WIP excerpt for Aether56; “baby clone and all associated trauma". content notes: nonconsensual cloning, trauma symptoms in a child, trauma symptoms in a teenager, unhealthy coping mechanisms in everyone. (( chrono || non-chrono ))
"No, kid," he says, and tells himself it still doesn't sound like "Kid". Hopes it doesn't, anyway. "None of that is anything you did. You got scared because something was scary, and you came out the size you'd been developed to, and you broke all that stuff accidentally. And—you're not Kon, but that's not something you did. That's just . . . who you are."
"You could still finish me, though," Tobias mumbles, rubbing harder at his eyes. "You could p-put me back an' finish me an'—an' ask Wonder Girl to get a god or somebody to put Kon's soul in me instead, and—and then it'd be okay, an' I wouldn't b-be . . . I w-wouldn't . . ."
The kid's tears drip down his face faster, fat and messy and guilty, and Tim thinks—
Tim thinks about what it means that he made a person. Made a person exist. Out of . . . nothing, really. DNA and uploaded information and a lot of science equipment, but . . . nothing more than that.
He made a person exist where one didn't before, and he made that person think they shouldn't exist at all.
"Tobias," he says. "I'd never let anyone do that to you. Not ever. Not for anything."
"But I make you really sad," Tobias says in the smallest voice Tim might've ever heard, and more tears drip down his face. He wants to say I deserve to be sad, but that isn't going to make Tobias feel like anything but a punishment. He's pretty sure the kid already does feel like he's a punishment. And he definitely feels like he's a problem.
Tim made him feel like that.
Tim made a kid feel like a punishment and a problem, like something unwanted, like a mistake. Like he's just an obstacle in the way of someone better existing in his place.
Like he doesn't have just as much a right to be here as anyone else.
So . . .
"I don't care," is what Tim says instead.
It's a lie, obviously, but so is everything he says these days.









