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Tim groaned, rubbing at his eyes to try and stay conscious. It was hour… forty-seven? Fifty-seven? Whatever. He’d been awake for a while by this point, and the copious amounts of caffeine in his system were beginning to prove ineffective.
He yawned, fingers typing away at the batcomputer as he finished up a mission report for the night. They’d intercepted a rogue magician on patrol a couple hours ago, and since everyone else was already asleep, report duty fell onto him.
It had been a real hassle getting the magician to calm down. Luckily, Kon had popped in for a visit that night and was able to offer another set of hands.
Big, strong hands…
Tim shook his head. He really must have been tired if he was thinking like that—Kon was a friend; a teammate. Tim was just exhausted and delirious.
His mind continued to get more and more sluggish as the minutes ticked by. He knew it was time for bed after this, he just needed to finish the goddamn report before he could finally, finally rest his eyes and dream the night away.
He glanced at the time in the corner of the screen. 2:57 a.m. That wasn’t terrible, right?
With one final click of the keyboard, Tim finished the final sentence in the mission report. With a sigh of relief, he sent it in an email to Barbara and logged off.
God, he was so tired.
______
Tim woke up six hours later feeling better than he had in weeks. His eyes no longer felt achy and dry, his hands no longer shook. Six hours wasn’t ideal, but it was more than he usually got. And for that, he was grateful.
He rode his high all the way downstairs where Alfred was serving breakfast. Tim grinned as he sat down beside Dick and a plate of fluffy pancakes.
“Good morning,” Dick greeted cheerily. He was taking a week off from work to spend time with the family at Alfred’s request. Tim had been thrilled—it wasn’t often that he got to see Dick outside of capes.
“Morning,” Tim said with a smile around a bite of his pancakes.
Dick kept grinning at him, though, and it was beginning to get a bit weird. It wasn’t Dick’s birthday, and Tim’s had passed a while ago. Tim didn’t think they’d made plans… had he forgotten something?
He raised an eyebrow. “Uh, Dick? You okay?”
“I’m fine,” Dick said. He put an elbow on the table and propped his chin up with his hand, still grinning stupidly. “Have you checked your texts?”
Tim narrowed his eyes. Was Dick playing a prank on him?
He cautiously stood up and walked over to the counter, where his phone was waiting in its charger (Alfred had banned electronics from his room for two weeks after finding his stash of secret coffee).
He wasn’t too shocked to see that he had a couple of unread texts. He was shocked, though, to see that one was from Babs. She never texted him unless it was important.
Babs: You might wanna reread your report, loverboy.
Tim blinked. He’d been so tired writing last night; had he missed a bunch of typos? Was it incoherent?
Loverboy?
“Don’t worry,” Dick said, as if he was reading Tim’s mind. “I have your laptop right here.”
Tim ignored the spike of unease at Dick’s enthusiasm in favor of sitting back down at the table and opening the computer. He pulled up the mission report from last night, and—
Oh god.
Tim’s eyes widened as he frantically scrolled through the report, if it could even be called that anymore. Each paragraph was a boatload of horrendous, idiotic statements that—
Shit.
It started out normal enough. Detailing the location and time, who was there. But as soon as he mentioned Kon, it went to hell.
Superboy made a reckless move—Typical, he’d written. Weird commentary, but not terrible.
Until the next paragraphs.
—eyes like shooting stars—
He laughs like he knows the sun will never burn him—
God, I wish he’d stop looking at me like that—
—an invincible, piercing look—
—a bewitching sort of fire in the way he moves—
Tim slammed the laptop shut, feeling his face heat up like fire. Dick’s grin suddenly made a lot more sense.
He felt Dick place a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t know my little brother was such a romantic,” he said, amused.
Tim’s head whipped around to face him. “I am not,” he insisted, panicking. What the fuck had possessed him last night? Why was he spouting out cheesy lovesick nonsense? “I—I have no idea what happened, I don’t remember writing any of that—”
Dick cackled. “This is why you don’t write reports until the morning after,” he said.
Tim opened his laptop again, desperately scrolling up and down.
Nope, still there.
Still poetry.
Still disastrous.
Tim groaned, head falling into his hands. “This isn’t real,” he mumbled. If he ignored it enough, it would go away. It had to.
“I think it is.”
“It’s not.”
Dick chuckled. “Okay, fine. But, now you have to spill the tea.”
Tim lifted his head, confused. “What?”
Dick placed a hand on his shoulder, smiling again. Did he ever stop? “I never knew you had the hots for Superboy, Timmy! You’ve gotta give me the details!”
Tim’s face heated up once more. “I don’t like him,” he hissed. “And keep your voice down, he could hear you!”
Dick raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “If you don’t like him, then how come you wrote a whole romance novel in your mission report? ‘He doesn’t know what he does to me, how weak he makes me feel—’”
Tim slapped a hand over Dick’s mouth to shut him up.
______
It wasn’t an isolated incident.
Every time Tim tried to write something down, his pencil would go off on a tangent about how beautiful Kon looked. Every time he tried to form a text message, his fingers would type out details about Kon’s costume or his eyes or his legs.
It wasn’t stopping.
Tim was, rightfully, freaking out. What was going on? It was like he couldn’t control his own freaking hands anymore. He couldn’t trust himself not to write more awful poetry about his best friend.
Then he remembered.
Last night, the magician had blasted him with some sort of spell. It had knocked him off his feet, so he’d assumed it was simply an offensive maneuver. But it had left him feeling weird.
Not necessarily a bad kind of weird, just…
Weird.
He called Zatanna immediately after he’d made the connection. She’d agreed to come see him.
So here he was, in the batcave, with Zatanna muttering in her own language and waving glowing hands around his body.
He sucked in a breath when she stopped. “Well?”
Zatanna smiled at him. “You’ll be fine. The magician seems to have placed a type of curse on you—mostly harmless, just meant to distract you.”
“So, it’s a curse making me write about Kon like that?”
Zatanna tilted her head. “Well, it’s a curse making you lose track of what you’re doing. The subject matter is all you, Tim.”
Tim grimaced. That couldn’t be right. There was no way he’d write like that out of his own volition. “When is it going to wear off?”
“It should wear off twenty-four hours after it started,” she replied. Tim breathed a sigh of relief.
______
It had been four days since Tim’s curse had worn off.
Maybe, in that time, he’d admitted to himself that he might have the teensiest, tiniest bit of a crush on Kon. Because who wouldn’t? Those muscles, those cheekbones…
But in the moment, he really wished he was still in denial.
Kon was at his window.
This wasn’t a strange occurrence, really. The Kryptonian could be counted on to show up unannounced at any hour of the day. But tonight, Tim was on edge.
He let Kon in, because anything else would have been suspicious as hell. It was best to play it cool, right?
“Hey, Kon—” he started, but Kon interrupted him before he could get much further.
“Are you having a heart attack?” Kon demanded, grabbing Tim’s shoulders.
Tim blinked. “Um, no?” He knew Kon kept his superhearing tuned in to his heartbeat a lot of the time. A few late night conversations made him admit that it felt safer knowing that he was safe.
(That didn’t make Tim feel warm and fuzzy inside; it didn’t.)
Kon’s eyes flitted across Tim’s body before he relaxed, sitting back across from Tim on the bed. “Your heart’s been going haywire all day.”
Tim shrugged. “Maybe I was running a marathon.”
Kon smirked. “Or maybe you were thinking about my shooting star eyes.”
Tim froze. “How the fuck did you find out about that?” He’d encrypted all of the files on his laptop, careful not to bring sensitive ones to the Tower where any of his teammates could log on and find them.
With a snicker, Kon said, “Your brother doesn’t know how to keep a secret.”
“He told you?” Dick would be a dead man come morning. Tim’s life was officially over. Kon knew how he felt; he was laughing about it—would they even stay friends? Did Kon think he was creepy and weird?
“Hey,” Kon said, placing a warm hand on one of Tim’s. “I can practically hear you spiralling. Dick told Wally, who told Bart, who told me. Some screenshots made it down the grapevine.” A crooked smile. “But, that is what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Tim felt his face turning red. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “We can forget it ever happened—I’ll take a break from the team, you won’t have to—”
He was cut off by lips crashing into his. The kiss lasted for only a second before Kon pulled away, an exasperated smile on his face.
“I… what?”
Kon chuckled. “I came here to say I feel the same, you dingus.” He pushed a strand of hair away from Tim’s eyes. “Honestly, I thought I was being obvious. Have you not caught me staring yet?”
Tim pressed a finger to his lips, still reeling from the kiss. Kon felt the same way? About him? “Are you sure?”
Kon smiled warmly. “I’m sure, Tim.”