Chapter Text
He’s being carried. Held against someone’s chest. He thinks it’s Mae. His head cushioned on her shoulder, her strong arms supporting his weight. It smells like Matrix, like the bodywash she uses.
Kon groans softly, squeezing his eyes shut tighter. His head is throbbing. There are bright spots in his vision that aren’t retreating despite how much he tries to hide from them.
There are voices above him, soft, muddled. Whoever is carrying him walks steady, their gait even, but they dip to set him down and the world spins like he’s on driftwood in the middle of a tempest. He feels blood dribble into his mouth, slicking the back of his tongue. His entire mouth is pulsing, the top and the bottom, flesh has been peeled back from his tongue, like something was seared there.
Branded.
The thought floats to him, vague and distant, that something is wrong with Tim. When he tries to make his hearing focus, to find him, all it does is send white static through his skull so painful that he has to stop immediately.
He’s put down. Mae—or not, he hasn’t heard from Mae in a while. They lost touch for a bit, when she went to Hell, and then to Space, and then Kon was the one always leaving. Dying.
Mae hasn’t held him like this in a while. And she shouldn’t. Kon’s hurt people. He hurt—
A hand comes to set in his hair. His head is settled in someone’s lap, and Kon tries not to groan at the jostling. Something thuds, so loud that it makes him twitch, and echoes in his skull. The hand presses more firmly. Someone is shushing him. An engine is turned on, and the noise—
There’s a harsh snapping. The hands are taken off his head and put on his ears instead. Firm. Like a vacuum seal, for all the good it’s going to do. Kon twists away from the noise, into the stomach. It isn’t Tim.
A voice, a woman’s voice—it’s not Matrix, he’s not with Matrix right now, why would he be?—He can’t make out what she’s saying, and he can’t force his eyes open. Dread settles on his spine, Kon feels his heart beat faster, harder.
The only other person that smells like that is Lex.
He takes in a sharp, uneven breath, and struggles to force his eyes open. His entire body is moving too slowly, too stiff, like the earliest memories he has from Cadmus, when he wasn’t connected yet. The hobble. The wrong. Like he was one of the Walkers in Bart’s stupid zombie show.
He fights, his ears aching, and finally gets the sliver of light he wanted when his eyes flutter. It doesn’t get any further than that, like something is pressed over both of them—no, like someone is shoveling dirt over him, burying him, square inch by square inch of soil.
“Drive slowly, Mercy,” the body beneath him rumbles. Their heartbeat is familiar. The words drift in like psychedelic hallucinations, the timber distorted. “I need to think.”
Thumbs rub over Kon’s cheeks, slow, meditative. Careful. He can feel the edge of a thumbnail on his cheekbone as it circles.
He needs…
Clark. He can’t keep visiting Lex like this. He’s scared Lex won’t let him go. Tim said, the last time that Kon told him about it, that it was too dangerous, that he was offering himself out as bait. He scared Tim when he confessed that Lex told him about the sun room, but he didn’t know who else to talk to.
Clark doesn’t know about the visits. And neither do Cassie and Bart. He didn’t know how to fess up to it. Tim understands having a shitty father, for all that he’s willing to defend Jack Drake trying, he didn’t judge Kon, just got that gentle furrow in his brow, the one he gets when he’s thinking and worried at the same time.
The thought of Tim sends that numbing ice down his stomach, like it’s racing through his spinal fluid. It had hurt, so much, when they were running tests on him, making it better, making it right.
The voice comes back, minutes or hours later, barely audible over the rumble of the car. “Are you awake, Conner? Can you hear me?”
Kon tries to open his mouth. He knows what sleep paralysis is. Another way he was wired wrong, at first, before Lex and Cadmus and Dubbilex through Cadmus fixed that little bug. The consciousness during the muscle atonia lead to a lot of weird dreams. Kon doesn’t need to sleep as much as a normal human, his body having a normal human’s sleep circadian rhythm was a glitch.
“How fast is it going to run through his metabolism, if it’s days for a human? He was supposed to be asleep for an hour.” The woman’s voice is clinical. Kon’s breathing too quickly. Is he sure that he’s laying on a lap? Maybe he’s on a table. They’re asking too many questions. He must be strapped down, they gave him a numbing agent. He’s human enough now for pain to be a consideration. Sometimes. Some of the League forgets, but his team doesn’t anymore.
Clark was the first one who asked if he wanted any.
He can’t speak, he can’t move. He doesn’t know if he’s awake, he just knows that he shouldn’t be. How many times has he come up from anesthesia before the surgery was over, trapped in his own body, knowing, aware while someone cut him open. How many times—
“Hush,” Lex—the hands, the careful, gentle caresses. Like Cassie, or Tim, or Tana, but not Roxy. Roxy was all sharp edges. He misses her. God he misses her. “We’re almost home,” Lex continues, soft, “I’ll find you a better sedative.”
No. That isn’t what Kon wants. Why is he here? How did he get here? Is he injured? Something is wrong with Tim. He needs to get to Tim. He needs to—Did Lex take him? Did Tim get hurt when he did? Were they fighting something else? He remembers Tim in pain, he remembers…did he…did he hurt Tim?
It’s enough, a concerted effort, he can’t open his eyes but he does twitch his fingers, turning his face into that touch, barely moaning, “Tim?” his voice is barely audible to his own ears, not the right tone for the imperative he wants it to be.
“Hush,” Lex says again, smoothing his hand through Kon’s hair, gentle strokes. “it’s not your fault, it’s your nature. Our nature.”
He doesn’t understand. He tries to twist his head in the grip, but the most he does is let it tilt in. His nose brushes the edge of a shirt. A jacket? It smells like lavender. Lex’s detergent. He’s in his lap. He must be. This isn’t the first time, which is worse, the knowledge that he almost wants to take comfort from it.
“Should I get the Kryptonite, Mr. Luthor?” Mercy asks.
“That won’t be necessary.” A finger traces the shell of his ear, plucking at the earring dangling there. The one he’s had since Cadmus. His product tag. Lex pulls the clasp back, sliding it off and tucking it away. “You’ll behave, won’t you?” The hand comes back to set against his face, patting once.
Kon doesn’t have a choice to do otherwise. He can’t get his eyes open to fight. He works, to get the word out, building saliva in his mouth, letting it gather, before he murmurs, “Tim?” again.
His bid for information is ignored. Lex rests a finger against his lips to shush him again, and Kon lets himself slip back into whatever oblivion he can find. He’s good at that, taking the fingers of unconsciousness offered to him, trying to ignore the rest of the awareness pressed in on all sides. He’s had practice. The pinpricks of pain don’t get worse, they don’t get all-consuming, so Kon lets himself slide away.
When he wakes up, he’s cold. It’s a somewhat novel feeling. Kon’s thermoregulation is a point of pride for Cadmus labs, a far improvement on other clones. Usually his jacket is just for show, he doesn’t feel weather extremes, cold or hot. But right now he’s cold, and his body is sore and aching faintly, limbs heavy. It feels like he just took a solid hit from Metallo.
He’s laying on a bed, a blanket pulled up to his waist, propped up by pillows. The clothing is too loose, it’s uncomfortable. He rolls his head along the pillow, blinking his eyes open. The first thing that he notices is the light. It’s all shades of red, around him, maybe in him, like he’s looking through painted glass. It’s steady, coming from a lightbulb above his head.
Kon feels his heart skip a beat, painful. He sits up quickly, glancing down at his hands like he’ll find evidence of what he did there.
Tim. He hurt Tim. Bruce put him in a red room just like this just a few weeks ago, under the same assumption. Because he’s sick, he’s… there’s something wrong with him. He remembers Tim being scared—f him. He did something, and he doesn’t even know what it was.
Tim wide-eyed, crying, holding Kon in his lap. What the fuck did he do? Why can’t he remember. This is just like the hospital, when Tim had begged Dick and Bruce to get him out of the room. He’d been terrified. Dick had asked him what was going on, and Kon had no answers then either. Just Steph and Dick looking at him, like they couldn’t comprehend what they were seeing. That he was a person.
The same look he used to get in the lab the early days.
Something is beeping, attached to his chest. Rapid, and pitchy, and when Kon pulls his shirt back he sees electrodes pasted on his skin. A heart monitor, portable, clipped to the inside of his shirt. There’s an oximeter on his finger, too. Kon rips it off, shoving the sheets off of him, struggling to his feet, breathing hard. He pulls up his shirt, yanking the electrodes, ignoring the flat, continuous alarm when he does. He touches his face, his hairline, bitterly familiar with the motions as he pulls more electrodes off his forehead, out from under his hairline, attached to the back of his neck and behind his earlobe.
Fucking Lex.
Clark’s name is on the edge of his lips, but he hesitates, swaying in place. He forces his abdomen to lock, so he’ll stay upright. If something is wrong with him, and he’s hurting Tim, then maybe it would be dangerous to call for Clark. He might hurt him. He might try. A few weeks ago, he couldn’t imagine that he could ever hurt Tim, and now he’s done it twice. Maybe even before then.
Tim had been so scared in the bathroom at Wayne Ind., he’d been throwing up, which he only does when he’s having a panic attack, because he’s been trained out of his gag reflex otherwise. I don’t want you here, Tim said, which had echoed like a battering ram in his skull for the next few days.
He can feel his breath coming hard and fast as he turns a sharp circle. This is the room Lex always puts him in, on the rare occasion he stays the night. Except it’s not, because all of the windows have been sealed, and every light in the room is glowing a lurid red, casting shadows, bathing him in scarlet. Kon is human, now. As human as he gets.
What the hell is going on?
Kon has to get out of here. Even if he’s broken, if he’s dangerous, Clark will help him. Clark tries to help him now, he may not have always before, but it’s different. They’re different, and Clark will fix him.
“Clark,” he says, choking on it, the humiliation. Every time he does this, gets too far in over his head, bails, Clark always looks at him like he’s Jon. Half-human and a child. It’s mortifying because he isn’t the one that’s fucking ten.
There’s nothing. Kon waits a minute that feels like an eternity. He raises his voice, like it matters at all, yells it into the ceiling. “Clark! A little help!”
What if Tim already told Bruce what happened, and Bruce told Clark not to come? What if they saw what was wrong with him, even though Kon can’t figure it out, and they gave up? Oh well, that’s too bad, start on fourteen, then.
Clark has to come. He named Kon. He didn’t even name Matrix, Martha did. He picked Kon, laid some level of claim on him. The only other person that Clark has ever given a Kryptonian name to is Jon.
It felt like a gift. It felt like a promise. Tim wouldn’t do that to him. But Kon doesn’t hurt Tim, and none of the ways the universe is supposed to work are working.
“Clark?” Kon’s voice cracks. It echoes, in the empty room. He can hear the uncertainty in it, the fear.
The door slides open, briefly. Kon scrambles back, reaching behind himself for the wall, dragging his TTK up like a cape to wrap around his shoulders, an invisible barrier. It cushions him from the rest of the world, a layer of space over his skin, and Kon pulls it tighter automatically.
Lex steps inside, closing the door behind him, raising an eyebrow at Kon, almost sardonically. Kon’s not exactly surprised to see him. He’s a little more surprised to see Lex in just a turtleneck and slacks, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. “Conner,” he says, “I’m afraid that Kal-El won’t be joining us this morning. I’ve set up precautions.”
Kon’s eyes jump toward the speakers in the corner of the room, perched like a giant spider, hidden behind a thin layer of bullet-proof glass. The installation isn’t new. How long has Lex been planning this? Kon hasn’t stayed the night in a few months, but that’s months. What was his end goal, the next time that Kon agreed to stay, that would be the last he ever left? Or was he planning on just taking Kon?
“What are you doing?” Kon breathes, taking another wavering step back when Lex takes one forward. “Why am I here?”
“You came to me,” Lex says. He’s lying, Kon remembers being carried by him, he remembers being in Gotham, the city smelled terrible, it always does. Clark asked him to go to Tim, asked him to try and talk to Tim. And then Kon—
“You were upset,” Lex continues, unaware of Kon’s racing thoughts. He gestures for Kon to sit down, but he doesn’t, and Lex takes a seat at the bed by himself. “I don’t have all the details, but something happened between you and your, ah,” a pointed pause, “Drake.”
“I want to leave,” Kon says, because Lex is all bark and no bite. Lex lets him do what he wants, most of the time. Let’s him come and crash-land on his stupid penthouse patio, and yell at him for having the audacity to let his DNA be used to make Kon. Even though Kon’s pretty sure Cadmus didn’t give Lex a heads up about that. Even though Kon’s pretty sure Martian Manhunter has just as much responsibility for his existence, percentages wise. Martian Manhunter doesn’t let Kon crash on his couch, though.
Martian Manhunter isn’t an egotistical megalomaniac that’s probably predisposed Kon to sociopathy, either.
Lex rests his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands together and leaning forward. He has to look up at Kon like this, it makes him seem smaller than he really is. For all the lacking bulk, he is tall. Almost as tall as Clark is. His eyebrows are dark, and the eyeliner he’s wearing is slightly smudged.
When Lex speaks, it’s even, and controlled. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Kon takes a step forward, tries to force volume and anger into it, when he snaps, “The hell I’m not. Don’t be stupid, I don’t want to hurt you. Let me go, or we can fight this out.”
With what power, little clone? He shoves the sneering thoughts aside. He’s thinking too much about Cadmus now. He needs to focus. He still has his TTK, he still has his training. He’s leaving.
“You’re not going to hurt me,” Lex says, like it’s so simple. Kon doesn’t want to admit that he’s probably right, because that makes him scared, and he hates being scared. “You’re going to stay here, in this room, and behave yourself, because you know it's what’s right. You’re not well, Kon.”
“You’re lying,” Kon snaps. He knew he shouldn’t have come here last week. He just wanted… he doesn’t know. He wanted someone to say he wasn’t going crazy and that Tim didn’t hate him and that he isn’t the single worst thing to happen to the people he loves. Lex didn’t do any of that, he mostly just rolled his eyes and made short comments about Kon’s clothes, but it still made him feel better for some reason. And maybe, a little bit, the argument he got into with Kon after he was done complaining about his clothes regarding Kon’s “laughable sense of self-worth.”
Lex’s eyebrow arches. “Am I?”
“I’m, I’m fine,” Kon snaps, but he’s losing momentum. Lex cut him off from Clark? “I’m not losing time.” Anymore. Not recently, at least, “I haven’t been sick at all, I’m fine.”
“How did you hurt Drake?” Lex asks, sitting back a fraction. “Do you know?” Kon’s silence is damnation all on its own, beyond the panicking swirl he’s sure passes over his face, and Lex huffs slightly, darkly amused. “I thought not. I’m going to help you, Conner. So come sit with me and stop behaving like I am hurting you.”
He pats the space next to him pointedly.
“I’m not sick,” Kon says, but it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. He knows he is. Deep inside him, he knows there’s something to be fixed. That’s why he needed Cadmus, even after he escaped. That’s why Clark let him go back, over and over and over, no matter how many times Kon crawled away from their stasis tubes and incessant tests. He’s not right.
“I’ll make you better,” Lex promises.
Kon wavers. He rocks back on his feet, then finally forces himself to cross the distance and sit on the bed next to the man. He’s never hurt Kon, not the way that Rex would when Kon was misbehaving. Lex has never even hit him, not even once, for whatever reason. Clark only has when they’re training, but he doesn’t hold back with him the way he does with humans. But Lex has never trained with him.
The bed sinks beneath his weight as he sits down. Lex turns his head to study him.
“Do I have to go back to Cadmus?” Kon asks, tense, clenching his fists in the sheets, trying not to grind his teeth. He doesn’t like this, deferring to Lex. It feels wrong. Clark would tell him to get out of here.
Lex’s eyes flicker. Dark swirls of anger. “No,” he says. He takes in a deep, deliberate breath. “I was under the impression you hadn’t returned in a year.”
“I haven’t,” most of it imploded, but there’s always vestiges. The scientists, the politicians behind it are always putting the project back into motion. Lex used to be one of those politicians, but since he pulled out, since the majority of their funding did, it's mostly been dead in the water.
It’s been strange. Any time that he has…problems recently, he’s had to tell Clark. That time he had the headache that wasn’t ending for two days, the one that made him so dizzy he wanted to fall over, Clark had taken him to the Fortress. He’d been bleeding into his brain, a bit—a lot—and Kon had apologized profusely while Clark stared at him with too-wide eyes asking if he’d been hit in the head recently. He had, but it should have healed.
Kon’s body just does that sometimes. He’s a clone, he’s not supposed to exist. Like a mule, sterile and colic riddled. A hybrid bastardization of natural order.
“Good,” Lex says, “that place distresses you. I don’t want you to return.”
He says it like it’s that easy. Everything is easy, to Lex Luthor. It’s never been like that with Kon.
“What’s wrong with me?” Shouldn’t he involve Clark? Clark has the Fortress, and the Justice League. Anything he can’t fix, there’s a whole team of geniuses to weigh in on. “Maybe…maybe Clark should—”
“No,” Lex says. Not harshly, just interrupting. “I’ll handle it. It’s nothing outside of my scope of understanding.”
“Are you kidnapping me?” Kon asks, tentatively. He doesn’t have a plan for this. Clark never told him what to do if Lex grabbed him. Mostly because Kon never told him about the red room.
This red room, the one he woke up in, just a few minutes ago. Did Tim ever tell anyone else? Kon didn’t ask him not to. He doesn't know if he was hoping Tim would tell Bruce. And Bruce would tell Clark, and him and Lex would get into another epic fight.
“That depends on your definition,” Lex says smoothly. “Lay back down, Conner, let me monitor you. I’ll put you back to sleep, if it distresses you too much. It’ll only be a few more hours.”
“No, I don’t want to sleep,” Kon says. Then frowns, “A few hours until what? What are you doing?”
“I’ve been waiting on the results of some tests,” Lex answers, vague. Kon pointedly slides a foot further away from him down the bed. Lex rolls his eyes. “Nothing so untoward, relax. Merely a CSF procedure, the cultures have needed time to develop.”
“A spinal tap?” Kon stares at him, wide-eyed. He doesn’t feel half as sore as he should, if Lex actually did one. He can’t even tell, which just makes the horror worse.
“I healed you,” Lex says. Like that makes it any better.
Kon squeezes his fingers into the blanket tighter, until it feels like the cotton fibers are going to tear in his palms. “How long was I unconscious?” It didn’t feel that long. Tim has to have told Bruce what happened, maybe he’s lucky that Lex has him. Maybe he isn’t, because he doesn’t know how to tell Clark that he’s better when he leaves.
Because…because he is leaving, isn’t he?
“A few hours,” Lex says. “I assumed you wouldn’t want to be conscious during the procedure, given your history,” he raises an eyebrow, an am I wrong eyebrow. Kon doesn’t know. He doesn’t like the idea of Lex reaching into him and mixing him up, without him knowing at all. But he wouldn’t have liked doing another spinal tap, he never does. He’d rather not have one, period.
“Do I have,” Kon hugs his knees to his chest, tilting his head to look at Lex through his fringe, half-afraid the man will say yes. “Meningitis or something?”
That was a subplot on WtWS once. Wendy went crazy, she was losing time, having delusions and seizures and terrible headaches. Maybe he got it from Tim from when he was in the hospital with it. Or whatever that was.
Lex’s eyebrows both raise. “Do you think you do?”
Kon hates it when he redirects the questions back at him. He wishes that he wouldn’t make him think about it. He’s always wrong, somehow. “I haven’t been sick. Not sick like that.” Kon corrects himself. “I don’t have a fever, or anything.”
“Your immune system has its flaws, but it hasn’t shown itself impaired to common bacteria,” Lex says. That probably means something to him. Kon just shrugs again, unsure if it’s a yes or not.
Lex sighs, a little. He reaches out, after a moment. His hand pauses in the space between them, and Kon looks down at it, throat working. Lex withdraws, setting it back on his own knee. “Are you hungry? I’ll find you something, if you’d like.”
“Is Tim okay?” Kon asks, as the man stands up. He never just cooks. Whenever Kon stays with Clark or Lois, they always have food in the kitchen. The most Kon has ever found in Lex’s pantry was a half portion of day-old Thai food. Lex gets everything ordered, or has a personal chef or something, unless it’s coffee.
It’s weird. In the Tower, they always have snacks. They have to, if they don’t, with Bart’s metabolism, they’d probably kill him in a couple of hours.
“Why do you ask,” Lex says, neutral, opening the door.
Kon looks up at him through his bangs. He brushes them out of his eyes, taking in a breath. He feels patronized. Lex is never cruel to him on purpose, not anymore, but he is cruel, and no matter how much his edges have smoothed over, Kon has to remember that Lex is glass. He will cut Kon, whether it’s intentional or not. “I hurt him.” The words crack.
Lex pauses. “How did you hurt him, Conner?”
“Kon,” Kon says, again, because that’s his name. “I told you, I don’t remember.”
Just Tim crying, just Tim holding him, his hands on Kon’s face, his voice, yelling at someone.
Tim’s voice, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and Kon took the delicate bones of Tim’s fingers into his hands and measured his own strength against them. Trying to figure out where to break it.
It’s okay, don’t fight it.
Kon digs a hand into his eye socket, at the surge of blinding pain. He grits his teeth, watching his vision fill with spots. He takes in a breath, sharper than he means to. Opens his eyes to squint blurrily up when Luthor’s fingers brush against his chin, tipping his head up to look at him. Delicate, and careful, the way that Kon was with Tim before—
“What is it?” Luthor asks, “Where does it hurt?”
“There was another guy,” Kon whispers, dragging his hands through his hair, squeezing them into fists, pulling at his own hair like it can take away some of the pressure in his head. Lex grabs his wrists, pulling them away from his face, forcing them back down into his lap. He cups Kon’s cheek in his palm, tilting his face up.
Lex’s expression is blank, dead. “I think you should stay in bed,” he says, tone flat. There’s something displeased in the press of his lips.
Kon shakes his head, making a thin, hitched noise in his throat at the pain. “No.” He starts to get up, ignoring the swell of vertigo. “No, there was someone else there. We…” what were they doing? Tim’s tears are so focused in his mind’s eye, the feeling of his fingers. They were so fragile against his skin. Like a bird’s.
“Hush,” Lex pushes him down, easy as anything. It used to scare Kon, the satisfaction in Lex’s eyes whenever he uses the red sunlight to exercise power he wouldn’t have otherwise, but that’s just one of his quirks. Lex understands better than anyone what Kon is, what all of the Kryptonians are. No one else appreciates the raw power, no one else is as awed at being able to harness it.
“You’re going to make your migraine worse, thinking on it,” Lex says, “I know how much it upset you, I was the one who found you. Just lay back down, I’ll bring you dinner later.”
Kon’s stomach drops out. “No, I don’t want to,” he looks at all the machines, and the monitoring equipment. He should be used to this. He is used to this. What, does he think the fact that he doesn’t want to is going to make anyone stop from hooking him up?
“I’m not asking, Conner,” Lex says. He picks up the electrodes, and the oximeter, holding out his hand like Kon will just acquiesce. Kon recoils, shaking his head, feeling a little like a toddler as he does. “Conner.”
“Call Clark,” Kon says, even though that’s probably the easiest way to get Lex pissy with him. Usually he’s not supposed to bring Clark up, not unless Lex does first.
Lex’s eyes darken. He’s looming, when he stands in front of Kon, over Kon, and picks back up the electrodes, holding it out between them. “What exactly,” he says, “do you think that Kal-El is going to do that I won’t? What has he done to ever take care of you? Has he even noticed how sick you’ve been?”
He was the one that came for Kon, after Tim flipped out on them all in the hospital. He and Bruce had spent a full ten minutes arguing about him—the way that they ever argue about anything, with Clark shouting at him and Bruce standing there making micro expressions that take the place of words. He’d said maybe three sentences, and Clark had done a lot of hand waving.
Kon would never hurt Tim had been passed around and around and around that night, even by Bruce, but no one could rule out that it was accidental. Or maybe some type of magic. Clark hadn’t been happy with him, for volunteering to spend the night in the red sun room, even though he’d spent the night there with him.
He can’t ask Lex to turn off the red light, because if there really is something wrong with him, he could hurt Lex, or get free and go berserk or something.
“Um, he’s,” Kon drops his gaze, before he can stop himself, even though he knows it makes him look guilty. Bart said it made him look like a kicked puppy, but Kon knows better. “Jon just got out of school, he’s been—”
“Oh, Jon,” Lex is seething. “And he is incapable of splitting his attention in more than one way. That must be so difficult.”
“Why are you so,” Kon bites it down, because he can hear the whine in his voice. It makes him feel ten, which he never was. He sounds like Jon. “You can’t keep me here, Lex, if the League finds out they’ll hit the roof. I’m not supposed to see you.”
Lex lifts a brow, just one, briefly. For all that Clark speaks with his hands, Lex speaks with his eyebrows. Kon doesn’t know what he does, who he takes after more. He picks up Kon’s hand, pointedly, attaching the oximeter. It makes Kon’s skin crawl, but he allows it.
“It’s a good thing they won’t find out then, isn’t it?” he says. “Get some rest. I’ll be back soon.”
He’s locking Kon in, isn’t he? Kon shakes his head, silently, staring at Luthor. Whatever’s on his face makes Lex sigh, aggrieved. “Don’t look at me that way, Conner. I’m doing what’s best for you, it’s not torture.”
Kon takes in a breath, then another. “Can I have my phone?”
“No.”
Lex finishes setting all the electrodes on him. He pulls the door closed behind him when he goes, and Kon hears the familiar, mechanical click of a lock engaging.
“Clark,” Kon whispers, again. He isn’t hopeful, and he isn’t surprised when he doesn’t come. He just rolls over and stares at the wall, trying not to feel the familiar, bitter sting of it.
His headache gets worse. Much, much worse. Bad enough that Kon has to curl himself into the meditation poses Dick taught him and Tim practiced with him, and breathe slow and evenly, he has to focus on it, to keep his heartrate down.
Lois told him, once, that Clark spent all thirty six weeks of her pregnancy listening to the baby’s heartbeat. He thinks Lex does that with him, or something. Puts the feed on his phone or something and just leaves it on as a background, because he always somehow knows when it changes rhythm.
Kon’s nose starts bleeding, and then it won’t stop. He bleeds into his hands, and his pillow, and he starts to realize this might be indicative of something more serious, when his vision starts getting dark around the edges. Kon’s entire mouth tastes like it’s full of pennies, and his breaths are getting hard to regulate, like he’s sick with Kryptonite again.
He runs his tongue along the burn inside his mouth.
All he sees is Tim, all he thinks about is Tim. At first, because he’s trying to worry the memory free, like popping out a loose tooth. It doesn’t help, it only makes it worse. He remembers Clark’s stretched, tight expression, I don’t want to ask this of you, he’d said, and then asked anyway. All of them thought that Kon would be the best person to approach Tim, the least aggressive, insensitive option. Kon’s not sure why, after the hospital.
He has to sit up, tipping his head forward to collect the blood in his hands so it won’t spill down his throat. And then, it starts draining through his shaking fingers to the floor.
His vision is filling up with spots. Becoming a single spot. Gray scale.
Tim was sitting in a chair in front of him. He wasn’t restrained. But he couldn’t move, he was reaching for Kon like there were hands wrapped around his waist, pinning him down. Kon remembers looking for the presence of telekinesis, because he didn’t understand, ruffling his own TTK against Tim’s skin, to peel the other one off. There hadn’t been anything.
I promise I’ll fix this, Tim said. Or something like that, something pressed into the side of his face. And then it’s not Tim, holding Kon, it’s that other guy. That tall, strong man, with cold green eyes and a vicious smile. A smile that reminded Kon of looking in the mirror.
That man, touching Tim, his hair, pulling him close in a way Kon always longed to do. The rage, the unspeakable, burning rage.
Don’t fucking touch him.
There were bruises and cuts on Tim’s skin, his back had been cut up. Dick, next to Clark, had said something about Tim and Bruce fighting about…about some sort of tracker. Tim had been terrified, he’d been trying to get away, he’d said I’m glad it was you, lying to Kon’s face on the doorstep. The man had put his hand around Tim’s waist and pulled him in. It had felt like he was watching a dog get their collar snapped back on, a reminder of ownership, even if he couldn’t place why.
He’d been jealous. Kon had been, for a minute there, inexplicably, insatiably, jealous. The man’s voice is crowding in his head, too many words, jumbled at a pitch in his skull that feels like autotune. Get up. Don’t move. Don’t try to escape. You don’t know what she’ll do if I fuck this up again. Why did you do this to me, Tim?
When he passes out—on the floor, stumbling to the bathroom, completely blinded by the splitting migraine and bleeding from every orifice in his body. He was so cold, and so nauseous. He loses consciousness but not the thread of memory. A body pressed against his, hot breath on his neck and face, those green eyes. Hands shoving him down between Tim’s legs, forcing his head down.
He wakes up in a puddle of his own vomit, to the sound of the lock disengaging. He almost groans at the familiar sound of Lex’s approaching footsteps. He’s not ready to be Luthor’s pincushion, he doesn’t want to be sick.
“...ner,” Lex’s hands are on him. There’s another set of hands on the opposite side, they’re gloved, and Kon’s stomach rolls with nausea. Cadmus. It’s Cadmus, he’s sending you back, just like Clark does, you’re broken…broken…
Is this Cadmus?
Tim never said no. Tim never said no. Tim never—
Voices. So many voices.
“—bleeding?” Lex sounds terrified. He never sounds terrified. The plastic hands peel back his eyelids, and Kon groans, letting his head loll back. He doesn’t have the strength to lift it, feels it roll back as someone tries to lift him by the neck. Blood pools down his throat, and he coughs on it weakly, spitting it back up. It dribbles with saliva. His eyelids flutter.
He’s never had a headache this bad. It’s like his brain is an overfed goldfish with advanced dropsy, about to burst open and spray innards all over the place. The red light sears his eyes, and even just Lex’s breathing is too loud, like cannon fire. A group of muskets. Kon is dying.
He reaches blindly for anything to grab onto, his lips are barely moving. He doesn’t even know what he’s trying to say.
Lex’s hand takes his, it’s familiar. And so, so hot. Like being burned. Kon twitches back from him, which only makes him move his spine, and the pressure in his skull gets that much worse for it. He loses time. When he comes back to himself, it’s with a deep, gasping inhale, rattling down his lungs.
He can feel the sun on his face, buzzing deep inside his skin, like a prickling rush of air being slid in between the layers of his epidermis. Static and warm and it hurts.
He leans toward it, into it, the warmth rolling through him, a physical sensation. He shudders, gasping, a diver just breaking the surface of the water. He opens his eyes, and stares directly into a patch of sky, a concentrated sunbeam. It’s blinding.
The red light has been turned off, it takes him a minute to get the colors to load in the right order. There are still faces over him, and hands touching him, maneuvering his body and his limbs, but Kon doesn’t fight it, he does his best to turn off his brain, so he won’t feel what they’re doing either. He doesn’t want to know.
“Tim’s in danger,” Kon rasps, leaning into the sun. If he can see it, if he can feel it, does that mean Clark could get to him. Lex said he’s missing time, said he hurt Tim, but it was that man, it was— “Braxton.”
“Will you stop talking about Tim fucking Drake?” Lex is genuinely angry above him, though Kon can’t pick him apart from the others, “Focus on yourself for once, Conner. Do not get up, I don’t care if someone is running a blade through the fucking boy right now, stay where I put you.”
Kon pushes at Lex’s hands, rolling a little, so he’s on his stomach, and the sun hits the back of his neck. It’s like being doused in warm water. Kon feels the headache rescind. Not the pain, the headache. The vasoconstriction and inflammation causing it. Blood dries on the back of his tongue.
There’s a round of swearing. There are at least five other people in here right now, heartbeats that keep dragging Kon’s attention away. It’s distracting, it’s annoying. He can’t split his focus like this, it’s making it hard to listen to what he actually wants to hear right now, which is what the hell is going on with Tim, and where Clark is.
He picks up the trailing end of Tim’s voice, quiet, almost subdued…yeah, it looks nice, I guess, Mei-Mei. Pink is…and then the stab of pain knocks his arms out from under him. He crashes to the floor, smashing his face into the rough tiles of the bathroom. There’s already blood there. His blood. He’s twitching and gasping, hands snapping over his ears.
The voices get louder, more frantic, but Lex’s rises above them. Annoyed, dismissive but not without tension. “That’s just the infrasonic noise generator. He’s listening to someone. Conner, stop that.”
“What did you do?” Kon demands, sucking in a rasping breath. He doesn’t have to find the energy to roll over, because the hands are doing that for him, positioning him back to how he’s supposed to be. “What did you—?” his ears are bleeding, when he pulls his palms back. He hears the thrum of the generator, matching the pounding in his head.
“Should we sedate him?” A woman asks. “Mr. Luthor, we can’t treat him like this. We would have already done it in the lab. I don’t know what you want, but this isn’t helping.”
Kon’s head snaps up to Luthor, eyes going wide. He forces himself to blink the room into resolution, to focus on himself. Lex is crouched over him again, hovering, his expression tight and displeased. The other heartbeats—people. Doctors, or geneticists, bioengineers. All with their pressed clothes, pagers on their waistbands.
His lips part with disbelief, looking into their faces, the familiar faces. These people, more than any others really did, are responsible for him. Created him. They’re from Cadmus. These are the scientists from fucking Cadmus. Lex has him pinned in this room, strapped down, monitored—
What the hell is he doing? What the hell is he doing with Kon?
Luthor sighs again, through his nostrils. Annoyed. Kon feels the terror swirl in his gut, the bone-deep panic. He scrambles back, away from Lex, out of the slivers of sunlight coming through the shuttered windows.
He’s still in his room. The room Lex made for him, to keep him in. The room where he is powerless.
“Clark,” Kon gasps, “Clark, please. Kal-El.” Kara is offworld, she’s not going to come, and Jon’s hearing is still developing. Clark is trying to train him to minimal success, and Matrix hasn’t answered him in months. Clark is it. “Please, please, you promised—don’t touch me, don’t fucking,” Kon kicks at the scientist with enough force that he doubles over, when Kon’s foot impacts with his stomach.
“Conner.” Lex is losing patience with him. Maybe he’ll actually hit him, this time. “Conner, behave. We are trying to help you.”
“My name is Kon!” He’s screaming. He’s hysterical. He can’t hear Tim, he can’t hear his voice, and Clark’s not coming. He’s walked himself right into this… this trap and he did it with his eyes wide open. What, he thought Lex Luthor the supervillain wasn’t going to capitalize on earning the shaky trust of a kryptonian? Even a half-functional clone one? What the fuck did Mae tell him. She said he’s a poison, he ruined her.
“Clark! Clar—!” Fingers jam down his throat, coated in plastic and unyielding, rough and deep. His voice dies out in favor of gagging, trying to spit them back up. He can’t talk like this, he can barely breathe. Lex has already started shouting at them. Kon can’t help the instinct to inhale around it.
Someone grabs his leg, pulling on him, tugging him flat. Kon sends them flying. It’s more instinct than reaction. His TTK lashes out, the hands touching him snapped back, the bodies thrown away from him in a rolling, concussive force. Kon curls in on himself, watching the two who had been trying to hold him down fly across the room and slam into the wall, slumping.
Lex is still just sitting there on his haunches, looking mildly annoyed, his dress shirt not even wrinkled. He turns slowly to look at the doctors, eyes narrowed, and then back to Kon, voice thick with exasperation. “Are you done?”
The rush of humiliation is unexpected. He feels like a tantruming toddler, even though he can still taste plastic, and he can’t get himself to stop twitching from the ghostly sensation of the hand on his ankle.
He nods, despite himself, inhaling sharply. He thinks he wants to cry. He can’t remember the last time that he cried when he was upset. He cries at stupid movies all the time, when he’s happy, he doesn’t cry when he’s scared.
Lex sighs again. It was funny, when Kon first started coming around. How Kon could push his buttons. Now it just feels like Kon is annoying, and small, and too difficult.
“Look at me,” Lex says, and then leans forward, snapping his fingers in front of Kon’s face when he doesn’t drag his gaze away from the other doctors in the room. “Look at me, Conner. I won’t let them touch you. There is spinal fluid leaking into your cranium.”
Kon’s eyes jerk. He feels himself double-take. He stares at Lex, inhales again, and wipes the saliva from the side of his mouth. It’s smeared with red.
Lex takes his wrist, firm, but not tight, Kon could break the hold if he had to. But all Lex does is guide him back into the sunlight. It’s late, minutes before the beginning of sundown.
“Why the,” he’s still wearing clothes. He drags his nails over the texture of his jeans. Not a hospital gown, not the antimicrobial scrubs Cadmus put him in. Not the Superboy suit he spent all of his first year in, because he didn’t have any other clothes, except the oversized souvenir apparel Rex got on his tour across America. “The sound machine? Why are you keeping me here?”
Lex’s fingers hurt, a little, when they scrape sweaty hair off his head, the way that Kon has watched Bruce do to Tim a dozen times, sometimes with the intention to kiss his forehead. Lex doesn’t do that, which is good, because it would be bizarre.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Lex asks, scooping under Kon’s chin, to raise it up again. It makes the world swirl with colors like they’re smeared water color tipped sideways, leaking down the page. “I want you. To keep. You are important to me, I won’t have you think otherwise.”
“Mr. Luthor,” one of the doctors, a man to Lex’s right, leans forward, sweating visibly. “There’s only half an hour of daylight left, we need to operate.”
Kon tries to look at him, but Luthor’s grip goes firm, holding. He doesn’t react to the information. He doesn’t say what they’re operating on. Kon feels his heart hammer against his throat. He’s not surprised, he knew this was coming, didn’t he?
“Please don’t,” he whispers.
“If your brain keeps swelling you will hemorrhage into your skull,” Lex says. “And that will kill you.”
He knows. But Lex is acting like he doesn’t have a healing factor unless the sun is up, he’s acting like he doesn’t have UV lamps in his penthouse, expressly for this purpose. He doesn’t have to do this. He could leave the red lights off, he could try.
Lex lifts out his hand, without losing eye contact with Kon, and gestures for one of the scientists to give him something. Kon shrinks back when the needle is withdrawn, and Lex smoothly pulls out his phone, tapping something on the screen. When the red light comes back, taking away the sun, and the blurring in his vision gets that much worse, he doesn’t feel the needle enter his skin at all. He hurts too much everywhere else.
He remembers.
Kon’s not sure when it comes back. He comes out of the surgery feeling like he got hit by a truck, his head pounding, worsened by the red lights he can feel like a blanket of cactus spines over him. He’s hooked up to IVs, monitors, a saline drip feeding into the crook of his arm. His sinuses burn like they’ve been filled with fire, and he lies there and drips blood and a white, runny fluid from his nose, staring at the wall across from his bed.
He’s still in the fucking room Lex made for him. He doesn’t know if they operated on him in here, it would be weird if they did, but it feels like he hasn’t seen anything except these four walls in days.
The doctors come and go, always in pairs or triplets, checking his vitals, taking his blood pressure, shining lights into Kon’s eyes. Every few hours they dose him with more pain medicine, but it never lasts very long and it's never enough to reduce his headache to anything approaching normal.
His body is limp, and he doesn’t try to move it. His ears ring faintly, and he doesn’t know if it’s an after-effect of the drugs, or because of Lex’s machines.
He has nothing but time, laying there, to think. He rolls the memory of Tim around in his skull, and the fear never gets any easier to manage. He numbs out to it eventually, playing it over and over and over. It’s patchy, like he’s watching a movie filled with static, he can only hear it in some places, his vision too dark with Kryptonite poisoning to help, even when he gets it back.
It’s on a loop. Being shoved to his knees in front of Tim, taking his hand, being put on the floor and watching Tim being forced to help them make dinner, his hands shaking. Braxton cupping Tim’s face, Braxton holding Tim’s waist, Tim promising Braxton sex and Braxton saying you’re not going to fight anyway.
When Lex finally does come in, Kon doesn’t know how long it’s been since they last saw each other, but he’s dressed in a different suit, and his expression is much calmer. He takes a seat on the end of Kon’s bed, and for the first time in a while, Kon is tempted to kick him off just on principle alone. He doesn’t know if he’d be very successful, his muscle coordination is still kind of shit.
“You lied to me,” Kon rasps, after Lex says how are you feeling? like this is normal for them, and it’s just another day or it’s a week ago and Kon is crashing out in his penthouse to hide from himself.
“Hm?” Lex bends Kon’s arm, so the saline will run through him faster. He picks up a tissue, and wipes Kon’s nose like he’s a toddler, grimacing at what he sees there. It’s not bleeding anymore, but it still runs constantly.
“Braxton,” the name tastes like ash on his tongue. The hatred all-consuming. Lex’s eyes flick up again, not surprised, not alarmed, just dangerous. “‘Tell him that he hurt Tim Drake, and he came to me because he was upset’,” it’s not an exact quote, but it doesn’t have to be. Lex recognizes it all the same, even in the mocking falsetto that Kon takes on of his voice, “You piece of shit. You lied to me. Where is Tim?”
“You don’t have the strength for this,” Lex says, placid. He stands up, still, and silences the heart monitor that’s steadily been beeping louder. The door is closed behind him, the red lights are still on. Kon can’t even feel his face, but he still extends his TTK, flexes the muscle of it, unsure if he’ll need it. It feels more like trying to control river currents than anything else. “You should rest, Conner.”
“How do you know Braxton?” Kon asks, “Who is he?”
“That is none of your concern,” Lex says, mild. It doesn’t hide the tension.
Kon almost laughs at him. Something dark is lingering in the edges of him, something that Clark wouldn’t like, has never liked. It always feels sometimes, that he’s balancing on some sort of tightrope between the two of them—Clark and Lex—and there’s too much of one or not enough of the other. Kon hopes it scares Luthor, seeing himself in Kon’s face. He reaches out with his TTK, brushes it up against Lex, like he means to yank him down and pummel him, “You don’t decide that. Tell me where Tim is, or I’ll make you.”
Lex holds his eyes for a moment. He doesn’t blink. Lips thinned. Still says, with far too much self-assuredness, “No, you won’t.”
Kon squeezes harder. Lex doesn’t look any more afraid. “I’m getting out of here and then I’m going to kill Braxton. Do you have any idea what he’s been doing to my—” he has no words to put here except the wrong ones, titles and layers of ownership he doesn’t get, “best friend?”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lex says.
“I’m not a dog, you can’t keep me.”
Lex’s head tilts, lips slightly parted, and now he looks like the one who wants to laugh. He moves away, slides out of Kon’s TTK without a problem—Kon lets him go, for all his bravado, Lex is fucking right—striding toward the dresser, and withdraws a small box. Kon doesn’t need to try and guess, he can already tell what’s inside of it. What else would Luthor need to lock away here but Kryptonite?
“I had always thought it somewhat barbaric,” Lex says, returning. He takes a seat on the edge of the bed, pointedly next to Kon’s hip, forcing a level of intimacy that makes his skin itch. “The process of collaring a pet. But I have begun to understand since I met you, that it is not simply a demonstration of ownership, it is one of affection. The desire for what’s lost to be returned.” He pauses for a moment, fingering over the box, “You’re right, you’re not an animal, but you are mine. Kal-El has had his time to fumble with this, but that’s enough of that now. You know who you belong to, Conner. I was the first person you thought of when you were distressed just last week.”
Kon’s stomach is in his throat. He can’t look at Lex’s face, as the man opens the box. It’s not Kryptonite, but it is jewelry. He leans forward, and Kon doesn’t fight him when he tips his head and slides the earrings into place. The latch clicks with permanence.
“You are hopelessly sentimental, Conner. Keeping your registration earring this long. Which is why I know I can tell you exactly what this does and you won’t remove it. You just want to be owned and I am more than happy to possess.”
Kon squeezes his eyes shut. He wants to cry again, but he doesn’t.
“We’ll put in the Kryptonite later,” Lex says, sliding another earring into place. Kon swallows hard.
“You’re sick.”
“No, you are,” Lex corrects. “Whatever it was that Braxton gave you, he nearly killed you. Such a useful tool, but one that needs to be modified before it’s put to further use.” Luthor leans back, once he’s set in all the earrings, and he studies Kon’s face. There is sincerity, in his voice when he adds, crisp, “For whatever it is worth, I am sorry this happened to you, even if the outcome benefited me. I know how much you value your autonomy.”
Kon curls in on himself. He pulls his TTK back, a warm buffer between them. He slumps into the mattress, trying to shove down the despair that washes over him. His head pulses in time with his heartbeat.
He doesn’t know what surgery they did on him. He doesn’t know where the Cadmus doctors came from, why Luthor brought them here. He doesn’t know what Braxton dosed him with, what Luthor means by that. He’s not sixteen anymore, but he feels it, so far out of his depth that he doesn’t even realize.
“Don’t be,” Kon mutters, closing his eyes, “it’s not good for branding.”
Lex’s hand settles on the side of his neck, firm pressure. “That is not funny.” It would have made Rex laugh. And Tana. He doesn’t amuse Lex that much when he makes jokes like that.
“I hate you,” Kon whispers. “I want to go home.”
But that isn’t really a place. There’s the Tower. There’s the Kent’s farm, but he’s never really fit there, and he doesn’t try. That’s the place that Clark means when he says home. Kon mostly just means wherever Tim is.
“Don’t lie,” Lex says. “We need to trust each other. I’ll be back soon to check on you. And Conner?” he doesn’t open his eyes, even when Lex withdraws his hand from his neck, “Don’t use your hearing, we’ve only just put you back together. I’ll have to resort to sedatives again. I haven’t designed a way to make it painless yet.”
He leaves.
Kon tips his head back up and looks at the ceiling. He doesn’t cry.