Chapter Text
Thursdays were always slow.
For reasons unknown to Tim, no one ever scheduled order pick ups on Thursdays, and foot traffic in his shop was practically nonexistent. It was why he’d talked Bruce into rescheduling all of their council meetings for Thursdays, and why he spent most of the day tinkering away in his workshop rather than manning the till.
Maybe Thursdays were just cursed. Tim had never read anything on the subject, but nearly all his customers were the sensitive kind. They could feel the currents of magic in the world like wind against their skin— the ones that had skin, that was. Maybe on Thursdays that wind was just a little too harsh and that’s why they all kept to themselves.
If that was the case, Tim wouldn’t know. He was the best magical shopkeeper in Gotham, but he was still only human. He could crack open as many books as he wanted, but in the body he had now, he was perpetually doomed to be nothing more than a tourist in the world of magic.
Luckily, Tim was very used to making himself at home in places he wasn’t wanted. Human or not, he had a job to do, and he did it well. Which was why, at eleven pm on a Thursday, he was still in the back of his shop, ensconced on all sides by ingredients and grimoires. The front of his shop was warmly lit and invitingly cluttered to best encourage impulse buys, but the back was pristine. In Tim’s workshop, everything had a place and everything was in its place. It wouldn’t do to have an accident.
Sometimes people came to Tim with special requests for Big Magic— the sort that messed with souls, minds, time, or any other Big Thing— and Tim was happy to oblige on a limited basis, but it wasn’t what he loved. At heart, Tim was a tinkerer, and he preferred the little things. A leaf enchanted to fight off hangovers. A bag charmed to hold a hundred times its apparent volume. Nail polish that changes color with the time of day. All things that melded together magic and mundanity. It was the very basis of Tim’s shop.
Today, Tim was working on something new. A pen that, when complete, would record anything said in its presence in the handwriting of the speaker. He was just testing it— “My name is Timothy Dra— I don’t dot my i’s with hearts— ” when a sound like an elephant falling flat from two stories shattered his concentration.
Tim startled, jumping nearly out of his skin as his head whipped around to the curtain that led out to the floor of his shop. “Who’s there?” he called, immediately cringing to himself. Way to go Timmy. You’d be the first to die in a horror movie.
“Tim? Tim, is that you?”
Instantly the tension left Tim’s shoulders. He knew that voice.
“I’m coming back!” Kon called.
In the scant seconds he had to collect himself, he ran his fingers quickly through his hair to force it into some kind of order and remembered to straighten the tie at his throat. He liked to look presentable for council meetings, but the all consuming focus of creating in his workshop had since then set his appearance somewhat awry.
He was just shifting his posture to lean casually against his work table when Kon came barreling through the curtain like a bull in a china shop. He looked wind swept, his shirt inside out and his shoes on the wrong feet. The sun had gone down hours ago, but Kon didn’t look the slightest bit tired. His eyes were wide and wild. Scared.
A stone dropped in Tim’s stomach.
“What happened?”
“They’re gonna kill me,” Kon said. All of the energy and movement seemed to have fled him the moment he laid eyes on Tim, leaving him standing stock still in the entryway to Tim’s workshop. His expression was as hollow as his voice.
“Who’s going to kill you?” Tim asked, forcing his own tone into an approximation of calm. Whoever it was, he would strangle them with his bare hands before letting them touch Kon, but the angel didn’t need to know that.
Kon looked at him, but it felt more like being looked through. Tim didn’t think Kon was seeing him at all. “The Triumvirate,” he said.
Strangling was out then.
Quickly, Tim rounded the table still between them and took Kon firmly by the arm, guiding him as gently as he could to a chair in the corner. Kon sank onto it without protest.
“You better start from the beginning,” he said.
For the first time, Kon looked him in the eye. His expression was pained, his brow scrunched up with worry. Tim wanted to press his thumb there and smooth it out for him, but he held himself back. Now wasn’t the time for foolish fantasies. His friend needed him. Still, he forced himself to back away until he could lean against the solid metal of his work table. Better safe than sorry when it came to the temptation that was Kon-El.
“You’re going to be angry with me,” Kon said.
“I won’t,” Tim replied immediately, but quickly thought better of it. “Okay, I might be, but I’ll still help you fix it. I promise.”
Kon smiled at him wanly— a minor victory. “It’s pretty bad.”
“I’m sure I’ve heard worse.”
Groaning, Kon put his head in his hands, his whole body slumping over in a long curve of defeat. Tim waited.
“My wings,” he said at last. “I went to check on them today, but they’re gone.”
Huh. Tim had heard worse, but only barely.
“What do you mean gone?” he asked, more sharply than he meant to.
“I mean gone,” Kon snapped back, momentarily regaining a bit of life. “I went to do my monthly check on them this afternoon, and they weren’t there any more. Not even a feather. I searched everywhere and I can’t find them— they’re just gone.”
“Fuck,” Tim breathed.
He’d done the math once. When Kon had first fallen, and they were in the gray area between allies and friends, Tim had run the numbers and calculated that just one feather from Kon’s wings could power all of Gotham for a week, and that was the least creative use of the angelic grace contained within it. In the hands of a skilled witch… they could do just about anything.
“I didn’t lose them, I swear. They’ve been in the same place since I fell, and it’s not like I had a whole lot of reason to move them. Someone must have taken them,” Kon said.
Tim’s brain was already whirring with the possibilities. “That’s a long list of suspects,” he said, starting to pace.
Kon groaned in despair.
“I said long not impossible,” Tim reassured him hastily. “We’ll find them.”
“How?” Kon asked. “It’s not like we can go asking around. If word gets out they’re missing, the Triumvirate is going to kill me— not to mention all the people who’ll jump on the trail right along with us. I don’t want to play hot potato with the only part of me that’s still worth a damn.”
Tim looked at him sharply. “Don’t say shit like that.”
Kon’s eyes widened with surprise, but Tim wasn’t sure if it was at himself for letting that slip out, or at Tim for the vehemence of his reply. “Sorry,” Kon mumbled after the moment had lingered a couple seconds too long.
Tim looked away and returned to his pacing.
As much as he hated to admit it, everything else Kon said had some merit. His standing with the Triumvirate was shaky at best. His fall had been entirely unplanned and, to say the least, poorly executed. The angels that had come before him— Kal-El and Kara Zor-El— hadn’t even fallen at all so much as strutted down a red carpet to bestow their magnificence upon humanity. Which was to say, they’d both been sent to Earth intentionally and eventually made the Heavenly-sanctioned choice to stay after they fell in love with it.
According to the popular story, Kon had just decided to up and leave one day, completely abandoning his duties. He’d fallen not just from Heaven, but completely out of it’s grace. His wings had gone dark when his connection to Heaven’s ideals snapped like a thread stretched too far. They’d said it was because he’d turned his back on love altogether.
Kal-El had wanted to exile him the moment he touched down on earth, but Diana and Bruce had both counselled caution. The only thing worse than a rogue and unpredictable angel was a rogue and unpredictable angel that you couldn’t keep your eye on. Kal-El had folded in the end, and Bruce had bestowed the task of watching Kon to Tim. It was a decision he would come to regret as it was, in all likelihood, going to cost him his son in only a matter of weeks.
But that was a problem for later. Right now, Tim’s focus was on Kon and getting his wings back. Everything else could wait.
“If the Triumvirate finds out you lost the magical equivalent of a nuclear bomb, there’s no telling what they’ll do,” Tim muttered to himself, still pacing. “So, we’ll just have to get them back before that happens.”
“We?” Kon asked. He was watching Tim carefully, tracking his slow steps out of the corner of his eye as if by not moving his head, he could hide the fact that he was staring altogether.
Tim paused and looked over at Kon. “Yes, we. I told you I was going to help, didn’t I?”
“You could get in a lot of trouble for not immediately reporting me,” Kon pointed out neutrally. He still wasn’t looking at Tim directly, and something about his sudden calm was deeply unsettling.
“Don’t be an idiot. I may be on Bruce’s council, but I’m not his pawn. I can make decisions for myself, and I’ve already decided I’m not going to turn you in. Now, will I be saving your feathery ass on my own, or are you going to help?”
Kon blinked at him, surprised. “Um… yes? I mean— yes. Of course I’m helping.” He looked adorably confused at this sudden turning of the tables.
“Good,” Tim said, happy to move on as quickly as possible. “Where did you last see them?”
Kon blanched. “You’re not going to like this either.”
“It’s not like it could get much worse,” Tim said, pinching the bridge of his nose in a fruitless bid for patience. “Where did you hide them?”
“... In my apartment.”
He took it back. He never should’ve doubted Kon’s power to make a situation more difficult for him.
“What the fuck, Kon.”
“I know, I know!” Kon said, scrubbing his hands over his face. “In my defense, I had a lot going on in those first few months. I didn’t know enough about Earth to find a better hiding place, and I guess I thought they’d be safest where I could protect them. Obviously that backfired.”
Tim’s head felt like it was spinning as he put the pieces together. “So you’re telling me that not only did someone steal your wings, but they were also in your home, and somehow you didn’t notice for a month?”
“We don’t know that’s how long they’ve been gone.”
“But that was the last time you checked.”
Kon just looked tired. It was all Tim could do to stop himself from going over to comfort him. “Yeah.”
“Why?” Tim asked, suddenly curious. “If I were in your position— well, first of all I would’ve hidden them a lot better— but I definitely would’ve checked on them more regularly. If they were really just under my bed, I would’ve checked on them every night. Twice a day, even.”
Despite the fact that Kon hadn’t been looking at him for some minutes now, Tim felt for the first time that his friend was deliberately avoiding his eyes. “I just… I wanted to forget that they were there.”
It felt, quite abruptly, as if there was a gulf between them.
“Why?” Tim asked, and his voice came out soft. He hadn’t meant it to, but the guarded expression on Kon’s face begged no other tone, and if Tim was being completely honest, it was a constant uphill battle not to be soft with Kon. Something about the angel made every single one of Tim’s hard edges feel like an ill-fitting cloak, threatening to slip off his shoulders at any moment.
Kon picked at a thread on the torn knee of his jeans. They were old and threadbare, and suddenly it occurred to Tim for the first time that he must have bought them that way. Kon hadn’t been on Earth long enough to wear out a pair of jeans, even if he wore them damn near every single day. The same went for his studded leather jacket.
“I don’t miss it, y’know,” he said after the silence had stretched long enough that Tim had started to think he wasn’t going to say anything at all. “When I first fell, everyone talked to me and looked at me with all this… pity.” He huffed a humorless laugh. “Actually, it was mostly disgust, but pity was a close second.”
“They all thought you must’ve wanted to go back,” Tim supplied when Kon fell quiet.
Kon nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t think any of them really understood what that meant. All you earthlings— even the ones with grace in their blood— you’ve got a terribly misguided impression of what Heaven’s actually like.”
Slowly, careful not to spook him, Tim took a step forward. “What about Kal-El and Kara?”
“Oh they’re the worst of all,” Kon replied with a wry smile. “They were in Heaven, but our experiences just weren’t the same. Kal-El was the prodigal son. A golden boy, favored above all others, and Kara… well, it wasn’t quite as easy for her but she was respected and she fit in. Me? Not so much.”
There was no more holding out. No force on Earth was powerful enough just then to keep Tim from closing the distance between them and kneeling in front of Kon— not even his own will. The best Tim could do in the way of restraint was keep his hands to himself, and even that was a close thing. “And for you?” he asked.
Kon was bent over, his elbows on his knees and his gaze fixed on the middle of Tim’s chest. He looked about a thousand miles away. “I didn’t take well to following orders,” he said darkly.
Tim held very still. He wanted to press for more details, to make a long and meticulous list of everyone who had put that expression on Kon’s face and start ticking it off one by one until he’d faced god himself for the angel in front of him, but that wasn’t Tim’s place. His place was here.
Tim sighed, deliberately forcing calm through his body. Before he could think better of it, he tipped forward until his head bumped Kon’s, and he said, “Then you won’t ever have to again.”
He would’ve pulled away, but Kon was leaning into him before he could, resting their foreheads together properly. When he sighed, Tim could feel his breath ghosting over his cheek as the tension left the angel’s body.
“If I could’ve handled this on my own, I would’ve,” Kon confessed to the air between them. “I never wanted to drag you into this, but I don’t know what else I can do. I have no idea where to start looking, but you… you can do anything.” His voice was laced with certainty and no small amount of adoration. Like it had never even occurred to him that Tim wouldn’t be able to solve his problem, only that he might choose not to.
“I don’t know about anything,” Tim said with a pang in his chest. He pulled away before his heart exploded from their proximity. “But we are going to figure this out. I’ll make sure of it.”
Kon smiled at him, their faces still far too close for comfort. “Thank you,” he said simply.
Tim cleared his throat, hastily standing up. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll head over to your apartment and see what we’re dealing with first thing tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Kon asked uncertainly. He looked like he’d rather run all the way there than wait a second longer.
“Tomorrow,” Tim repeated. “It’s late, and we should both get some sleep. Nothing’s going to change overnight, and this’ll give me time to get a more coherent plan together anyway. I need to figure out what supplies I’ll need to gather and who will watch the shop and… ” he said this last part more to himself than Kon as he threw an assessing glance across his workshop.
“Uh, Tim?”
Tim hummed in question.
“Where am I supposed to sleep?”
It was exceedingly lucky that Tim was turned away from Kon just then, because his cheeks were on fire. Just for a moment, he let himself indulge in the fantasy.
With me, of course, he’d say, and it would be all he’d have to say. After that, there would be no more talking. Tim’s heart beat faster with the possibility of it. Intimacy trapped like a secret between their bodies and all wrapped up in warmth. What would it feel like to have the length of Kon pressed up against his back, enveloping him? To wake up next to him and see the silly faces he’d make early in the morning?
A shiver ran down Tim’s spine.
“I’ll make up the guest room for you,” he said instead, bending over to fiddle with some supplies on a low shelf.
“Thanks.”
Silently, Tim cursed himself for not making up some reason they’d have to share. Honesty would’ve been a step too far, but a manufactured bed scarcity? That he could have managed.
He shook himself. That would’ve been a terrible idea. He needed to actually sleep tonight thank you very much, and being unable to look Kon in the eye tomorrow morning wouldn’t be very conducive to spending the whole day together on a quest to find Kon’s wings, now would it.
“Think nothing of it.”
They said goodnight and separated just a few minutes later. As promised, Tim provided Kon with everything he needed to spend the night and sent him off without so much as an untoward glance at the low sling of his jeans.
His heart skipped a beat anyway when Kon shot him a sleepy grin over his shoulder and said: “‘Night.” Tim could get used to a sight like that.
The thing was, Tim didn’t think Kon would say no if he asked. He knew he wasn’t the only one who’d felt the electric current between them when their foreheads were pressed together, and he’d seen the way the angel’s eyes would linger now and then. The simmering heat in his gaze when they would stay out too late drinking. Like Kon would’ve prefered to stumble back to Tim’s bed rather than his own. Tim knew that Kon wasn’t uninterested— that had never been the problem.
The problem was that Tim fell too fast, and now it was too late. Maybe if they’d had more time he could’ve seduced Kon into bed and then taken his time building it out into a relationship. Hell, if he really had enough time, he could’ve waited. Asked Kon out on a proper date first.
But time was the one thing Tim had run out of, and no matter how glorious a couple weeks could be, that was all it could be. Tim was too in love to do that to either of them.
When he finally stumbled into bed, he found his phone on the dresser. He’d forgotten that it had died around lunch time and he’d had to take it upstairs to charge. He felt a stab of guilt at the twenty missed texts and three missed calls from Kon and wondered why the angel hadn’t brought them up.
And then he saw what else was waiting for him. A voicemail from his brother.
Dread pooled quietly in the pit of Tim’s stomach. He’d been trying not to think about it, but he knew he and Dick had left things in a bad place after the council meeting, and it was getting too close to the wire for them to keep doing that. Dick would never forgive himself if they were on bad terms when it happened, so Tim crawled into bed, curled up as tightly as he could under the covers, and pressed the phone to his ear.
“Hey, Timmy. It’s me. You’re probably busy with the shop right now, but if I’m being honest, I think that’s why I chose now to call you.”
Tim pulled the covers all the way over his head until he was sheltered in darkness and the glowing blue light from his phone screen. On the other end of the line, displaced by distance and time, Dick sighed like he’d already used up all of his tears.
“Look, Tim, I’m trying, but this is really fucking hard okay? You’re my little brother. Letting you do this goes against every instinct in my body and after Jason died I just— fuck. I’m sorry. You know better than anyone what we’re up against, and I didn’t call just to rehash everything we said at the council meeting.
“I called to say I’m sorry. Whatever I’m feeling, I know it’s a hundred times worse for you, and I haven’t been making this any easier. You were right, we’ve run out of time and options. And… and I understand why you’re doing this. You’re gonna save a lot of lives, Timmy. I just wish…
“I just wish it didn’t have to be goodbye.
“Fuck, okay. You don’t want to listen to your big brother cry, and my lunch break’s over soon anyway. I need to get back to the precinct and hound Jason about the shitty case files he’s been turning in. For a kid who used to love reading more than air, he can’t seem to write sentences longer than five words, but I guess a lot’s changed since then. I’d hoped Roy would be able to help him out, but if anything, I think those two enable each other.
“But you probably don’t want to hear about that either, huh? Sorry. I’m rambling. I’ll just… I’ll see you real soon, okay? Goodbye, Tim. I love you.”
The message ended there. Silently, Tim wiped at the tears in his eyes with the corner of his sheets. Then he held down the power button on his phone until it shut off completely, and laid very still until eventually sleep took him.