Chapter Text
On Tuesday morning an unusually powerful solar flare caused an extreme radio blackout, damaged the Watchtower and other satellites, and all the Kryptonians disappeared.
It wasn’t immediately noticeable. Damaged satellites affected cell coverage, and Superman’s tendency to be everywhere in an emergency sometimes made it seem like he was nowhere. But as the day wore on without a sighting, and the repairs to the Watchtower and coordination with Oracle reestablished comms for the League, people began to realize that no one had seen any of the Kryptonians all day.
Superman. Superman the second. Supergirl, Power Girl, and—most relevantly to Tim—Superboy. Nobody could contact them via official or civilian channels. Tim had a robocaller continuously call Conner’s phone. He kept waiting for it to connect and patch Conner into his comms, for him to suddenly hear Conner in his ear telling him to chill and stop blowing up his phone. But Conner never picked up.
It wasn’t that all of the Supers had been taken out in one fell swoop. New Super-Man, both Steels, and even Superwoman were out flying the shield in Metropolis, doing their part to restore the damaged electrical grids, and wrangling the hyperactive Super-Twins. Which would have been a relief… except that the available Supers were all completely unforthcoming about where the Kryptonians had gone.
“The situation is being dealt with,” John said, when Bruce got so irritated by the stonewalling that he flew to Metropolis and broke into Steelworks to confront him. It was the same answer that every hero who asked about the missing Kryptonians was getting: there was a situation, but it was being dealt with, and there would be no further explanation.
“Where is Nakamura? One would think a press liaison would be present at a time like this,” Bruce said with a caustic bite.
“I don’t monitor my employees during their personal time,” John said with just as much bite.
Lois Lane was also conspicuously absent.
Bruce and John went on for quite a while longer, because Bruce was like a dog with a bone, and Damian was searching the building top to bottom for leads while the adults sniped.
Tim liked to think that he wasn’t as bad as Bruce and Damian… but he was aware that he wasn’t good. He ducked out of Steelworks to hunt down Super-Man. Kenan was a teenager and had a history of being loose-lipped, so Tim thought he was more likely to get somewhere by questioning him. And, not incidentally, Conner was a lot closer to him than he was to the senior Steel.
It wasn’t that Tim didn’t care that Superman (both of them) and the Girls were also missing. He just cared much, much less.
Kenan was looking very harried trying to corral Superman’s twins. They seemed to have even more energy than usual; they were literally bouncing off walls.
The difference between Kryptonians and Phaelosians was more cultural than biological. If some agent were affecting the Kryptonians in some way that required them to be isolated, why were the children not affected? Particularly when half-Kryptonians were.
“Super-Man!” Tim called out. Kenan turned toward the address, initially looking relieved to be called away from the kids, but then he registered who Tim was and his face fell.
Tim pushed on with forced friendliness regardless. “I was hoping you could tell me where Superboy—“
Kenan yelled something back, grabbed the kids by the collars of their shirts, and zipped off. Tim’s Mandarin wasn’t great, but he knew the phrase “Sorry, I don’t speak English!”
He also knew that was a load of shit, because Kenan and Conner were pals and Conner didn’t know Mandarin at all.
Tim had never seen rank-closing quite like this. It made sense that Lana Lang’s first and last loyalty was to Clark Kent. Kenan had gone from the Justice League of China to Metropolis with virtually no connection to anyone outside the city. The twins were children—judging from their “no parental supervision” giddiness, they didn’t know what was going on or even that anything was going on. But John had been on the Justice League. Natasha was an active hero with ties outside of Metropolis. And they were still unanimously shutting everyone out, including the Kryptonians’ closest friends.
They couldn’t just squat in Metropolis until they figured it out. The rest of the Bats had mostly held their peace when Bruce, Tim, and Damian had jetted off to the city, but the truth was that they were in an all-hands-on-deck situation and no one really had the time to investigate the case of the missing Kryptonians. The Supers wouldn’t tell them anything, but they were not telling them things with the undercurrent of “butt out and go away,” not “I hope they don’t discover the dastardly truth!” When there was no reason to suspect anything truly nefarious, they couldn’t justify pursuing their personal interests while there were more urgent matters.
All that being said, Bruce could have kept a one-man harassment campaign against everyone who wore an “S” going until the sun burned out. Anyone who knew him knew that. Which was maybe why Lois called him while they were sullenly flying back to Gotham.
Bruce’s phone rang—by which Tim meant Bruce Wayne’s business cell. Bruce usually let it go to voicemail, but when he saw the caller ID he answered it with a curt, “Lois.”
Bruce usually kept a respectful tone with Lois, if not a downright friendly one. That he was being as short with her as he was with everyone else was an indicator of how stressed he was.
“Where—“ Bruce said, then went immediately and completely quiet. He listened to the phone with a perfectly blank face, and after less than a minute, he hung up.
“Well?” Damian demanded. “Where are they? What happened? Why aren’t you entering new flight coordinates?”
“We’re going back to Gotham,” Bruce said, as dispassionate as a stone and staring straight ahead. “The situation is being handled.”
“What?! You cannot believe that I will accept that as a satisfactory explanation—“
They argued the rest of the way to Gotham. Or rather, Damian argued, and Bruce stonewalled him. Tim sank into his seat and stared out at the empty sky.
Conner still didn’t pick up.
𖤓 𖤓 𖤓
Tim was on the trail of some opportunistic thieves when he heard a body drop behind him in the center of the alley, as though from the sky. Friend or foe? He reached for his staff and turned…
“Rob…” the hunched figure groaned.
Conner. “Conner!” Tim started to cross the distance to him and startled back when Conner lurched forward and grabbed him by the biceps. Up close, Conner looked… awful. He was sweating so much that his hair was developing wet ringlets. His eyes burned with frantic energy; he had dark circles under them, and the contrast made his light irises look arrestingly alien. Heat was coming off of his body in waves. It felt like standing next to a fire.
“Tim,” Conner groaned. “You gotta help me.”
“What?” Tim said. “Kon, what happened, what—jeez.” Conner was sagging toward the floor. Tim had to plant his feet to keep him from dragging Tim down with him. He grabbed Conner under the arms and tried to hoist him back up. Unfortunately, Conner weighed more than a bag of cement and was even less helpful.
That was when Tim noticed Conner’s dick. He was so hard that he’d burst out of his jock. His thick, filled cock was standing out against his thigh, straining his suit.
Tim’s whole face flushed. “Wha…”
“Tim,” Conner hissed. He stared Tim right in the eye. He looked deranged. “I feel like I could cream every hole in a cathouse and it wouldn’t be enough…”
God, fuck Tim’s life.
“The solar flare?” he said, connecting dots.
“It hasn’t gone down since,” Conner whined. “I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m gonna die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Tim said, knee-jerk.
“My dick’s gonna explode and I’m gonna be dickless…”
“That’s not going to happen either.”
“You don’t know!” A tremor ran through Conner, and his teeth sank into his abused-looking lip. He clung to Tim like a life raft.
“I need your help,” Conner whimpered.
Any paranoia that this was an elaborately cruel joke or a sixteenth-birthday-esque test was wiped away. The unreality of Conner asking for help with his boner was superseded by this rock-solid truth: someone needed his help; Tim was going to help.
Tim pulled Conner’s arm around his shoulders and hefted him to his feet. “Come on,” he said, “the safe house isn’t far from here.”
𖤓 𖤓 𖤓
Tim lugged Conner all the way back to the innocuous-looking townhouse with the subterranean access point. He dropped Conner on the couch, where Conner stayed in a pained heap, changed into civilian clothes, and exited through the front.
A lot of stores were having payment-processing issues. Luckily, the local sex shop was used to doing cash business. Doubly luckily, Tim had a lot more cash on hand than the average person. The shop didn’t have exactly what Tim needed, but he was resourceful. Tim purchased a milking table and an automatic masturbator and carried it out of the store. Hopefully, there were enough distractions in the city right now that a photo of that didn’t show up in a tabloid tomorrow.
Conner hadn’t moved off the couch while Tim was gone, but he had stripped off all of his accoutrement—boots, jacket, belts, gloves—and was sitting hunched in nothing but his bodysuit, gripping the swollen head of his cock through the fabric, and sweating.
“Hold on just a bit more,” Tim said. Conner gave him a pained grunt in acknowledgment.
Tim set up the milking table in the garage. It was, to Tim’s untrained eye, just a massage table with a hole cut in it and three times the markup. But he didn’t have the time to shop for deals right now. The automatic stroker had a desk mount attachment. Tim drilled into the bottom of the table and used the mount to affix the masturbator, which he pointed upward at the table’s glory hole.
Tim made sure it was firmly attached, then went to fetch Conner.
Conner sucked in a breath when he laid eyes on the MacGyvered fucking machine. “Do you think this’ll work?”
“It came fully charged out of the box,” Tim said. “We can reassess after twelve hours if need be.”
Conner let out a groan and scrubbed his hands over his face. His fingers were trembling.
He shakily undressed. Tim looked away. You need to be clinical, Tim told himself, compartmentalized harder than he ever had in his life, and looked back.
The member was engorged. Approximating from sight, Tim estimated 9 inches in length with a 6-inch circumference. The stroker was going to be tight on him. The testicles were slightly pulled in, as if about to ejaculate. The tip was wet with clear-leaking pre-ejaculatory fluid. The color was a dark almost purple hue.
“Does it hurt?” Tim asked.
“Yes,” Conner said in an emphatic, low tone that someone who wasn’t as good at compartmentalization as Tim might call a moan.
Tim cleaned a patch of Conner’s chest with a sterile wipe to attach the ECG electrodes. Conner held his breath when he did—which, considering how hard he was sucking in air, had to be uncomfortable at best. “Breathe normally,” Tim said, and Conner inhaled in relief. His chest heaved. Tim pressed into the rising and falling flesh with firm fingers to make sure the electrode patches stuck. When he was satisfied, he affixed the heart rate monitor.
Conner’s heart was racing. The meter matched the rabbiting pulse Tim could see in Conner’s bare neck.
“Do you know what your normal heart rate is?” Tim asked.
“Uh,” Conner said. “Normal?”
“I’ll track when it subsides,” Tim said. He took a step away. “Okay. All set.”
Conner dragged himself onto the padded tabletop. He directed his member through the glory hole, found the opening of the masturbator, and pressed in.
“Is the angle right? I can adjust it,” Tim said.
“’S good,” Conner slurred. He flattened himself against the table, pressing in hard with his hips.
Tim looked away. He picked up the masturbator’s remote control and pressed it into Conner’s hand. “I didn’t have time to read the instruction manual,” he admitted, “but I assume the controls are intuitive.”
Conner caught his wrist when he went to step away. His hot, sweaty palm wrapped around the ball of Tim’s thumb and the back of his hand. He gave him a brief, strong squeeze before he released him.
“Thanks, Rob.”
The whirring motor started before Tim had cleared the room. Tim shut the door behind him.