Chapter Text
The blinding sun was bright above them all as the four teens walked through the summer fair, an almost novelty experience for Tim given the sort of rouges that they had in Gotham, any one of them making such a thing a bad idea from the start.
It was nice though, he had to admit, calming after the day that had occurred only a week or so before. It was the sort of place that lacked the quiet of the Kent farm that had been slowly driving him mad once the peace of it had worn down into a place that was just a bit too silent at all hours of the day.
Tim smiled, a small delicate thing, as Bart led the four of them, all of their hands linked together as they walked in a strange version of a single file line. The other three were under the (not entirely impossible) idea that if they let Tim out of their sight or vicinity for even a moment that he might disappear. So, Bart was taking the lead as he held onto Kon’s hand in a way that could more be considered a drag, the super holding the speedster’s hand before him and the former Robin’s behind him, as Cassie took up the rear for once.
(No one could turn down Bart’s need to go as fast as he possibly could in such a public sort of place when he was giving them all those frustrated eyes that screamed that he could have covered half the fair before the rest of them had ever stepped into it, but was forcing himself not to do just that. If Tim ever got the chance to talk with the Speed Force - he didn’t know how, but he used to have a sentient car so it wasn’t the craziest of ideas - they would be having words while Cassie and Kon held Imp back.)
The first game that they settled at was not at all what any of them had been expecting, though the other three all guessed that they shouldn’t have expected the speedster to want to go onto a rollercoaster or something first when it would still seem like nothing but a brisk walk for the teen in comparison (if that) to the speeds that the speedsters were used to achieving.
(Again, words)
“A shooting game?” Kon asked as he looked at the dart guns that had been brought out to shoot the balloons that were behind the stand.
In previous years they just had the contestants throw the darts, but someone had thrown it with too much of a curve and had almost hit the game runner. It was decided after that, that a weak level gun was safer than some peoples’ natural aim… and yeah, Kon could see that. Not everybody had the aim of a bat with their stupid little batarangs and birdarangs, and given that the game runners stand almost completely out of the booth for games like this, that person definitely had not been a bat or a bird.
But Tim was, and Kon could see the other boy eyeing the weapon with a certain glint to his eyes that came so often when he had a bad idea that he wanted to do anyways. And like with so many other bad ideas that the other teens of their group have had before, Kon was interested to see where it would go.
They wouldn’t be teenagers forever after all.
(No demons would make deals with them for that. Tim blamed Constantine. Cassie blamed Zantana. Bart blamed the timeline, forever changing as it was. Kon just blamed whichever adult figure was annoying him the most right then.)
Bart shrugged, something a bit wild in his gaze that never ceased to remind the other three just how insane all four of them must be, because they almost always mirrored it back by the end.
“Well,” youngest of them all started, that manic tint to his voice that usually cropped up with the current look in his eyes, “I want to drag Rob to laser tag one day, so we need to get him comfortable shooting guns again after the Unternet thingy,” he says as if it were that simple.
Maybe it was.
Cassie had a thought then that laser tag was probably a bit different in the future than it was right now, but she wasn’t going to try and explain that when the game runner was already looking at them strangely.
Tim looked down at the weapon, knowing logically that it really couldn’t do too much to hurt anyone even if they were shot with it. Somehow that didn’t really put him as at ease as he would have liked it to. Tim wasn’t like Bruce when it came to guns, having a loved one being lost to the use of them, and gaining a great dislike for them. If anything he was the opposite, the weight of the weapon feeling much too comfortable in his hands, their use coming much too easy. Much too naturally, to the point that he got almost lost in it.
(To the point that the Unternet had dragged him in with it. To the point that he future self had gotten lost in it.)
He didn’t want to be like that, but...
But Bart was looking at him with the damned hopeful look, and Cassie was smiling in an encouraging way, as Kon reached out to grasp his hand.
“Yeah, okay,” Tim agreed, rolling his eyes as the other three smiled as he handed over a dollar and took the dart gun closest to him in hand.
“There’s five darts in there,” the game manager starts as he looked at the four strange kids before him, only recognizing one of them as one of the younger Kent boys. A cousin of Clark's as the story goes. The people of Smallville had honestly stopped questioning anything to do with the Kents long before Superman came onto the scene looking like Clark without glasses and with a slightly different hairstyle. Superboy wasn’t any different. If he were a betting man, he'd bet that the other two strange boys before him were some other hero or another, and it wasn’t like the demigod had a secret identity at all. “All you gotta do is pop three out of five of the balloons, the more balloons you pop, the bigger the prize you can get.”
Tim raised his arm, the weapon in hand, and took the sort of deadly aim that he had that day with the invasion, before his world had gone to hell, and pulled the trigger. A pop filled the air as one of the balloons before him exploded on the first try, even as there had purposefully been a sad amount of sit in the balloon to make it hard to do just that.
All five balloons were gone in five shots.
The game manager looked at the boy with wide eyes as he handed over the prize from the rigged game - a red stuffed animal that looked a bit like a robin, if he were to take a guess.
“Damn,” the man said, impressed by the boy that had overcome all of the rigged aspects of the game from the start to finish of it, very few were able to do that at the end of the day.
Tim just smiles, something small but true as he held the bird in his hands, the stuffed animal soft under his fingers. He shrugged.
“I’m from Gotham,” the teen said, like the explanation that it was, as Cassie, Kon, and Bart smiled from around him.
The game manager looked between Superboy, Wonder Girl, the short boy that was looking more and more like Impulse the longer that the four stood there, and the last teen that might just very well be one of the bats and birds of that cursed city, and kept his mouth shut.
He wasn’t that crazy.
Instead he just smiled and turned to put more balloons up as probably (definitely) speedster led the other three away in the same manner that they had come to him.
He almost pitied the rest of the fair runners, they had no idea what was coming for them.
Almost.
The teens grinned in a manner that was almost frightening as they walked up to where the arm wrestling competition was being held, Kon ahead of them all. It was cheating, plain and simple, and the four of them all knew it, but they also knew that the current champion was an asshole from all of the stories that the super had told them… sometimes the lines were allowed to get a bit blurred…Especially when asshat reached out before them all and tried to slap the ass of the girl in charge of counting them down after his latest win.
Blurred but not broken. So long as the line still existed at the end of the day.
The three watched as Kon kneeled down and propped his arm up on the other side of the cut wooden log, something a bit vicious in his smile as the other guy smirked and met the super’s hand with his own.
“Oh, you’re so going down, Kent,” the man swore, a bit of gravel to his voice.
Kon didn’t even bother with a response, the way that the arrogant teen’s arm slammed onto the wood only a moment or so after go was called was response enough. The gathered crowd cheered as the older teen walked away, keeping his hands to himself.
“Guess all that time on the farm did you some good,” Tim said with a bit of a smile as Bart and Cassie counted through the bills that Kon had won from that stunt.
And really, it wasn’t even a lie, even if some of those in the caped community might think that it was. While it wasn’t all that common, they had all known for a while that there were ways for supers to loose their powers, sometimes even in the middle of a fight at that. In cases like that, where super strength meant nothing, regular strength was needed to shine through, even if it meant taking time to work out in a room with artificial red sunlight shining down.
The two man race that Bart and Cassie won right after was derived from much the same sort of thought.
(Sometimes… sometimes they just wanted to pretend to be normal kids, and if they won stupid games when they likely would have lost in another life then they really couldn’t bring themselves to feel bad about such a thing when this time last year half of them had been dead and the other two as good as)
At the end of it all, as they drove back to the Kent Farm with fingers sticky from cotton candy and bags of caramel popcorn piled high in the backseat, singing badly along to the truck radio, they all couldn’t help but feel more at peace since they had since that day, packed together as they were.
It’s a fun day, freeing as they talk of nothing from that damned day.
Tim knows that it could never last though, not with the mournful tint the air that they had all been ignoring since they started the walk to the car.
It’s not until they’re sitting around one another in Kon’s room back at the farm that Tim says the thought that had been weighing on his mind for a bit of time then, the one that they all had known was coming but it was just a matter of when it did.
“I’m going back to Gotham tomorrow,” the former Robin says as he looks at the way that the sky seems to burn with the setting sun rather than at the other three teens.
He hears their noises of descent anyways.
“You sure?” Cassie asks, because somebody has to. Even if their Robin was one of the most stubborn people that any of them knew, one of them still had to ask.
“Ma and Pa wouldn’t mind you staying longer,” Kon adds, even as his voice is filled with the resignation of someone that already knew that they had lost. “You know the tractor never works better than when you and Imp are around, you mad scientists.”
And Tim smiles at that, something soft and warm filling his chest at the way that they found to keep him even when they knew that they wouldn’t be able to. He only shook his head though, because even if it was a Hell city, he missed Gotham. He missed the way that the city lights shined through the smog of the city night like man made stars. He missed flying through the night in ways that only bats and birds could. He missed the way that the sun never really did reach them, but they could still feel its warmth. He even missed his siblings, and wanted to see if he could get to know the demon brat now that Damian seemed inclined to want his presence around.
(He wanted to see just how well Bruce could keep his word. And if Ra’s was to pull something, he wanted to make sure that the Kents didn’t get caught in the crossfire of it all)
“You ran for a reason, Rob,” Bart reminded the other, because it was true and if there was one thing that they knew about all of the bats of Gotham, it was that it took them a great while or a great deal of trauma to change, to the point that such a reason likely still stood.
Tim nodded, cause the other was right, but…
“I’m going back for a reason too,” he said as if it settled everything.
It shouldn’t have, after all the other three were plenty stubborn too, but it did.
Kon sighed then, because all of them had had varying degrees of this conversation with each of them playing the role that Tim was now, and they all knew how this would end before they had ever started it.
“I’ll fly you there, yeah?” He offered, feeling the need to do something. Anything.
Tim nods and they’re done talking of it for the night, instead moving to pick up their things and go to the living room where they watched old movies until they fell asleep, curled around one another.
(They all wished that the sun would be slower to rise)