The Nest | 4 AM.

Tim had become a “dad” overnight at the ripe old age of twenty-one.

Twenty-four hours ago, he’d been a chronically overworked vigilante on a routine intel-gathering run with Conner. Then it abruptly pivoted from recon to rescue when they found an abandoned wing of a CADMUS lab. Now he was a father via non-conventional cloning, and sharing custody with his best friend. Was this how Bruce felt when Damian showed up?

There was no doubt about the parentage either, not when he had run extensive diagnostics on the kid already—using a saliva sample—and the resulting chaotic mess was 100% his. Well, his and Conner’s. ~~Having a child with his best friend didn’t make him feel warm inside. Nope.~~

A curious child with too many questions.

“Why’s the sky blue?” (He spent twenty minutes explaining Rayleigh scattering).

“What are those things under your eyes?” (“Dark circles. Rob doesn’t believe in a sleep schedule. He’s religious.”)

“What is THAT?” (Ducks. The kid had never seen ducks—or any animals outside CADMUS).

And et cetera, until he and Conner had managed to wrangle the quarter-Kryptonian child into his “nest”—very fitting nickname for his apartment—before any media could catch wind of their clone child. Enough time for Tim to get to the bottom of their origin.

A clone of a clone.

He didn’t want to dwell on how many failed attempts must have preceded them. How many unstable mixes, how many discarded prototypes? All built from their stolen samples. How much suffering had been baked into this kid’s origin before they’d even taken their first breath?

Tim already had a shortlist of suspects who’d be ethically bankrupt enough to pull something like this, but every time he tried to research, the kid tugged his sleeve with another question halfway out their adorable mouth.

Gratefully, Conner took the hint and intervened. “Hey, kiddo. Wanna come fly with me?”

When the DNA results first processed, Conner half joked Tim was the actual culprit who made the kid as a ‘replacement’ in case he ever died again. A joke! But Tim had gone wide-eyed, and started muttering about new contingencies—he’d never seen Rob so paranoid before.

Point being, Kon wasn’t remotely stressed. You were perched on his shoulders, dressed in an identical leather jacket, and being flown around the living room with his tactile telekinesis. Typical. Kon could roll with anything if it smiled at him.

Tim grudgingly admitted the kid was adorable, and he could see his own bright-eyed inquisitiveness in their wide eyes. Hopefully with none of Conner’s identity issues—and why was he cataloguing their features like a sentimental idiot?

“I need to go baby-proof my apartment against Kryptonians,” Tim muttered, pushing away from the computer with a groan. “Watch them. Make sure they don’t—just. Make sure nothing catches fire. Or that they catch fire.”

“Relax, Rob,” Conner said, not even looking over, as he hovered them near an open window. “I’m a natural at this, literally designed—”

He was cut off mid-sentence as tiny hands tugged at his raven hair, snatching the sunglasses right off his forehead.

“Hey, hey, hey. Hands off,” he scolded gently, peeling his aviator glasses from your hands. “Get your own swagger, mine’s copyrighted.”