Chapter Text
It took another three days before they were ready to try the portal again. Bruce and Kal were both skeptical of Tim’s plan, which he could hardly blame them for. The words “I want to irradiate the entirety of planet Earth,” were not particularly reassuring. But, because Bruce was Bruce, they’d run tests, and done their best to consult all the experts that could possibly apply to the situation, and run risk assessment after risk assessment. Finally, having concluded that it was incredibly unlikely that they were going to get anyone killed, Bruce conceded. Once again, the Batfamily convened in the Batcave.
Of course, Dick had managed to get himself abducted onto an alien world yesterday afternoon with the Titans in hot pursuit, and Damien was confined to the infirmary, sleeping off a dose of fear toxin from last night’s Scarecrow attack, so the roster was not quite as full as it had been. Add to that the fact that Jason and Cass were out on patrols, Oracle was running backup for them, and Duke was “-sleeping like a normal person. Jesus, some of us actually try to get five hours a night, Bruce .” Kal El also hadn’t been called in this time, but Tim suspected that wherever he was, he was keeping one ear focused on the situation.
So really, that just left Bruce, Steph, and Tim to save the day. Go teamwork.
They’d also requested a magic user from the league in case Tim’s calculations were off. John Constantine had shown up twenty minutes late, looking washed out and presumably wearing last night’s clothes. There was lipstick on his collar, and some kind of viscera caked on his boots.
“Long night?” Batman greeted him in uniform. Normally, Bruce wouldn’t have been so accepting about a League member showing up late, but Constantine was an exception. The problem with asking Constantine why he was late was that he would tell you , and you would end up feeling like the universe was a slightly darker, more uncaring place than you’d previously believed.
As it was, Constantine gave Bruce a world-weary look and said, “You don’t know the half of it, mate.” He reached behind his ear, as if hoping for a cigarette, and winced as he came back with a shard of broken glass that had been caught in his hair. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Arms wrapped around Tim from behind, and Tim allowed his attention to be dragged back to the Kryptonian behind him. “You ready?” Kon said, quietly, pressing his face to the top of Tim’s head.
“Yeah,” Tim murmured. “Are you?”
There was a pause. “Can you tell me one more time that this will work?”
“It’ll work,” Tim said, with a confidence that he didn’t entirely feel. On the small chance that it failed, they’d do what they could to minimize damage and respond. Then they’d gather data, and formulate a new plan. But Kon didn’t want the real answer, about how there were never any real guarantees in science and engineering, about how there was always something that might have been overlooked, about how knowledge and perspectives were fallible. Kon needed certainty if he was going to do this, and Tim was willing to give it to him.
There was another pause, where the only sound was Stephanie arguing with Bruce about who had tracked sewage through the Manor, before Tim felt Kon nod against the back of his head. “Okay, yeah,” Kon said. “Let's do this.”
The matter of the portals themselves wasn’t difficult. Tim was reasonably sure he’d made the correct changes to the machine’s code, and Constantine had given the magic side of things the go-ahead, so Tim pressed the button.
There was a long pause. Tim pulled out his phone and pulled up the first social media app he saw.
“Uh, Tim?” Stephanie said. Tim looked up. Kon and Stephanie were staring at him in confusion. “Where was the portal? What went wrong?”
Tim blinked. “Hm? Oh, no, this was supposed to happen. If you’d seen a portal here, then that would mean something had gone horribly awry.”
He refreshed the page of the app. The third post down read: “ bro??? Why did I??? Just remember a whole ass superhero??? What the fuck??”
He breathed a sigh of relief. It worked.
“Okay,” said Stephanie, “Cool, but where is the portal then?”
“Everywhere, love,” Constantine said, leaning against the back wall. Normally, it was the sort of thing he would do to look impressive. Now he looked like he was doing so to hold himself up. Something vaguely demonic oozed out of his pant leg and squirmed away. Tim made a mental note to decontaminate the cave later. “We just opened it bloody-fucking-everywhere, for less than a nanosecond. Long enough for the magic to come out, not long enough for anyone to get sucked in, or to notice for that matter.” He paused. “Well, no one probably noticed. We may have fucked with some time-wizard’s day somewhere, but who needs time-wizards, right? Bunch of fuckin’ arseholes the lot of ‘em.”
Tim nodded confirmation but didn’t respond. He was too busy looking through the feeds. There were a couple more posts about it.
Behind him, he heard Bruce shift and inhale sharply. “I’ve remembered Superboy.” His voice was loud and flat.
Stephanie sounded dismayed. “I swear to god, if everyone remembers but me-”
Constantine made a wretched sound. “I- oh devil’s bleeding scrotum, yup, I’ve got memories too. Christ but that doesn’t feel good with a hangover.” He made a second wretched sound, followed by a retching sound.
The social media notifications were really pouring in now. Tim already followed just about every Superboy fan account in existence, and was even a card-carrying fan club member, (if only to make sure that none of Kon’s fans ever got interested enough in their idol to threaten his identity), and right now half a dozen discord servers were being flooded with messages faster than he could read them.
Behind him, Stephanie said “Oh, okay, there we go. Hi Kon, I remember you now and- oh Jesus, did I really call you a Kryptonian beefcake? In writing? Oh my god, shit, I gotta delete that before anyone grabs screenshots. Shit, fuck, I regret everything .”
Kon laughed, a self-indulgent release of pressure, like all the stress he’d been carrying for weeks was escaping with it, leaving only a nervous, buoyant energy in its wake. “Wait, hang on, that was you?”
“It wasn’t me in any way you can prove in a court of law,” Stephanie warned, but Kon’s laughter was infectious, and he heard the warmth in her voice.
Tim could imagine them grinning like idiots at each other. He still couldn’t look away from his phone.
Batman cut through the chatter. “Superboy, I’ve gone through all of my memories of you and cross-referenced them with what we know.”
“What- like, right now?” Kon sounded surprised for some reason, as if this wasn’t exactly the sort of thing Bruce would do. “Like, every memory you have?”
“Yes. I can’t see any gaps between what I remember and the information we’ve gathered. I’ll have time to go through them more closely later.”
His phone started to buzz with message notifications from fellow heroes, asking about the friend and colleague they’d just remembered. His phone lit up with a call from Martha Kent and his gut rolled over.
He answered. It was time to see if his quiet hunch, the one that he’d kept to himself, was right.
“Tim,” Martha said, sounding out of breath, “I remember him, I remember Conner. His room-”
“Is there anything there? Has anything come back?” he quietly asked.
“That’s what I was just calling to tell you,” Martha said urgently. “It’s there. All of his things. The place looks like a hurricane hit it, but, well, I can’t tell if that’s because of your magical doohickey or if it was already this messy.”
Tim closed his eyes. Early on, they had decided it was better for Kon to stay in Gotham with Tim rather than go back to Smallville where no one remembered him. There would have been too many questions asked. Too many things that couldn’t be explained. Even now, Tim was anticipating the headache of coming up with an explanation as to why Kon El and Conner Kent had both been forgotten by the world for the same period of time and in the same way when no one else was. Still, there had been another reason why Tim had advised Kon not to go back. Beyond the fact that he was essentially a stranger to the Kents and their neighbors, nothing of Kon’s had been left behind at the house.
From birth (or at least the clone equivalent of birth), Kon’s entire identity had been built around being someone else. It had been a long, hard fought battle to scrape out a place for himself and build himself into someone he was satisfied being. And now, thanks to this device, every physical marker and memento of Kon’s identity had been ripped away, leaving it as bare and soulless as a Cadmus lab. Some part of Tim dreaded the idea of Kon - even a Kon who knew what he was going to find - walking into the room he’d slept in for nearly five years and finding it cold and empty.
He’d had no evidence that Kon’s things would come back once reality recognized him again, only a theory. After all, it wasn’t as if portals had sucked up every t-shirt and novelty keychain that had Kon’s Superboy logo on it. Only Kon had physically gone into that other dimension. It was just that this dimension must have stopped recognizing the objects that related to Superboy. In the same way that Kon had disappeared from the background of pictures and mission reports, logos had disappeared from t-shirts, fan clubs met up regularly to make small talk about the weather, and the most obvious things - the things that couldn’t be explained away by the mind, the things that had directly belonged to Superboy himself - they simply disappeared, not to another dimension, but not fully in this dimension either.
Still, it had only been a theory. Not even a theory: it had been a vain hope that Superboy didn’t have to lose every single thing he’d ever owned. It had been enough of a vain hope that he hadn’t even mentioned the possibility to Kon. If Kon had asked him to be sure that everything would come back, even his extensive history of being a secretive, lying, compartmentalizing jerk wouldn’t have been enough to project confidence convincingly.
But that small, thin, glimmering light of irrational hope had paid off.
He turned to watch the stunned disbelief bloom across Kon’s face, because of course Kon had heard every word he and Martha had said from across the room. Slowly, Kon started to grin, and Tim felt his lips start to tug wide in an answering grin of his own. For the second time this month, Kon shot across the room and picked Tim up in his arms, spinning him around. As Tim’s feet touched the ground, Kon leaned in, and kissed him firmly.
Stephanie made a retching sound in the background, but Tim couldn’t find it in himself to care. He pressed his face to Kon’s jacket and breathed in.
He smelled like home. Kon was finally, really home.