Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tim rolled out of the way as a fist punched the air where he had been standing. He jabbed his staff into the ground for support and swept his hair back with his free hand, catching his breath. Suddenly, the air was knocked out of his lungs as someone crashed into his back, sending them both flying.

The two of them tumbled over each other for a few seconds before collapsing several feet away. Tim groaned and clutched his hand, looking down at the person who had knocked into him. Unsurprisingly, it was Kon.

“What the hell was that!?” Tim shrieked furiously.

Kon spat out a clump of grass. “Maybe, if you had bothered to look where you were standing-”
“Maybe, if you had bothered to look where you were flying,-”

“I wasn't flying, I was knocked back! Why would I fly backwards, you-”

Before Kon could finish his sentence, Bart sped by and picked them both up, standing them upright before dashing away. Tim was about to come up with another retort before Cassie sucker-punched him in the face as payback for the hit she had missed earlier.

Kon laughed annoyingly, then seeing Cassie bring her arm back for another punch, closed his mouth and tackled her. Tim recovered from the punch and held his staff up just in time to deflect Anita’s incoming sword baton.

They had been sparring like this for about half an hour so far. Every Friday afternoon, before dinner, they would gather in the courtyard of the Young Justice headquarters and split into two groups for mock battles. The winning team would get first grabs at the TV the next day.

Currently, Team A consisted of Tim, Bart, and Kon, and Team B consisted of Cassie, Anita, and Greta. The Ray was acting as referee, which really meant he was sitting off to the side minding his own business while Cassie looked over everyone.

Anita swung her sword baton again and Tim’s staff clattered to the ground. As he lunged to pick it up, Kon crashed into him once more. Luckily, instead of flying across the field like last time, they only moved an inch or two. Tim was still fuming nevertheless.

“This is the SECOND time!” he exclaimed, exasperated.

“Maybe don’t get in my way and there won’t be a third!”

Overcome by anger, Tim found himself at a loss for words. Rather than respond, he opted to whack Kon on the back of his head. Kon’s restraint broke as he slapped Tim across the face- not hard enough to break anything, but hard enough to sting. Offended, Tim bit Kon’s hand, earning a loud “what the fuck!?”.

“That’s it! Time out!” Cassie boomed, interrupted the mock battle. When everyone had stopped moving, she stomped over to the boys and kicked Kon off of Tim. They were both still on the floor, now laying on their backs next to one another. “I’m sick of you two screwing around. You’re supposed to be on the same team! If you can’t work together, go waste each others’ time somewhere else.”

Tim opened his mouth to protest. “But-”

“No buts! I’m team leader now, and I don’t want either of you back in this building until you can learn to get along.”

“We’re not even inside the building.” Kon grumbled.

“Well, I don’t want you in the headquarters! In fact, I’m temporarily kicking you both off the team.”

“What!?” They both exclaimed in unison, jolting upright.

“Well- not really. I just mean, like, you can’t come back until you learn to get along.” Cassie said quickly.

“So, what, you’re gonna force us to hang out, or something?” Kon snickered unseriously.

Cassie’s eyes brightened. “Actually, that’s a great idea! You two go out on the town and have some fun.” She said.

“You can’t be serious,” Tim pleaded at the same time Kon said “I was just joking!”

“Look, I’ll rent you guys a hotel room for a week. Just learn to get along before next Friday, and you’ll be back on the team! Is that really so bad?”

Although they were both thinking the same answer (yes absolutely yes), the boys simply gritted their teeth and kept silent. After all, it wasn’t as if they were being chaperoned; There was nothing preventing them from going their separate ways and pretending that they hung out instead.

“And just so you guys don’t get any funny ideas, I’m having Red Tornado watch over you.”

They both let out another collective groan.

Chapter Text

“Well, this is a dump.” Tim muttered, standing in the doorway of the hotel room that was to be his home (or prison, depending on how he looked at it) for the next week.

Considering their Justice League funding, Tim thought it suspicious that this was the best Cassie could rent. It was a small space, a little less than twice the size of his old room from when he lived in Gotham Heights. The wave of cold air that had blasted over the two boys when they first arrived was unsurprisingly paired with a sticky note reading “HEATER BROKEN”.

The first week of winter break spent freezing in a dusty New York hotel room.
“Perfect,” Tim thought. “Just what I wanted.”

Everything in the room was blanketed with a thin layer of dust, including the singular queen-sized bed, which seemed stiff as a board. Aside from that, the room was fairly bare: A creaky old ceiling fan above the bed (which, in this weather, would most likely never see any use), a mini-fridge with a faintly foul odor, a bedside table covered in dubiously sticky stains, and a bathroom the size of a cubicle.

Tim walked over to the dust-covered window and creaked open the blinds, revealing the glow of the city lights. The room may have been crappy, but he had to admit that the view wasn't too horrible. The hotel was close enough to the city to see the beautiful infrastructure, but far enough away that the noise wouldn’t keep them up during the night.

“I call dibs on the side closest to the window.” Tim said, gaze still locked onto the horizon.
"Fine by me.” Kon responded, already laying facedown on the opposite side of the bed.

Once he tore his eyes away from the moonlit city, Tim was forced to focus on his situation.

It wasn’t that he hated Kon, exactly. They just couldn’t seem to agree on anything. Even the littlest thing, such as deciding what to order for dinner, always seemed to turn into a full-on debate. Tim was used to things being professional. If you were given orders, you carried them out with little to no question. He had seen Bruce’s and Dick’s teams in action; he knew what an orderly, cooperative team looked like. And yet, Kon seemed to be intent on defying any command he received, especially if Tim was the one dishing them out.

The silence in the air hung like dense fog, but Tim had a feeling that an argument would spur up to combat it soon enough.

“Dude, it’s like, midnight. Are you gonna sleep or what?” Kon asked, yawning. He had thoroughly wrapped himself in the crusty hotel sheets for warmth.

“It’s too cold to be tired,” Tim shivered, hugging his arms around his sweater for warmth.

“It’s too cold to not be tired.” Kon mumbled back.

“Don’t you have some sort of temperature resistance, or something?"

Kon shrugged sleepily in response.

“Whatever. Talk to you tomorrow.” Tim grumbled, reaching across Kon to turn the lights off. He sat down on his side of the bed, cringing as the stiff fabric of the sheets crinkled.

Cassie said she had sent Red Tornado to chaperone them, but besides dropping them off at the hotel room, Tim hadn’t seen the robot at all. He wondered if Cassie had been bluffing or if Tornado was hiding somewhere, just out of sight.

Tim pulled out his phone and opened Instagram. Dick was doing some charity work in Blüdhaven, and Steph had posted pictures of her and Cass eating dinner together. Everyone seemed like they were busy, but enjoying themselves. He scrolled past a few posts from his old Gotham Heights High friends. Seeing Ives and the gang documenting a Star Wars marathon from last week put Tim in a melancholic mood.

Over the course of his life, Tim had moved schools countless times. He didn’t have trouble making friends, but once he switched schools, he drifted away easily. Ives and him had remained friends even after he had left Gotham Heights, but he could tell his old gang had more or less moved on.

“I didn’t peg you as a social media type of guy.” Kon said, causing Tim to whip his head around.

“I’m not.” He said flatly, putting his phone away. “What happened to sleeping?”

“You being awake is making me awake.”

Tim rolled his eyes. “Just trying to put off going under that musty blanket a little while longer.”

“Beats freezing your tits off.”

With a dramatic sigh, Tim flopped under the covers and drew the blanket over himself, suppressing a shiver.
“Is it just me, or is it colder under these sheets?”

“Want me to use my heat vision?”
“And do what? Burn my clothes off?”
“I don’t know! It was just an idea!”
“Well, it was a shit idea.”
“Gee, thanks. Maybe I will burn your clothes off. Then you can turn into a naked popsicle and Bruce can use you as an ice sculpture at his next gala.”
“Oh, shut up! Premature balding is in your not-so-distant future.”
“Why, you-”

Kon grabbed his pillow and brought it down over Tims’ head, suffocating him. Tim thrashed around a bit before getting a grip on his own pillow and repeatedly bashing it into Kon’s face.

After another twenty-or-so minutes of ruthlessly attacking each-other with pillows, the two boys collapsed back on the bed, chests heaving and bodies aching. The mattress had been stripped bare of all it’s pillows and blankets, which now laid strewn across the hotel floor.

“Everything hurts,” Tim grimaced, trying not to laugh so that he could swallow more air.

“Hey, at least it’s not too cold anymore.” Kon responded between breaths. All that running around had gotten their blood pumping and warmed their bodies up.

“Yeah, but now we have to pick all this up.” Tim groaned.

“Or… we could make a pillow fort.”
“What are you, five?”

But despite his insult, Tim had already begun picking up pillows and arranging them in the shape of a fort. Kon pitched in, laying a blanket over the top to create a roof. The boys crawled inside their newly-made creation.

“I feel like this is warmer than the bed,” Kon noted.

“Yeah, since we’re tightly surrounded by all the warm stuff, I’m guessing it’s probably trapping heat better. Plus, its more comfortable than that stale mattress.”

Kon snorted. “It’s like they put some blankets over a block of wood and pretended it was a bed.”

Tim nodded and rubbed his eyes. “That pillow fight made me kinda tired.”

“I was tired even before the pillow fight. Now I’m exhausted.”
They talked for a few more minutes. Eventually, the silences between sentences grew along with their fatigue, and they said their goodnights and fell asleep.