Chapter Text
Later, Kon will wonder if the whole thing was a setup from the start. If those aliens’ creepy mindfuck technology had somehow sensed their missing exhibit from the other side of a solar system and remotely broke their ship.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The Mantis makes an emergency stop at the first planet with somewhat breathable air, Tim and Bart are stuck with supplementary oxygen masks while they poke around the de-powered engine, Cass keeps watch at the helm, and Kon does a brief few circles of the planet to check for signs of life.
There’s a few scraggly-looking brush forests, mostly crowded around pockets of water, and some mossy stone flats, but not much else. Tim would probably know what stage of evolution this planet’s probably right in the middle of, but there definitely aren’t any locals.
It’s on the dark side of the planet, though, that he finds it: an old spaceship, half plowed into rock. Kon circles it, but any sign of survivors had long since been wiped away by time and dust and exposure—that part isn’t what makes his heart race. Some poor crew had crashed here decades ago and probably died, but all he can focus on is…
The shell is corroded with age, exposed wiring and insulation spilling out from the gaps, but it’s still recognizable. Sleek, organic lines, like a tarnished silver cocoon. One huge glass orbiter is still intact at the far end, where the tail lifts slightly from its crash impact, and old crystals sit in pieces at the bottom of it.
A kryptonian scout ship. It’s unmistakeable, after all the time Kon’s spent poring through the records of anything he could get his hands on at the Fortress.
His first instinct is to dive straight into the old wreck and poke around. Maybe find some old pieces of life from a culture he wasn’t ever really born into—maybe old clothes, or jewelry, or knickknacks or intact technology. Clark would probably appreciate it, too!
His second instinct is a way better idea, though.
It only takes seconds to zoom back to the Mantis, and he zips straight past Cassie to the belly of the ship, where he finds Tim and Bart bickering good-naturedly over a charred-looking piece of thruster cord.
Both their heads swivel to blink at him like the twins from the shining, even before Kon touches down to make audible footfalls. Eugh. These two and their creepy ability to sense displaced air.
“Hey, Kon,” Tim says with a grin, straightening as he sees him. It looks a little funny under his mask, but his eyes glint just the same as they always do as he wipes sweat from his brow and, in doing so, smears soot all across his face. “Good news, it’s an easy—”
“Ineedtoshowyousomething,” Kon blurts before he can finish. Already the anticipation is curling and licking at his ribs, and he’s sure the wide smile on his face must look manic by the way Tim pauses.
“Gesundheit,” Bart tells him politely, with a shit-eating grin to match. Brat.
Tim says, “Uh, what?”
As he’s taking far too long to get with the program, Kon just huffs and pulls with his brain. The striking wrench in Tim’s hand tugs itself free and clatters back to their toolbox, and Tim yelps as he skids a few feet, stumbling to keep his usually impeccable balance.
“Kon!”
“C’mon, Wonder!” Kon beseeches, making grabby hands at him from the door. “I’ve got something cool to show you!”
“What am I, chopped liver?” Bart says indignantly. “How come Tim’s the only one invited to the party?”
“Well, someone needs to fix the ship,” Kon reasons with a grin. Bart flips him the bird and sticks his tongue out for good measure, too.
Tim rolls his eyes, but he’s laughing as the TTK drags him closer again. “Okay, okay! Jeez. Bart, are you—?”
“I do not need your help replacing a hose, Timothy,” Bart scoffs. “Go on. Abandon your fellow grease monkey in arms to go spend time with your boyfriend, you cheating scroach.”
“I’m being kidnapped, Imp,” Tim protests, like he’s doing anything to stop it. In fact, he lifts both hands to take Kon’s own once he’s finally in range. “What am I supposed to—?”
Too much talking, not enough discovery of the century. Tim gets a single squeeze of protective TTK in warning before the ship blurs around them; at least from his perspective. For Kon, it only takes a few minutes to drag him at safe superspeeds to the other end of the little planet, and to Tim’s credit, he doesn’t give more than a startled inhale as they settle back on dusty earth.
Not-Earth? He’s sure this planet has a designation somewhere. Eh, who cares.
“Oh, weird,” Tim comments as he re-adjusts to the semi-nighttime, squinting up at the sky. The planet’s small enough that they can still see the glow of the nearest star from the horizon, though; seriously, Kon has no idea where all the gravity on this planet is coming from. “It’s like King Kai’s planet. Okay, what am I looking at?”
In answer, Kon grabs his shoulders and turns him the right way round.
He can tell it takes him a second, between his inferior human eyes adjusting to the gloom and the no-doubt exhaustive mental list of spaceships he no doubt keeps in his head at all times. Then his eyes widen. “Whoa. All the way out here?”
“Right!” Kon can barely keep from wiggling, and settles for floating, legs twisting up so he can squeeze happily at his crossed ankles. “I haven’t looked at it yet. Wanna get your hands on some Krypton-tech guts?”
“Oh boy, do I,” Tim teases, and grins at the snicker he gets in reply. The intrigue in his voice is real, though, as Kon knew it would be. “You should’ve let me bring my kit. We can bring some stuff back for Clark and Bruce; pin the coords for later?”
Kon grins. “You read my mind, Robbie.”
He follows along like a tethered balloon as Tim steps his way up curiously to the side of the ship, gloved fingers smoothing through dust. “I wonder what they were doing here,” his partner says thoughtfully. “It’s not really near anything they would’ve wanted. Maybe they had a technical issue on the way to somewhere else?”
“Might’ve been stolen,” Kon suggests.
“Looks too old to have been after Krypton blew up, so they weren’t fleeing,” Tim muses. “Weirdly intact for a crash like this.”
“The docking bay doors are open. I saw ‘em earlier,” Kon tells him. “Round the back. Might be how they got out?”
Tim hums as Kon unfolds to touch back down to earth, but he looks intrigued more than anything when Kon glances back—a recognizable expression he knows well. It’s the one he points at old rotary phones and coffee machines; one of his least subtle gazes. His eyes, in all neon, scream: I WANT TO DISASSEMBLE AND REBUILD YOU.
Truly one of his better ideas. Exploring the ship with Tim will be way more fun than if he went poking around on his own, with only half an idea what he was even looking at.
Kon leads him to the open dock port. It leads into what looks like an airlock room, which is interesting, considering Kryptonians don’t really need to… breathe, like that. But then again, maybe they built their ships to function even if they didn’t have the right kinds of sunlight?
Intrigued, Kon can’t help but let his eyes wander all over the interior. It’s a bit cramped, this room, with old equipment tacked up against the side wall, but it’s even cooler inside than the twilight outside. It smells like dust and metal.
“Weird,” Tim says again, frowning as he too steps inside. “Doesn’t look like this part took any damage, even though—hey!”
He’s drowned out by the sharp slam and clack of the doors as they lock tight, apparently fully functional, actually! They’re plunged into a sudden darkness, and Kon is already grabbing for Tim, eyes sparking red to cut them out of this apparently booby-trapped ship before it can—
There’s a flashbang of bright white light before he can even open his mouth, searing him from the inside out, and then—
Nothing.
Kon-El, now sleeping soundly too many galaxies away to count, can’t possibly see the entire scout ship and its crash scars glitch and flicker into nothing: nor the small, claustrophobic metal lure left pristine in its place.
When he wakes, Kon’s first thought is oh god, not again.
Less because of the getting unexpectedly kidnapped thing (because that happens more often than he’s comfortable admitting) and more because he knows, intimately, what it feels like to be strapped down to a table.
His immediate attempt to wrench his hands free from their restraints is completely fruitless, and it takes him way too long to realize why. But even panicking, with his eyes twisted shut and yanking and twisting helplessly on the table, Kon is lucid enough to recognize the shade of red seeping through his eyelids.
Oh, god. Oh god oh god oh God.
The whole room is bathed in red sun radiation, and he’s tied down to the dentist’s chair from hell.
Lex, he thinks instantly, wildly. Cadmus. Or some other wannabe mad scientists. But how? How from some planet in the middle of nowhere, days’ light-travel from home? How did they even know what he was, how—?
Where was Tim?
A voice says, “Oh, it’s awake. Can you hear me?”
Kon’s eyes snap open. Hovering over him are two… aliens, he presumes, given they’re bright red. One blinks yellow eyes at him before smiling, and Kon figures she’d been the one to speak.
“Where am I,” Kon rasps, and winces when his voice comes out crackling. “Who are you?”
“Hello,” the alien coos, like they’re speaking to a frightened cat. “You’re speaking a human dialect, aren’t you? You must have been born offplanet. How are you feeling?”
“Like I’m gonna kick your ass if you don’t get this off me,” he snaps, yanking again at his restraints. “Take a guy out for dinner first before trying to vivisect him!”
“It’s all right,” the other alien soothes. This voice is deeper, more tenored than the first. “Of course, we aren’t going to hurt you. We just want to make sure you’re healthy before we move you to your enclosure.”
“My—what?”
“Its teeth look nominal,” the first alien observes. He thinks they’re noting something on a tablet he can barely see, if he strains his eyes, and it takes a second before he’s awake enough to see with his TTK.
Something is wrong, though. He feels too sluggish to call on it properly; it slips and slides off the restraints and finds no give or seam, and there’s no strength to rip and tear. It does spread, though, over the floor and the equipment and the sun lamps.
“Temperature is good, and weight is normal,” the deeper voice notes. “None of the scans showed anything strange. I believe it’s male, based on presentation.”
“What the fuck is going on,” Kon snaps, but the light is swimming in his eyes.
“Shh, relax.” The alien on his left starts petting his hair, like that might somehow actually calm him down. “Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of you. We’ve kept plenty of Kryptonians before.”
And to repeat, Kon thinks wildly: What the fuck?!
And then his TTK snags on the wheel of a nearby dentist-from-hell chair-table; spreads up the metal to the cushion and past the sciency shit. Catches on familiar fingers and jolts quickly to the face, ghosts over familiar scars on a familiar chest.
Tim is breathing, but his eyes are closed. Asleep. Kon’s hold on his TTK feels too slippery to check properly, but he can’t find any injuries, even if his heart jumps out of his throat when he realizes his hearing’s no longer good enough to track his heartbeat.
“Robin!” he shouts, and it clearly startles the two aliens overtop him. It also does absolutely nothing to wake Tim, and he feels his heart sink in his chest. “Hey! What’re you doing to him?!”
“Easy, easy,” the higher-pitched alien croons. “Poor thing. He’s so stressed.”
“Acclimatization is always the worst part,” Baritone agrees. “Don’t worry. He’ll settle soon enough.”
To Kon, Soprano nods and says, “We didn’t mean to trap the human with you.” They glance up to their partner. “Our human exhibit is already full, but they can’t be released after exposure to the lures. Should we euthanize?”
“That’s probably the humane route,” Baritone says, and then Kon can’t hear anything else because what the fuck do they mean, they’re going to euthanize Tim? Panic swells and balloons in his throat until he chokes.
“No! You can’t—” Desperate, Kon yanks again at his arms, trapped by the wrists and elbows at his sides. They’re even padded, he thinks hysterically, like they’re prepared for this, for panicking Kryptonians and humans and—
Enclosure, they’d said. Human exhibit.
“What’s the matter?” Baritone pets at his hair again as the realization crests and slams down over his chest. He is being treated like a frightened cat—like he’s at a vet’s office for a checkup. Like Tim is some feral stray they accidentally trapped off the street with him.
Oh god.
He can’t lift his head, not with the soft strap he feels over his chest, but he throws his gaze in Tim’s direction. He can just-barely kind of see Tim’s Red Robin boots on the table kitty-corner to them, but the Baritone alien is in the way. He wonders how long it took them to realize Tim wasn’t Kryptonian—wasn’t what they needed for their exhibit.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. He has no idea where they are, no clue where they’d teleported to, and no idea how long he’d been unconscious. There’s no way of knowing if Cassie and Bart even realize they’re gone yet. He can’t let them euthanize Tim like an unwanted stray!
“The human? Is that what you want?” The soft lilt of Soprano’s voice makes him shiver all the way to his bones. It sounds like Kon when he asks what toy Krypto is begging to fetch with. Still, she says something to the other alien vet, or whatever they are, and they move to shift the bed, rolling it at enough of an angle for Tim to be fully visible.
They’ve pulled his cape off, for some reason, and the bulkier parts of the suit. Probably to weight him and take his temperature, Kon thinks somewhat hysterically. Maybe to give him his kitten shots. Fuck.
“Tim!” Tim doesn’t rouse, which maybe is normal for him, actually, but he can see the fluids hanging from a strange IV bag and knows it’s medical, just like his had been. If he lifts his head, he knows he’ll see needles—knows he really can’t afford to have a meltdown right now, and channels it to anger, instead. “Shit. If you bastards hurt him, I’m going to turn you inside out.”
Did they wake Tim up to check his health, just to realize he wasn’t what they wanted? Poke around his teeth and try to soothe him like an angry dog? Had they knocked him back out after telling him they would euthanize him?
“Oh dear,” Soprano says worriedly. “Are they bonded?”
A sigh. “Possibly. It’s rare, but I’ve heard some Kryptonians bond outside of their own species. We wouldn’t be able to put them in the community enclosure, though, any future specimens might fight over it.”
Kon is never going to find a ‘bonded pair’ adoption ad cute ever again.
“How bonded, do you think?” Soprano is doing something with her mouth that Kon thinks is frowning. “It’s hard enough to find Kryptonians, the exhibit’s been empty for months since the last pair died. If this one can’t acclimate…”
That is maybe the most fucked up sentence Kon has ever been relieved to hear. He can worry about the zoo animal thing in a second when he doesn’t have to worry about his best friend in the entire universe getting tossed like chump change down some chute somewhere because the human exhibit is full.
“He’s my partner,” Kon snarls at them. He puts all the teeth into it that he can, for all that they don’t look intimidated in the slightest. Just worried, like they think he might lay down and die if they set up his enclosure wrong. “If you think I’m gonna be a good little pet after you kill him you’ve got another think coming, buddy!”
Another sigh. “We’ll have to ask Millent about a cohabitant enclosure,” Baritone says. “I know there’s a few in the Krypton wing. Maybe she’ll go for it, if they don’t already have plans for them.”
“It could be cute,” Soprano muses thoughtfully. Now they start to pet him as Baritone pulls away, dull nails scritching through his scalp. If he wasn’t already strapped down it’d be taking him every scrap of self control in his body not to be biting the shit out of them. “A specialty exhibit. And I’d hate for him to be distressed.”
“You know I can hear you,” Kon snaps, but neither pay him any mind. How he can hear them, he isn’t sure; the harder he focuses, the more clearly he knows they aren’t actually speaking English, and he doesn’t have any of his JL translators. Even if he did, that doesn’t mean it has these assholes’ language.
They’d seemed surprised he speaks English, which means they’d maybe been expecting Kryptonian, and it means they have fucked up translators that somehow work both ways even when Kon isn’t wearing one. Between that and the red sun radiation, he gets the feeling these zookeepers are old hat at this shit by now.
So obviously this whole thing was a trap. They’re fresh out of Kryptonians—and isn’t that a horrifying thought, that they had a pair of what could very well have been family trapped in a zoo exhibit until they died—and so they’d put traps out, shaped like bits and pieces of their ancestral home. A lure, Soprano had called it.
And he’d dragged Tim right into it.
Soprano coos at him again, wordless, and Kon doesn’t even get a second to snarl at them like the animal they so clearly think he is before the dizziness surges, and—
Nothing.
He’s so sick of this shit.