Good morning," Martha said cheerfully as he entered the kitchen. She put down her rolling pin and took the eggs from him two at a time. When his hands were empty, she pressed a full, steaming mug into them.

Kon breathed a sigh of relief and took the kind of gulp only an invulnerable semi-alien could. He closed his eyes and let the caffeine filter through his bloodstream.

Tim was still there when he opened his eyes, but Kon felt a little more able to handle that. "When did you get here?" he asked.

"You were milking the cow. Mrs. Kent suggested I wait until you came inside." Tim smiled one of his normal boy smiles. It matched his normal boy clothes too perfectly to be real. "I did try to say hello."

Kon made a face and took another gulp of coffee.

Martha finished cutting biscuits and started laying them out in a pan. "Tim brought us sausage," she told Kon.

Kon raised his eyebrows.

"Alfred makes it himself," Tim explained. He sat down at the table and patted Krypto, who had finished his own breakfast and commenced with the shameless begging. "He asked me to pass along his regards as well, Mrs. Kent, and to thank you for the preserves."

"I’ve told you to call me Martha. Ma, if you like."

Tim looked a little sheepish. It was a good look for him. Kon always liked anything that made Tim’s expressions more human. "I’m sorry," he said. "I tend to forget."

"Right," Kon said, "because you’re so polite. How many cameras have you got in her bedroom?"

Martha let out a huff of a laugh and started cracking eggs into a bowl.

"One," Tim said, "covering the door. And one outside the window."

"God, you’re a freak."

Martha gave him a stern look. "That’s not a very nice thing to say to your friend."

"He put cameras in your bedroom!"

"She was aware," Tim said. "Superman isn’t always available, and after you died – and especially after Mr. Kent’s heart attack - there was some concern about her safety. The cameras were arranged in such a way as to provide as much coverage of the entrances as possible while still allowing privacy."

Kon opened his mouth. Martha looked at him. He shut it.

"Now that you’re back, there isn’t as much need to monitor the property."

"Did I get them all?" Kon asked.

"Other than the one in Martha’s bedroom – which I took down while you were feeding the chickens, by the way - you successfully located all the surveillance equipment inside the house. You took less time than I had expected. I imagine you’re now more aware of the potential for covert observation of your actions?"

Kon rolled his eyes.

"I left two of the external cameras, and installed a new one on the back porch." When Kon frowned, Tim added, "For safety’s sake, Kon."

Martha smiled blithely and pulled her favorite iron skillet out of the cabinet by the fridge. "I was assured that inappropriately personal surveillance is how Bats show their love," she said. "Now you boys get out of my kitchen. I’ll call you when it’s time to eat."

"Yes ma’am," they said in unison, and Tim’s sudden smile was so broad that Kon forgot to be angry. He followed Tim into the living room and sat down in his favorite chair. Tim’s laptop was on the couch, connected to the television by a long cable. Tim picked it up when he sat down.

"You told me last night you had work to do," Kon said.

Tim opened the laptop and started typing. "I did."

"Well, you’re here kind of early, aren’t you? Did you even go to bed?"

"The jet has an autopilot," Tim said, which shouldn’t have been an answer, but probably meant that he was running on about an hour of sleep. He turned on the TV and did something that replaced The Breakfast Show with a top down view of the Lowell County autopsy lab. Kon could only assume the body on the table was Matt’s, because it was under a sheet. A man in a white coat and plastic apron walked into the field of view, pulling on a pair of long latex gloves. "Oh good," Tim said. "They’re about to start."

"You know what?" Kon said as he flew toward the stairs, "I should get dressed. I should take a shower and then get dressed. I’ll, um… be back?"

"You should view this as a learning experience."

"Look," Kon said, "we all have our specialties. You call me when there are giant robots to break. I call you when someone’s being dissected. Division of labor. It totally works."

Tim’s mouth did that grim little thing it did sometimes, but he didn’t look away from the television, so Kon made his escape.

The farm got its water from a well Clark had dug years ago, with a wind-powered pump. Kon stayed in the shower as long as he could. It was going to take all day for the tank to fill up again, if he didn't go spin the turbine. He didn’t know how long an autopsy usually took, so he dawdled while he dressed and tried not to think too hard about what a coward he was. It wasn’t that he was all that squeamish…he’d spent ages at Cadmus, and there was no counting how many times he’d been covered in monster guts and worse things. It was different, though, when you knew the person on the table. That was probably why Tim hadn’t made him stay.

Still, he could only drag his feet so long... Kon sighed and headed down to the living room, where Tim was still watching the TV, making notes one-handed in between bites of scrambled egg and tomato. The other TV tray was open in front of Kon’s chair with a plate full of breakfast food that someone had fixed for him. Kon kept his head down on the way to the chair and didn’t look up at the screen.

"So…" Kon ventured. There were four biscuits on his plate, even though Martha only ever let him have two at a time.

Tim took a bite of sausage without looking away from the screen. It made Kon feel a little queasy. "The intensity of the blows suggests I was probably correct about the killer being a meta. I don’t think a weapon was used, but it’s hard to be sure, considering the strength of the attacker. Braincase rupture…there were at least three distinct blows to the head, including one to the face.. Multiple fractures of the ribcage, with perforations of the lungs and other organs by bone fragments. Ruptured stomach and small intestine."

"Jesus," Kon said, and pushed his plate away. He put his elbows on the TV tray and held his hands in front of his face, just in case he accidentally glanced up.

"The majority of the blows were received while the victim was supine, indicating that he probably went down after the initial strike. Blood spatter at the scene suggested a blow to the head." He did turn to Kon, then, but Kon only watched in his peripheral vision. He was afraid to turn his head. "He…probably died instantly, Kon."

Kon squeezed his hands into fists and bumped them against his forehead. "That... shouldn’t be a consolation. Jesus. Jesus. You’re saying they did all that after he was dead?"

"Excessive brutality usually indicates a strong personal connection to the victim."

If he took Tim’s lead and focused on this like a puzzle, maybe he could stop thinking about what Matt’s face must have looked like when he went down. "A personal connection. Like the maybe the dad," said Kon quietly. "Or…or somebody crazy. Like, Joker crazy."

"That’s certainly a possibility."

"In Smallville," Kon said. "Jesus."

"The attacker appears to have worn heavy shoes, between twenty-five and twenty-seven centimeters. Between that and the splatter pattern for the initial blow, our killer is probably a man of average to slightly below average height, or a fairly tall woman."

Kon closed his eyes. "Amazing. You have narrowed the list of subjects to…half the people on the planet. You can really tell you were trained by-"

"Patrick Stephens is five-foot-ten," Tim interrupted.

Kon blinked a few times, then started stuffing fried eggs into his biscuits. There was no way he could eat them now, but he would probably be hungry again by the time they made it to Iowa.

Tim suited up while Kon did the dishes, and then they took off. They were only going about three hundred miles, so Tim didn’t bother retrieving the Bat Jet from…wherever he’d left it. Kon was pretty sure the only reason they weren’t taking it was so Tim wouldn’t have to tell him his hiding place.

"Air Superboy!" Kon shouted as they broke into the clouds. He had Tim by the wrists, though his telekinesis was supporting most of Tim’s weight. "It’s the only way to fly!"

"No in-flight movie, though," Tim said.

Kon dropped him.

He kept pace, though, and scooped him up by the armpits after about five-hundred feet of free-fall. Tim didn’t have the decency to look fazed. Instead, he just tucked his limbs against his body and made himself as aerodynamic as possible so Kon could lay on the speed.

The town Tim directed him to was small – smaller than Smallville, even, and surrounded by green fields. Tim had him come in low on the west side, and pointed out a little white house on the outskirts of town. They touched down behind it, a few yards from the back door. The grass was patchy and a little too long, and the house needed a new paint job. The screens were missing from half of the windows.

"Kind of a fixer upper," Kon said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a biscuit wrapped in a napkin. Tim grabbed his arm and yanked him behind a bush before he could bite into it. Part of it crumbled away and fell to the grass.

"As far as I could determine, he lives alone," Tim said. Kon put on his yes-I’m-listening face and pulled away far enough to start shoving food into his mouth. Tim just rolled his eyes and kept talking. "He called in sick from work today. His personnel file indicates this isn’t an uncommon occurrence. I think we can assume today, at least, he’s out because of Matt, whether he’s our killer or just grieving."

"He put the kid in the hospital," Kon said with a grimace.

"We assume. It is possible there’s another explanation for Matt’s injuries just before the divorce."

"Do you believe that?"

Tim frowned and looked away. "No," he said, "but we can’t let preconceptions get in the way of the investigation."

"What’s your gut say?"

"My gut," Tim said, with a slight smile, "says I ate too much of Mrs. Kent’s delicious home cooking, this morning." It was Kon’s turn to roll his eyes. "Honestly, Kon, I’m trying to refrain from forming a theory until we have more information."

"You always have a theory for everything," Kon argued.

"And sometimes – frequently, in fact – my initial theory in a given situation is wrong. Patrick Stephens is currently our best suspect, but that could change. We’re three hundred miles from the scene of the crime, Kon, and I couldn’t find any travel records that are a good match."

"He could have driven. No records, then."

"Stephens’s truck was parked right over there, since around one PM yesterday."

Kon craned his neck around the bush. Sure enough, there was a beat-up, red pickup truck parked at the side of the house. "You got that off surveillance at the gas station across the street?" he asked.

"Hm," Tim said, with obvious approval.

"Then again, if he’s a meta…"

"He might not have needed a vehicle for the trip. Yes. You’re getting the hang of this," Tim said, and brushed a few biscuit crumbs off of the S. "Ready to loom threateningly?"

"Always," Kon said, and grinned.

"Where is he?"

Kon paused, then looked up at the house. He was still kind of getting the hang of the X-ray thing, so it took a moment to find his focus. The back door led into the kitchen, which was a mess. There were take-out cartons and pizza boxes everywhere, and the trash can was overflowing and probably pretty fragrant. Kon shifted his focus and found Stephens in the next room, the living room, watching television from a cracking naugahyde armchair. He was pale and unshaven, and he had a bottle of beer in his hand despite the hour. Probably if he’d known he was about to have company, he would have put on some pants. "Second door on the left," he told Tim, "watching TV."

Tim looked at him appraisingly. "You’d be very useful on surveillance missions."

Kon spread his arms wide. "All you gotta do is ask, dude."

Tim gave him a little nod, then turned and led the way up the back steps. He sprayed the door hinges with something before motioning Kon forward to pop the cheap lock, and then they slipped silently into the filthy kitchen. Kon watched Tim pick his way across the cracked and dirty tile before flying over to join him at the open door to the living room.

All they could see of Stephens was the back of his balding head. Most of the light in the room came from a small reading lamp on an end-table by the chair, and of course the television, which was currently displaying the bold yellow POLICE logo. Kon thought that was pretty appropriate.

Beside him, Tim pulled something that looked like a tiny detonator from his belt and depressed the switch with his thumb. Instantly, the room when dark and quiet as the television and the lamp both cut off. Goddamn Kon wanted one of those. Tim always had the best toys…

Stephens sat up, cursing, when the power cut out, and clicked the switch on the lamp futilely a few times. While he was still bent awkwardly over the arm of the chair, Tim sprang into action, stalking quickly but silently to stand directly in front of Stephens, cape drawn tight around his body. Kon followed his lead, and slipped around the other side of the chair to do his looming from close range.

"Shit," Stephens said when he saw them. "Shit, shit-" he fumbled for a drawer in the end-table, but Tim’s staff cracked against his wrist before Kon could even react.

"Ah ah ah, Patrick," Tim scolded, leaning close. "You don’t have a permit for that handgun."

"Oh shit, oh shit," the man babbled, clutching his hand to his chest. He pressed himself flat against the back of the chair, which was worn in a hollow the shape of his body. His eyes darted wildly between them. "Who are you? What do you-"

The tip of Tim’s staff touched the man’s mouth, silencing him. "We’ll ask the questions, Patrick, if you don’t mind." He drew the staff away.

"Oh God," Stephens whispered, and then he went quiet.

"You left the plant at noon, yesterday. You stopped at Charlie’s Bait’n’Beer and purchased two bottles of Old Bear whiskey and a case of this fine beverage." He tapped the bottle in Stephens’s hand with the edge of his staff. "You came back here, and…then what?"

Stephens shook his head from side to side, not taking his eyes off the long white staff in Tim's gauntleted hands.

Kon concentrated, and saw red. The bottle in Stephens's hand burst, and he yelped as his lap was splashed with uncomfortably warm beer. "The man asked you a question, Patrick," Kon said.

"Oh God, I - I haven't been anywhere. This is - this is about Matthew, isn't it? The police already-"

"We're not the police, Patrick," Tim said, pleasantly. He pressed the tip of his staff gently against one of the shards of brown glass on Stephens's thigh.

"Ow! Jesus."

"Tell me about your divorce. The court says it was amicable, but I have my doubts. You've been sending a sizable portion of your paycheck to Smallville for a very long time,"

"For - for Matthew," Stephens stuttered, "and Becky. It's hard to raise a boy alone. If I didn't send the money she'd have to take a night job."

"Hm," Tim said. It was one of his more menacing 'hm's. "And it kept you out of prison."

"F-Fuck you," Stephens gasped. He squirmed under the pressure on his thigh, but it didn't shut him up. "I love my wife. I loved my son. I understand why she took him away, but if she hadn't been so soft, he'd still be alive." Stephens glared between them fiercely, defiantly, but his lips were twitching. After a moment, he slumped down again, and his face relaxed into tears. "I only wanted to protect him," Stephens sobbed. "I never meant- I knew what would happen. I knew. That's why I tried to beat it out of him, but it didn't work. I should have sent him to one of those camps-"

Something tight and bitter was growing in Kon's gut. "Camps," he ground out. Red. He was- he was seeing red. He had to calm down. He had to focus.

"For homosexuals," Stephens whispered, "To fix them. I was in the army. I know what happens to people like that. I just wanted to spare my son-"

"By beating him nearly to death," Tim said, his voice as cold as Kon had ever heard it.

"I'm sorry," Stephens sobbed. He pressed his hands to his eyes. "Oh, God forgive me. I loved my son. I loved him. I never wanted this."

Tim looked across the man's slumped form to Kon. Even with all his practice at reading his friend through a mask, Kon didn't know what he was thinking. After a few seconds, Tim leaned down and touched a thin pipette to the wound on Stephens's thigh, which was bleeding weakly in thin line down his calf. He tucked the pipette into his belt, and walked out of the room.

That left Kon alone with the weeping mess in the armchair. He sighed in disgust and kicked an empty whiskey bottle across the floor to shatter into powder against the baseboard.

Stephens flinched.

Kon rolled his eyes and turned to follow Tim, but a hand on his arm stopped him.

"Do you," Stephens began, tentatively. When Kon stepped out of his reach, he let his hand drop to his lap to brush away the broken glass. "Do you know when the funeral is?"

Kon blinked. "What?"

"I'll just upset Becky, if I call. I don't want that. But he's my son. I need to be there. I'll stay to the back. She never has to know. I haven't seen him-" he broke off. "I haven't seen him since the ambulance took him away." Stephens looked up at him, then, and something about his face - something about his eyes-

"Saturday morning," Kon said, "at the First Methodist."

Stephens closed his eyes and relaxed into his chair. "Thank you," he said.

Tim was on the porch when Kon walked out the back door, fiddling with a couple of tiny vials.

"He didn't do it," Kon said.

"No," Tim agreed, turning. He held up a vial of something faintly purple. "He's not a meta."

Kon watched silently as his friend carefully tucked his little science experiment away, seemingly oblivious to Kon's gaze. Tim was the smartest guy Kon knew, but every now and then he completely missed the point. It really made Kon wonder, sometimes, if there was something seriously wrong with him. Back in Young Justice, it had been easy to joke, to call him a freak or a sociopath. Ever since he'd come back, though, Kon had been a little more careful about the name-calling.

Except…Well, Tim could be incredibly kind, in his own way, and he was very perceptive, when it came to the people he cared about. It was like there was a switch in his head, a Tim/Red Robin switch. One minute he was sneaking you extra biscuits and wiping crumbs off your shirt, the next, boom, instant asshole.

Tim turned to look at him, once he'd packed his gear away. He seemed to see something in Kon's face, because he cocked his head. "Did you know that Matthew Stephens was a homosexual?"

"What?" Kon asked, because, really, who the hell said 'homosexual' like that anymore, except for the fuckwad inside. "No, I didn't know he was gay. I'd only just met him."

"Hm," Tim said, and this time, Kon didn't know what he meant at all. "We'll need to identify any romantic or sexual partners."

Kon made a fist. Apparently, they were still stuck in asshole mode. "Seriously?" he asked. "You find out he might be gay, and all of a sudden his boyfriend did it?"

Tim's face shifted under the cowl - not much, but enough for Kon to read his expression without looking through the mask. Tim was pissed. His voice was strangely blank when he spoke, though. "We're looking for people with an intense emotional connection to the victim. After immediate family, that's most likely to be someone he was involved with. Whatever their gender."

Kon took a step back.

"But it's nice to know you expect so little of me. I'm used to being considered callous and uncaring-" Kon flinched "-but no one's ever accused me of bigotry before."

Tim brushed past him toward the steps, or tried to, anyway, until Kon caught his arm and made him turn around. "You'll notice I was surprised okay? I just misunderstood." Tim's expression didn't change, so Kon plowed on. "The whole thing with the dad got me all keyed up. I was spoiling for a fight. I shouldn't have jumped down your throat like that."

Tim didn't say anything for a moment, but his face relaxed. He looked at Kon consideringly. "You're taking this case very personally."

"It happened at my high school."

"Hm," Tim said, like Kon was a puzzle - or a crime scene. It maybe should have been disturbing that Kon found that so comforting.

"Wanna go home for lunch?" Kon offered. "We can hit the mom's after."

"It's only ten," Tim said, without looking at his watch. Maybe he had a heads-up display in that cowl of his.

"Yeah, well, some of us have trouble eating sausage while we watch autopsies."

"Mmm…" Tim said with relish, "organ meat."

Kon felt his stomach moving, and swallowed, hard. "Urgh, yuck," he said, when he felt like it was safe to open his mouth again. "Don't ever say that again."

Tim just smirked at him, so Kon tackled him hard and threw them both off the porch. Just before they would have hit the ground, he jerked them upward toward the sky. The click Tim's teeth made when they knocked together was oddly satisfying.

It wasn't until they were almost to Lincoln that Kon realized Tim wasn't fighting him anymore because he'd fallen asleep.

*

Kon had to concentrate pretty hard to open the screen door without it squeaking. It wasn't that the task was all that difficult - he just lifted the door a tiny fraction of an inch and cushioned the space between the hinges and the pins. He'd gotten to be kind of an expert at the maneuver while sneaking down for midnight snacks. What made things a bit more difficult was how carefully he was holding Tim, who he knew from experience had a tendency to come up swinging when awakened suddenly.

Martha's hand flew to her mouth when she saw them. "Gracious!" she said.

Kon shushed her as he maneuvered Tim's still form through the door.

"What happened?" she asked, more quietly. "Is he all right? What-"

"Shh," Kon hissed. He guided Tim toward the stairs with one hand and raised the other to his lips, one finger extended. "He's sleeping, Ma."

"But-"

"Shh!" Kon repeated. Keeping Tim level on the stairs was harder than he had expected it would be, and he tuned Martha out so he could concentrate on not slamming Tim's head into the banister.

Thankfully, his bedroom door was open. He floated Tim over to the bed and looked him up and down. Tim had used to sleep in his uniform, sometimes, back when he was just Robin, but it had never looked comfortable. This uniform looked even less so, but Kon knew all too well that the old suit had been booby trapped all to hell. He and Bart had called it the Bat-Chastity-Belt, but never where Tim could hear them.

This was going to be tricky. He would probably survive whatever the suit could throw at him, but he wasn't sure what might happen to his room, and anything he set off was sure to wake Tim up. There was only one thing for it - Kon was going to have to be very careful. He sat down on the edge of the bed, more or less level with Tim, and closed one eye.

There was some kind of mechanism in the cowl, but if he was careful… He tugged gently with his aura until the cowl wasn't actually touching Tim's face anymore, depressed the tiny switches near his temples, and slid the cowl up and off of his head, taking the cape with it. There was a thin red line across his forehead where an internal seam must have been pressed against his skin, and his hair was horribly mussed. "You still keep emergency product in that belt?" Kon murmured, and laughed quietly to himself.

Speaking of belts, those were the next to go, and probably the most dangerous part of the uniform to handle. Good thing he wasn't actually planning to handle them. They were actually pretty easy to slide off, once he figured out how they connected together, and nothing exploded when he pulled them down over Tim's hips, over his legs, and finally let them rest gently on the floor.

Tim's boots weren't booby trapped, but it was hard to get them off without jostling Tim's legs. Kon had to carefully flex Tim's foot as he slid each boot off and set it aside. He did the same with the gauntlets, shifting each of Tim's fingers inside their sheaths so that they wouldn't catch against the interior texturing. The tunic was rigged with a taser, but Kon had been expecting that. It took him a few minutes to find the release switch, and another to realize that, yes, the tunic did just slip up and over Tim's head - that was a tricky maneuver, all by itself.

Kon hadn't seen Tim without a shirt since he'd come back. He was a lot bulkier than he had been, though he was never going to be as broad as Kon, or even Dick. The adult musculature looked…strange… on Tim's familiar frame. There wasn’t a spare ounce on him - Kon could see every vein, every ripple of muscle under his skin. The combination of all that new muscle mass and the lack of padding made Kon swallow back something unpleasant. There was something…stark about Tim's body now…unhealthy, despite the obvious increase in strength and how hard he must have worked for it. There were fresh bruises, too, and a line of stitches across his bicep. From the angle, Kon guessed Tim had done them himself. Was he not going home at all, anymore? Not even for medical care?

Kon considered leaving Tim in his pants, but despite how tight they looked, they were almost as armored as the tunic. And Tim would probably thank him for not letting him sleep in his cup. It was harder, with the pants, to pull the fabric away from Tim's skin - there wasn't a lot of room to spare - but he finally managed to slide them down and off, revealing a knee brace that Tim hadn't mentioned at all. Kon focused on the brace, then the skin, and finally what was under it, but he couldn't really tell what was wrong. No broken bones, or anything…Maybe he should ask Mr. Dalton for a few good books on human anatomy.

When Kon looked up, Martha was standing in the doorway, leaning against the jamb and just watching him. He smiled at her, ruefully, and lowered Tim gently to the mattress. Tim stirred, but didn't wake, so Kon shook his quilt out and laid it gently over his sleeping friend. He shooed Martha back and stepped out into the hall, tugging the door shut behind them.

"That boy doesn't take care of himself," Martha said quietly.

"No, he doesn't," Kon agreed.

Index | 3