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Essentials Of Happiness
It was a secret, of course. How could it not be? It was not only embarrassing, but if anyone found out…
Well, they’d know his secret. His most secretive secret, something even more intimate than how he snored when he really trusted the person he was sleeping with or nearby (which he’d been told – by Tana, and Roxy on that one camping trip, and Bart on the other – sounded like the offspring of a sneeze and one of those Japanese manga kissing ‘chu’ noises).
Kon’s secret was that he was in love with Tim Drake. Had been for…well, much longer than he’d realized. It had just hit him one day, out of the dark (he’d been trying to sleep at the time), that the fact he wasn’t really upset with not having seen Cassie while they were between super-teams, was because he didn’t feel as much for her as he’d thought.
He’d really missed Tim, though, and that told him something. Something he still hadn’t figured out what to do with. Knowing who you loved was one thing, but acting on it…well, it had taken months with Cassie.
Until one day Kon was in the Wal-Mart in Smallville – a town so small they only had the one – fighting boredom as he waited for Aunt Martha to finish her shopping, and happened upon the toy aisle, where he’d found it.
There was a line of Teen Titans plushies. He still got royalties from his original Superboy merchandise, but this was the first new stuff in years. And while he wasn’t going to spend money getting a stuffed toy that looked like himself – he hadn’t been that shallow in years – the one of Robin looked…well, like Robin.
Like Tim, not any of the others that had worn the costume. It even had a staff and the right hairdo.
Even knowing how much his crush was not a crush, but rather something deeper, Kon was still surprised to find himself standing in the express checkout line with a stuffed Robin doll barely two minutes later. Another two minutes and ten dollars later, he had his prize.
Kon had to forcibly remind himself that he was meeting Aunt Martha and he didn’t want to explain his purchase to her, otherwise he would have taken the doll out of the bag and…well, hugged it. He couldn’t have the real Tim, but this toy…yeah, he could hold it, and hug it, and love on it like he would Tim if he ever got the chance.
Not that he thought Tim would let him. Tim didn’t let himself be touched all that often. Kon had never been sure if it was because he didn’t like being touched, or if he’d never been touched enough to get used to it. He liked to think it was the latter, if only because that meant that if he and Tim ever got together, he’d be able to hang all over his boyfriend and touch him however much he wanted without pissing Tim off.
Kon would like to be able to call Tim his boyfriend.
Still, no matter how lame it was that he went to sleep that night with a stuffed toy held tightly in his arms, Kon had to admit that he slept better than he had in weeks.
***
Over the next few weeks, Kon grew used to sleeping with his toy Tim next to him. In fact, he grew so used to it, that on the third Titans weekend, when he tossed and turned all through the night for the third straight Saturday in a row, he finally gave in and decided to bring his Robin doll with him the next weekend.
It was just Kon’s luck that that fourth weekend after his acquiring of his toy Robin, was also the first weekend of the month – November, to be precise. As always on the first weekend of the month, the real Robin went over the footage taken by the security cameras.
Real-time footage.
At eleven twenty-three PM, on November the third, Tim finished checking the cameras in Bart’s room, and moved on to Kon’s. He panned across from the window to the closet, seeing the few pieces of clothing and homework on the floor and counting it as normal.
He ended, as always, with a long (compared to the other security checks) look at Kon, who had gone to bed a bit early – but then, California was two hours ahead of Kansas, so to Kon’s internal clock, it was tomorrow.
Tim was just about to (reluctantly) ‘change the channel’ when he caught sight of the way Kon of sleeping. Kon was curled in a semi-fetal position – not unusual for him – but his arms seemed to be wrapped around something. And as all three of Kon’s pillows were currently under his head – and too big besides – Tim zoomed in on the small something Kon held in his arms.
And got the shock of his life.
***
One Week Later
***
Another Saturday patrolling sunny San Fran, another purse snatcher caught – at the expense of Kon’s costume. It had to be one of the great mysteries of the universe that weeks-old take-out food disintegrated into a smelly, slimy mass that was completely putrid.
Especially when a certain TTK-gifted test-tube Kryptonian slipped in it and got it all over himself. He really needed to work on keeping his aura up around his body while he was simultaneously using some of it to do something else.
Whistling cheerily as he headed down the hall towards his room, Kon again gave thanks for the never-ending supply of hot water in the Tower’s locker room. It was limited in the personal quarters, but elsewhere it was endless. Good thing, too, since while the petrified and putrified pizza and congealed Chinese food had been easily enough removed from his skin with his TTK, the slimy residue it had left behind had required two vicious scrubbings, with lots of soap.
And Cassie’s loofah. Kon hoped he’d be able to replace it before she found out.
Kon opened the door of his bedroom, prepared to sling the towel in his hand onto the small pile of dirty clothes next to the wall, and instead stopped in his tracks, the towel caught mid-swing.
Tim looked up from his position on Kon’s rumpled bed, where he was tentatively holding Kon’s Robin doll, and gaped. “Um…” he said after an interminable minute.
“Uh…” Kon replied.
“Why do you–?” Tim started, at the same time Kon said, “What are you–?”
They both paused for a moment, embarrassment clear on their faces.
“It’s my room,” Kon eventually ventured to say, belligerence fighting with mulishness for his dominant expression.
“It’s my…image,” Tim shot back, eyes flicking back and forth between the doll and Kon. He looked caught between being shocked and appalled, but both didn’t even appear to cover the way he felt.
Kon’s mouth opened and closed several times before he finally came up with a rejoinder. “Yeah, well…” Not a very good one, admittedly. “It’s still mine,” he said.
Whether he meant the room or the toy, even he didn’t quite know.
“Why?” Tim bit out, staring down at the doll in his hands.
Rather than sounding angry or embarrassed, he sounded…worried? Kon couldn’t quite tell, but there was something more to this – just like there was to his reason for buying the toy. “I just…I want it.”
Tim scoffed and finally turned to look him in the eye, the toy falling out of his hands onto the rumpled sheets. “Obviously. But why? Why this specific toy?” he demanded, eyes searching Kon’s for an answer – what answer, Kon couldn’t guess.
Because I can’t have you, Kon thought, unable to come up with anything to say other than the truth.
Except, from the shocked look on Tim’s face, Kon had apparently said something – and to Kon’s overly-anxious mind as it went over the past few seconds of his memory, it seemed as if it had been the truth. “Um, I meant…” Kon stumbled over himself to correct his faux pas
Whatever Kon had ‘meant’ remained unrevealed, as Tim used all his Robin training to leap up and at Kon. Throwing his arms around Kon’s neck and legs around Kon’s face, Tim grinned at him before planting a hard, bruising kiss on Kon’s lips.
Words would have just gotten in the way at that point, so Kon kissed Tim back. He had loved having even a facsimile of his own Robin to hold, but to have the real thing in his arms, and wanting him back?
That was all Kon could ever have hoped for.