![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iesikaTitle: Subtext in Triptych
Characters: Cassie, Kon, Tim
Rating: pg-13
Words: 2400
Summary: Cassie, Tim, and Kon have it out, in various combination.
Note: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kirax2 , because she’s awesome.
1.
The first weekend they’re all going to be back together again, Cassie gets to the tower before Kon’s even left the farm and finds Tim up to his elbows in the innards of one of the Tower systems. “Hey,” she says as she floats into the room, and Tim nods in acknowledgment without looking up. He’s still wearing the stupid cowl, but he’s changed the costume since she saw him last - it doesn’t look quite so stiff and stifling anymore.
After a minute or two, when she hasn’t said anything else, he either finishes what he’s doing or decides the tension is too much, and he turns to look at her. “What is it?”
“I told him about us,” she says, and she knows from the sudden flash of...something, in Tim’s eyes, that she doesn’t have to specify who.
“I know,” Tim says, and then, after a few seconds, turns back to the panel and the computer guts all over the floor.
“I should have talked to you about it first, but-”
“It’s okay,” Tim interrupts without turning around again. “He didn’t seem to mind.”
The nonchalant tone doesn’t quite fit with the set of Tim’s shoulders, but if she didn’t know him as well as she does, she probably would have believed it. As it is, the fact that Tim doesn’t want to be having this conversation makes it even more clear that she needs to say what she came to tell him. “I didn’t tell him everything. I mean... I just told him we kissed.”
Tim remains crouched, staring at a pair of cables he’s holding in his gloved hands. He doesn’t move, and he doesn’t look up, but his whole body is screaming with tension.
“I really, really wanted to talk to you, but you kind of disappeared. I didn’t know what to do, Tim. So I told him part of it, but....but I wanted to know what you wanted to do, before....” she bites her lip, hoping Tim will interrupt again, but he’s still staring at those stupid cables. “Do you think we should-”
“No,” Tim says, with an abrupt shake of his head. He snaps the cable connectors together and shoves them back into the casing. “There’s no reason to bring it up. It wouldn’t do anything but cause potential tension.” He slides a circuit card of some kind into a slot, and then two more, quickly, before slamming the casing door.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe telling Kon the whole truth wouldn’t help anything, would only hurt him, her, Tim, all of them, but....but not telling him feels so fundamentally, horribly dishonest that it makes her stomach roil.“But..”
“Cassie,” Tim says, and it’s the sharp tone he uses sometimes in the field, when one of them is going too far, hitting too hard. “There were extenuating circumstances. It’s not like it’s going to happen again.”
His voice sounds so harsh, now. So bitter. He was supposed to be better - he’d *seemed* better, when they’d all gotten together in Gotham a few weeks ago, but he sounds so much like he did the last time she saw him before he disappeared that Cassie wants to hug him, or hit him, or maybe both. Probably both. She doesn’t let herself think about the other things she wants. Instead, she watches as he screws the panel down and shoves the pile of tools and leftover computer bits into a bag with an uncharacteristic lack of care. He’s going to leave the room - maybe the Tower. If they’re lucky, he probably won’t leave the city.
He passes her on his way out the door, and Cassie catches his arm. “Tim,” she says, as softly and soothingly as she can. “You really don’t think we should tell him?”
He doesn’t answer right away, taking a moment to compose himself. The cowl covers his eyes, but when he looks at her, the set of his jaw,doesn’t look as angry as she’d expected. There’s a softness around his mouth she hasn’t seen in a long time. “He knows you love him,” he says. “And he loves you. That’s all that matters. Anything else...is just a distraction.”
Later that night, as she lies listening to Kon’s steady breathing, she repeats the words in her mind and wonders if she’d imagined the subtle emphasis.
He knows you love *him*. And he loves *you*.
That’s all that matters.
2.
“I’m telling you,” Kon insists, following her into the bathroom as she brushes her hair. They’d fallen into this arrangement, sharing a room at the Tower while they’re there, because it just hadn’t seemed worth making up a separate room for Kon when they’d probably end up in the same place, anyway. Cassie’s kind of regretting that now, though, because it means she can’t really kick him out, even if he is being an idiot. “You need to talk to him. He’s not over you.”
“By the gods,” she mutters, and pulls at a tangle so viciously that the brush breaks. “Conner, please. Drop it. He’s not - there was never anything for him to get over.”
“He kissed you, didn’t he?”
Her mind stutters over the memory - not the first kiss, but the second, against the door in Tim’s room, his fingers tangling in her hair, his mortal skin bruising under her mouth. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t like what?” Kon asks, sounding exasperated. She looks up from her broken brush to see him standing behind her, looking at her reflection in the mirror.
“It wasn’t-” she sees her own face twist into a scowl and throws the brush down into the garbage can. It topples over, spilling tissues and empty packaging onto the floor, and she thinks that if the Tower weren’t built and furnished with demigods and Kryptonians in mind, she might have put a hole in the floor.. “It wasn’t about me,” she says, her voice quiet.
When she glances up at his reflection again, Kon looks confused, his forehead drawn tight, his blue eyes clouded. “I don’t understand.”
She doesn’t know if she can explain it without giving away more about Tim than she feels she has a right to. “He was really...we were both...you were gone, Conner. And neither one of us could handle that.”
“He tried to clone me.” Kon says, quietly, like it’s a piece of the puzzle. Cassie can’t believe Tim told him that and not the rest. She can’t believe Kon hasn’t realized what it means.
She has trouble even thinking about it - about the depths of her grief, of Tim’s. She’d done stupid, horrible things. They both had. Compared to the cult, to the cloning, what had happened in Tim’s lab had seemed like the healthy response, which just proved how fucked up she’d been. “The first time we kissed-”
“First time?” Kon asks, and it isn’t until he says it that she realizes her error. “You, ah. You did a lot of kissing, then?”
Cassie turns and throws her arms around his neck, pressing her forehead against his shoulder. “You don’t know what it was like without you. Tim and I...we both went a little insane.”
Kon’s big, warm hand comes up to rest between her shoulder blades. He strokes her back gently, soothingly. “It was more than kissing,” he says quietly, and there’s no question in his voice at all, so she can’t even try to deny it. She couldn’t, anyway. It’s the truth.
“I should have told you,” she says, her voice small even to her own ears, muffled by his shirt. She’s afraid to look up, in case he’s angry. He doesn’t sound angry, but maybe it hasn’t sunken in yet. Maybe she can head it off, explain... “Tim....Tim thought it would be better if you didn’t know.”
“More secrets,” he mutters, but he’s still stroking her back, so she doesn’t do much more than flinch. “Cassie, he’s in love with you.”
“He’s not,” she protests, trying not to laugh, because even as bitter as it feels in her throat, she knows Kon would take it all wrong, right now.
“I was gone,” Kon says, “things changed. I know it. But....I know Tim. He’s not casual about that kind of thing. He doesn’t let people get that close. If you slept together...” he pauses for a moment, giving her a last chance to deny it, but Cassie just squeezes him tighter. “I - Lots of people have tried to get that close to him. If he let you in...he really loves you.”
She shakes her head even as he pulls her closer, feels his hand slide through her hair, smoothing it with a faint brush of his power. He’s wrong. He’s got to be wrong. The alternative is unthinkable.
Later, after she wipes her tears and brushes her teeth, they join the others for breakfast. Cassie fixes herself a plate and waits while Kon pours them both tall glasses of orange juice, turning the argument over in her mind.
When she looks up, Kon is staring across the kitchen to where Tim has wedged himself into the corner made by the fridge and the counter, drinking his coffee, his face hidden behind mask and mug. Something about the sadness in Kon’s eyes makes her mind catch on the memory of his stutter, the bittersweet note in his voice.
“ I - Lots of people have tried to get that close to him. If he let you in...he really loves *you*.”
3.
Kon isn’t in their room, when she looks, and there’s no answer at Tim’s door. For a long moment she hovers there in the hall, waiting, listening, thinking about breaking through, but she doesn’t actually think they’re in there. Mostly.
She checks the common areas - the kitchen, the training rooms, the lounge where Bart is watching three televisions and stuffing his face and reading a stack of technical manuals taller than he is. He seems to read something in her face, and slows the blur of his hands to hand her a chocolate chip cookie. “I think they’re still on the roof,” he says.
Cassie thanks him and slips away when one of the televisions catches his attention, trying not to wonder what he’s seeing in all this. She probably ought to ask him. If things go on this way much longer, she doesn’t think she’ll have much choice. She’s got to talk to someone or she’ll go insane.
The roof access door is ajar, and Cassie can hear them from the highest landing. It’s so rare to hear Tim shout outside of a combat situation that she just stands there, still, trying to figure out what’s going on.
“Stop being such a fucking martyr!” Kon yells back, and she can feel the concrete wall of the stairwell vibrate under her fingertips. “Maybe you like making yourself miserable, but she’s miserable, too! It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to you - or me, for that matter.”
“She’s the one who dumped me,” Tim shouts back, his voice ragged, completely without control. She thinks he might be close to tears, and so she leaves her place on the landing and flies closer, until she can watch them from the gap in the door. They’re standing just a few feet apart, fists clenched, postures tense. Something is going to break, here and now. She can feel it in the tension in the air, but she has no idea what’s going to happen. “She doesn’t love me. She never did!”
“Bullshit!” Kon roars. He’s floating higher and higher, looming over Tim more and more as his voice rises in volume. “You never would have fucked her if she didn’t love you. If you didn’t love her. You made that pretty fucking clear-”
“Is that what this is about? Because I didn’t let you use me?”
“But you let her!” Kon cries, and it’s such an anguished sound that Cassie has to cover her own mouth, not to echo it. “That’s what you’re saying! That she just fucked you for the hell of it and threw you away! She wouldn’t do that! She wouldn’t, and you wouldn’t let her!”
“You were dead!” Tim screams. His reaches up and yanks his cowl back, and his eyes are red, his face is wet. “You were dead and we were alone!”
Kon takes the words like a slap, dropping like a puppet with its strings cut, his feet hitting the tar paper roof with an audible thud. Cassie’s heard enough, she’s heard more than enough to last her a lifetime, and she pushes the door open, but Kon’s back is to her, and Tim’s head is bowed.
“You loved her,” Tim says, low, hoarse from shouting, but Cassie hears everything in it without having to wait for the filter of memory. “You loved her,” he says again. “She had all these memories of you. You loved her, and she loved you so much. It was like...like stealing a part of that for myself. Just a piece of it.”
Cassie’s foot scuffs on the tar paper, and both of them turn suddenly to look at her, their eyes wide, caught. Tim takes a step backward, and she realizes he’s only three steps now from the edge of the roof. She doesn’t think he can get to one of his transports before she catches him, but if Kon bolts, too, she’s not sure which of them she ought to chase.
“I think,” she says in the voice she uses for jumpers and frightened animals, “we probably ought to try talking about this together. All in the same room, even.”
Kon is looking between her and Tim - who is looking between her and Kon. The moment stretches out until Tim drags a gloved palm across his face, wiping his eyes and breaking the standoff. She never expected him to be the first one to cave.
“Sure,” Kon says, his tone carefully light. He reaches out and puts a hand on Tim’s shoulder, earning a flinch and a surprised stare.
“Yeah,” Tim says after a long pause. “Okay.”
Cassie just nods and smiles a hopeful smile. She thinks they can work things out, now that it’s all out in the open.
She can hear it in their voices.
END.
Characters: Cassie, Kon, Tim
Rating: pg-13
Words: 2400
Summary: Cassie, Tim, and Kon have it out, in various combination.
Note: For
kirax2 , because she’s awesome. 1.
The first weekend they’re all going to be back together again, Cassie gets to the tower before Kon’s even left the farm and finds Tim up to his elbows in the innards of one of the Tower systems. “Hey,” she says as she floats into the room, and Tim nods in acknowledgment without looking up. He’s still wearing the stupid cowl, but he’s changed the costume since she saw him last - it doesn’t look quite so stiff and stifling anymore.
After a minute or two, when she hasn’t said anything else, he either finishes what he’s doing or decides the tension is too much, and he turns to look at her. “What is it?”
“I told him about us,” she says, and she knows from the sudden flash of...something, in Tim’s eyes, that she doesn’t have to specify who.
“I know,” Tim says, and then, after a few seconds, turns back to the panel and the computer guts all over the floor.
“I should have talked to you about it first, but-”
“It’s okay,” Tim interrupts without turning around again. “He didn’t seem to mind.”
The nonchalant tone doesn’t quite fit with the set of Tim’s shoulders, but if she didn’t know him as well as she does, she probably would have believed it. As it is, the fact that Tim doesn’t want to be having this conversation makes it even more clear that she needs to say what she came to tell him. “I didn’t tell him everything. I mean... I just told him we kissed.”
Tim remains crouched, staring at a pair of cables he’s holding in his gloved hands. He doesn’t move, and he doesn’t look up, but his whole body is screaming with tension.
“I really, really wanted to talk to you, but you kind of disappeared. I didn’t know what to do, Tim. So I told him part of it, but....but I wanted to know what you wanted to do, before....” she bites her lip, hoping Tim will interrupt again, but he’s still staring at those stupid cables. “Do you think we should-”
“No,” Tim says, with an abrupt shake of his head. He snaps the cable connectors together and shoves them back into the casing. “There’s no reason to bring it up. It wouldn’t do anything but cause potential tension.” He slides a circuit card of some kind into a slot, and then two more, quickly, before slamming the casing door.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe telling Kon the whole truth wouldn’t help anything, would only hurt him, her, Tim, all of them, but....but not telling him feels so fundamentally, horribly dishonest that it makes her stomach roil.“But..”
“Cassie,” Tim says, and it’s the sharp tone he uses sometimes in the field, when one of them is going too far, hitting too hard. “There were extenuating circumstances. It’s not like it’s going to happen again.”
His voice sounds so harsh, now. So bitter. He was supposed to be better - he’d *seemed* better, when they’d all gotten together in Gotham a few weeks ago, but he sounds so much like he did the last time she saw him before he disappeared that Cassie wants to hug him, or hit him, or maybe both. Probably both. She doesn’t let herself think about the other things she wants. Instead, she watches as he screws the panel down and shoves the pile of tools and leftover computer bits into a bag with an uncharacteristic lack of care. He’s going to leave the room - maybe the Tower. If they’re lucky, he probably won’t leave the city.
He passes her on his way out the door, and Cassie catches his arm. “Tim,” she says, as softly and soothingly as she can. “You really don’t think we should tell him?”
He doesn’t answer right away, taking a moment to compose himself. The cowl covers his eyes, but when he looks at her, the set of his jaw,doesn’t look as angry as she’d expected. There’s a softness around his mouth she hasn’t seen in a long time. “He knows you love him,” he says. “And he loves you. That’s all that matters. Anything else...is just a distraction.”
Later that night, as she lies listening to Kon’s steady breathing, she repeats the words in her mind and wonders if she’d imagined the subtle emphasis.
He knows you love *him*. And he loves *you*.
That’s all that matters.
2.
“I’m telling you,” Kon insists, following her into the bathroom as she brushes her hair. They’d fallen into this arrangement, sharing a room at the Tower while they’re there, because it just hadn’t seemed worth making up a separate room for Kon when they’d probably end up in the same place, anyway. Cassie’s kind of regretting that now, though, because it means she can’t really kick him out, even if he is being an idiot. “You need to talk to him. He’s not over you.”
“By the gods,” she mutters, and pulls at a tangle so viciously that the brush breaks. “Conner, please. Drop it. He’s not - there was never anything for him to get over.”
“He kissed you, didn’t he?”
Her mind stutters over the memory - not the first kiss, but the second, against the door in Tim’s room, his fingers tangling in her hair, his mortal skin bruising under her mouth. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t like what?” Kon asks, sounding exasperated. She looks up from her broken brush to see him standing behind her, looking at her reflection in the mirror.
“It wasn’t-” she sees her own face twist into a scowl and throws the brush down into the garbage can. It topples over, spilling tissues and empty packaging onto the floor, and she thinks that if the Tower weren’t built and furnished with demigods and Kryptonians in mind, she might have put a hole in the floor.. “It wasn’t about me,” she says, her voice quiet.
When she glances up at his reflection again, Kon looks confused, his forehead drawn tight, his blue eyes clouded. “I don’t understand.”
She doesn’t know if she can explain it without giving away more about Tim than she feels she has a right to. “He was really...we were both...you were gone, Conner. And neither one of us could handle that.”
“He tried to clone me.” Kon says, quietly, like it’s a piece of the puzzle. Cassie can’t believe Tim told him that and not the rest. She can’t believe Kon hasn’t realized what it means.
She has trouble even thinking about it - about the depths of her grief, of Tim’s. She’d done stupid, horrible things. They both had. Compared to the cult, to the cloning, what had happened in Tim’s lab had seemed like the healthy response, which just proved how fucked up she’d been. “The first time we kissed-”
“First time?” Kon asks, and it isn’t until he says it that she realizes her error. “You, ah. You did a lot of kissing, then?”
Cassie turns and throws her arms around his neck, pressing her forehead against his shoulder. “You don’t know what it was like without you. Tim and I...we both went a little insane.”
Kon’s big, warm hand comes up to rest between her shoulder blades. He strokes her back gently, soothingly. “It was more than kissing,” he says quietly, and there’s no question in his voice at all, so she can’t even try to deny it. She couldn’t, anyway. It’s the truth.
“I should have told you,” she says, her voice small even to her own ears, muffled by his shirt. She’s afraid to look up, in case he’s angry. He doesn’t sound angry, but maybe it hasn’t sunken in yet. Maybe she can head it off, explain... “Tim....Tim thought it would be better if you didn’t know.”
“More secrets,” he mutters, but he’s still stroking her back, so she doesn’t do much more than flinch. “Cassie, he’s in love with you.”
“He’s not,” she protests, trying not to laugh, because even as bitter as it feels in her throat, she knows Kon would take it all wrong, right now.
“I was gone,” Kon says, “things changed. I know it. But....I know Tim. He’s not casual about that kind of thing. He doesn’t let people get that close. If you slept together...” he pauses for a moment, giving her a last chance to deny it, but Cassie just squeezes him tighter. “I - Lots of people have tried to get that close to him. If he let you in...he really loves you.”
She shakes her head even as he pulls her closer, feels his hand slide through her hair, smoothing it with a faint brush of his power. He’s wrong. He’s got to be wrong. The alternative is unthinkable.
Later, after she wipes her tears and brushes her teeth, they join the others for breakfast. Cassie fixes herself a plate and waits while Kon pours them both tall glasses of orange juice, turning the argument over in her mind.
When she looks up, Kon is staring across the kitchen to where Tim has wedged himself into the corner made by the fridge and the counter, drinking his coffee, his face hidden behind mask and mug. Something about the sadness in Kon’s eyes makes her mind catch on the memory of his stutter, the bittersweet note in his voice.
“ I - Lots of people have tried to get that close to him. If he let you in...he really loves *you*.”
3.
Kon isn’t in their room, when she looks, and there’s no answer at Tim’s door. For a long moment she hovers there in the hall, waiting, listening, thinking about breaking through, but she doesn’t actually think they’re in there. Mostly.
She checks the common areas - the kitchen, the training rooms, the lounge where Bart is watching three televisions and stuffing his face and reading a stack of technical manuals taller than he is. He seems to read something in her face, and slows the blur of his hands to hand her a chocolate chip cookie. “I think they’re still on the roof,” he says.
Cassie thanks him and slips away when one of the televisions catches his attention, trying not to wonder what he’s seeing in all this. She probably ought to ask him. If things go on this way much longer, she doesn’t think she’ll have much choice. She’s got to talk to someone or she’ll go insane.
The roof access door is ajar, and Cassie can hear them from the highest landing. It’s so rare to hear Tim shout outside of a combat situation that she just stands there, still, trying to figure out what’s going on.
“Stop being such a fucking martyr!” Kon yells back, and she can feel the concrete wall of the stairwell vibrate under her fingertips. “Maybe you like making yourself miserable, but she’s miserable, too! It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to you - or me, for that matter.”
“She’s the one who dumped me,” Tim shouts back, his voice ragged, completely without control. She thinks he might be close to tears, and so she leaves her place on the landing and flies closer, until she can watch them from the gap in the door. They’re standing just a few feet apart, fists clenched, postures tense. Something is going to break, here and now. She can feel it in the tension in the air, but she has no idea what’s going to happen. “She doesn’t love me. She never did!”
“Bullshit!” Kon roars. He’s floating higher and higher, looming over Tim more and more as his voice rises in volume. “You never would have fucked her if she didn’t love you. If you didn’t love her. You made that pretty fucking clear-”
“Is that what this is about? Because I didn’t let you use me?”
“But you let her!” Kon cries, and it’s such an anguished sound that Cassie has to cover her own mouth, not to echo it. “That’s what you’re saying! That she just fucked you for the hell of it and threw you away! She wouldn’t do that! She wouldn’t, and you wouldn’t let her!”
“You were dead!” Tim screams. His reaches up and yanks his cowl back, and his eyes are red, his face is wet. “You were dead and we were alone!”
Kon takes the words like a slap, dropping like a puppet with its strings cut, his feet hitting the tar paper roof with an audible thud. Cassie’s heard enough, she’s heard more than enough to last her a lifetime, and she pushes the door open, but Kon’s back is to her, and Tim’s head is bowed.
“You loved her,” Tim says, low, hoarse from shouting, but Cassie hears everything in it without having to wait for the filter of memory. “You loved her,” he says again. “She had all these memories of you. You loved her, and she loved you so much. It was like...like stealing a part of that for myself. Just a piece of it.”
Cassie’s foot scuffs on the tar paper, and both of them turn suddenly to look at her, their eyes wide, caught. Tim takes a step backward, and she realizes he’s only three steps now from the edge of the roof. She doesn’t think he can get to one of his transports before she catches him, but if Kon bolts, too, she’s not sure which of them she ought to chase.
“I think,” she says in the voice she uses for jumpers and frightened animals, “we probably ought to try talking about this together. All in the same room, even.”
Kon is looking between her and Tim - who is looking between her and Kon. The moment stretches out until Tim drags a gloved palm across his face, wiping his eyes and breaking the standoff. She never expected him to be the first one to cave.
“Sure,” Kon says, his tone carefully light. He reaches out and puts a hand on Tim’s shoulder, earning a flinch and a surprised stare.
“Yeah,” Tim says after a long pause. “Okay.”
Cassie just nods and smiles a hopeful smile. She thinks they can work things out, now that it’s all out in the open.
She can hear it in their voices.
END.
