You are (not) the father! (<- spent five minutes trying to find a gif from that one tv show and then couldn't find it) for wip Wednesday? 🥰
“Her name's Kyra,” Tim says quietly, looking down into the crib at her. He keeps his voice low, but he knows she'll sleep through it. She sleeps like a rock every time she goes down. “Kyra Constance Drake-Kent.”
Kon steps up beside him. Looks down at her too.
“I named her after you,” Tim says, although it's obviously incredibly obvious that he did that. It's just something to say. Some pathetic attempt at . . . not a justification or even an apology or an excuse, because none of those things would mean anything when he'd do it all again, but . . . but.
“You were the only way I could explain her,” he says, stiff and abrupt. “I said–I told everyone that we'd slept together. They all just assumed I meant that we'd been together. And I thought . . . it doesn't matter. I just–you were the only way I could explain her.”
The only way he could stand to explain her.
“I had to explain her,” he says, and his voice doesn't want to come, but it doesn't have the right not to. He owes Kon this explanation. Owes Kon the truth.
Part of him still wants to keep lying, though.
“It's not her fault,” he says, and doesn't take his eyes off Kyra's sleeping face. “And I don't–if he ever found out about her, I thought . . .”
He feels Kon's eyes shift to him. He still doesn't take his own off Kyra.
“After you died,” he says very, very evenly. “I . . . ran into him, a couple weeks after. Alone. And then he–and I couldn't–and you were the only way I could explain her. If anyone ever . . . ever looked at her DNA, or–or if she got sick, or . . . got powers, or . . .”
Tim doesn't think about the last time he saw Kon's face. Doesn't think about–
He doesn't think about it.
“You can–you can say whatever you need to say to–to everyone. Obviously,” he manages to stutter out, his chest clenching and gut twisting with nausea as he doesn't think about it. “I'll take the fall or the blame for whatever story you want to make up, I just–I just–just–just please, please don't–don't tell them that Kyra isn't . . . that she's from . . .”
“Tim,” Kon says very, very carefully. Tim tells himself–he tells himself Kon lived through having both Paul Westfield and Lex Luthor as his “fathers”, and not having Clark as one. He tells himself–he tells himself–
“I'm s-sorry,” he chokes like it means something; like he wouldn't do it all again if he thought it'd work. Like he's not a selfish, terrified asshole and a horrible person who lied about his dead best friend and let everyone else believe whatever they wanted to about it. “It was the only thing I could think to do, it was . . . I couldn't . . . c-c-couldn't tell anyone, because . . . because if I told anyone, that meant s-someday I'd have to tell her, or that he might find out about her, and . . . and you were my best friend, and the only way I could explain her, and I told myself . . .”
Kon looks at him for a long, long moment. Tim tells himself–tells himself this is Kon, and he doesn't need the contingency plans. He doesn't need any of that. Because this is Kon, who'd never hurt Kyra. Never hurt him.
Not Match, who already did.
“I told myself you would’ve said it was okay,” Tim rasps very, very quietly, staring down at Kyra's sleeping face. “I told myself you would've . . . would've let me lie about it.”
“I would have,” Kon says, his own voice just as quiet as he looks straight at him, eyes intently, inhumanly blue. “And I'm gonna.”
Tim bursts into tears like the selfish, terrified asshole he is, because he's selfish and terrified and an asshole. Kon just leans over the side of the crib and brushes the back of his knuckles against Kyra's soft little cheek with all the terrible gentleness of unfathomable superhuman might compressed down into touching some fragile, precious, impossibly delicate thing.
“Hey there, Kyra,” he murmurs with that same terrible, terrible gentleness. “Nice to meet you. I'm your pa.”
It takes a very long time for Tim to stop crying after that.
