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The Titans wouldn’t look at him. No matter how hard he tried to catch their eye, all of them were tired and tending to their wounds, none of them so much as glance his way even though Conner knew they must be aware of him.
Dick was keeping himself close to Kory, holding her arm like letting go might mean she disappears forever and after what they’ve just gone through Conner couldn’t blame him for it. Kory looked exhausted as she leaned on Dick’s shoulder, letting him take her weight, and in her lap she cradled Rachel’s head, her fingers carding through still pure white curls soothingly like a mother would while Rachel got some much needed rest. Rachel was fine, as far as Conner had been able to tell, just grieving and stricken by the loss of her brother– the loss of the sibling bond she could have had with Sebastian if things had gone differently– and before falling asleep she had turned away from Conner without a word when he approached. It had hurt, but he couldn’t hold it against her after everything he’d done.
Tim wasn’t far away from the trio, and while Dick avoided Conner’s stare by keeping his eyes on Kory’s face and Kory did so by watching the girl in her lap, Tim settled for using his phone to blank Conner out. Glued to his phone, his thumbs tapped away endlessly and at the angle he was sat, Conner couldn’t tell if he was texting his parents or Bernard, or both. Probably both.
Even Jinx, who had apparently been killed before Gar’s actions turned everything upside down and saved them all, glared at him before strutting off with the parting statement that she was done and for the Titans not to contact her again. Unlike his friends, Conner did hold that against her, because it seemed ungrateful after what they and Gar had done for her.
Speaking of Gar.
He was the only Titan who looked back at Conner when the clone tried to connect, but he’d been too deep in conversation with a man Conner didn’t know, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere, to do anything more than smile tiredly in Conner’s direction, cheeks flushed.
At least he hadn’t messed that up. He’d destroyed his relationships with everyone else, but not with Gar, who was so forgiving, maybe even too forgiving. He’d been capable of forgiving Jason Todd, and now apparently Conner too.
Krypto whined in Conner’s lap and he looked down to give the dog a comforting pet, humming low and calm. “I know buddy, looks like you and I might be going solo from now on. You rest up, then we’ll go. Yeah?”
The dog whined again.
He swallowed thickly at the thought of leaving, but from the way the Titans were shunning him and the crushing awareness of all his mistakes in the last week, Conner couldn’t see how he would ever stay, how he could ever be allowed to stay after this. Jason had been told he could never be a Titan again after what he’d done, it figured the same would apply to Conner. He reached up and smoothed his other hand over his bald scalp, cursing how ridiculousness his actions had been and how stupid he must look.
“Do not be so hasty, my friend.”
Conner jumped and glared at the source of the voice, the stranger Gar seemed so buddy buddy with, unable to figure out how the man had managed to sneak up on him. One second the man hadn’t been there, the next he had.
“I’m not your friend,” Conner muttered, refusing to show how much the man’s sudden appearance had shaken him.
He looked around for Gar, who he’d last seen talking to this very same man, and tried to calm his racing heart realizing he was gone.
“A friend of a friend, then,” the man chuckled, taking Conner’s hostility in his stride. “Though I do hope one day you will let me call you friend, Conner.”
Conner watched with narrowed eyes as the man reached out and pet Krypto on the head, smiling serenely. The stressed dog calmed at the guy’s touch, Conner could feel the tension leaving Krypto’s body instantly, and he felt a flare of jealousy that the stranger was able to effortlessly achieve what Conner had spent the last fifteen minutes trying to.
“How do you know my name?” He asked instead.
“I know many things about you, and your many names,” the man winked. “Conner. Subject 13. Superboy… Kon-El.”
Conner started at the last one, eyes wide and innocent as he blinked at the man like he had just woken up at CADMUS again, eager for knowledge. He’d never been called Kon-El before, or even heard of the name.
The man grinned, clearly pleased to have won some ground with Conner, and the clone caught his mistake too late, expression shuttering again.
“And my name is Dominic Mndawe,” he continued, amused that Conner hadn’t asked. “You are welcome to simply call me Dominic if you want. Or Freedom Beast, if you want to stay in keeping with superhero monikers.”
Conner glared, raising an eyebrow at the name, and fought to keep his face passive when Dominic laughed.
“Not all of us can have names that roll off the tongue as well as Superboy.”
He didn’t know what to say, didn’t understand why Dominic had come to him in the first place or why he was so persistent in talking to Conner. The clone looked around for Gar again, breathing becoming erratic when he still hadn’t reappeared from wherever he had disappeared off to.
“Don’t fret, Conner, he is seeing to some urgent business in the Red. He will be back,” Dominic told him, tone much softer. All mirth was gone from his face when Conner looked back at him, instead he studied Conner with a sad shine to his dark eyes. “Our mutual friend has a lot of work ahead of him and very little rest bite.”
Dominic seemed as if he regretted that, but no amount of rue on his handsome face would change the indignant anger that boiled in Conner’s stomach.
“Can’t he have a break? He just pieced reality back together,” Conner seethed, annoyed that instead of being afraid of the Kryptonite monster in front of him, Dominic seemed endeared. “Can’t the Red wait?”
Freedom Beast sighed and nodded, seemingly more to himself than Conner, and patted the clone on the arm. Whether he was bothered by the death glare Conner sent him for it wasn’t clear, or if he noticed it at all.
“Sadly not. The Red has waited long enough for Garfield Logan, it cannot wait any longer,” he explained. “You should have heard the animals cry when he died at the hands of your friends over there. Grief like no other tore through the hearts of all the universes.”
Dominic nodded to the convened Titans, specifically Dick and Kory, and Conner scrambled to think of what he meant. Then, abruptly, Conner remembered a time months ago when Rachel explained to him just why Dick, and Kory and Dawn and Hank and even Jason whenever he reached out to the two boys, sometimes would treat Gar as if he were fragile. Under the influence of her father they had brutally beaten Gar to near death just before Dick personally landed the killing blow. How Gar had lived had still been a mystery to them all, since Rachel hadn’t had access to her healing powers at the time and hadn’t even come close to mastering her resurrective powers yet, but now Conner could guess the cause.
“You felt him die?” Conner asked, recognizing a deep pain on Dominic’s face.
Dominic nodded. “I did. But I also felt when he returned, when the Red itself rebelled and took hold of him: dragging him back from the Rot. It was true euphoria, my friend.”
He didn’t complain about being called friend the second time, which seemed to make Dominic happy.
“The Red defied forces of nature for Garfield Logan, it will not wait any longer,” he chuckled. “There is much to be done and it is overdue. Which is why… I have come to speak with you, Conner.”
Conner looked around, wondering how no one else seemed to think the man’s appearance was weird, and noticed Tim’s hands still as they held his phone. A brief flood of panic filled Conner as he opened out his hearing to the whole room, suddenly aware that he couldn’t hear any breath, any heartbeats, and somehow he had missed Krypto seemingly turning to stone in his lap.
“What… what’s going on?” Conner stuttered. No one was moving. No one was alive–
Dominic held up both hands placatingly and even dared to rest them on Conner’s shoulders. Instead of being able to shove the man off like he weighed nothing, Conner found he couldn’t so much as shrug: the man’s strength seemed mightier than his own, and he stared, horrified at Dominic.
“Remember, we are friends,” Dominic assured him. “Breathe, Conner. All is well. Your friends are all fine.”
Conner frowned, feeling like a child, and shook his head.
“I know you saw us, you were able to perceive Garfield and I talking just now,” the man said, taking Conner off guard and looking oddly smug about it. Nothing he was saying made any sense to Conner and that scared him, frustrated the Luthor side of his brain. “I had suspected, but that was when I knew for certain.”
“What are you talking about? What’s happening?”
He could move fast enough that others looked like they were in a total stand still, that wasn’t new to him, but he wasn’t doing that and no one was moving even an inch as time passed, as no matter how fast he moved the regular world still crept by however slower: it never froze completely. This was someone else, some thing else.
"We are talking between one second and the next,” Freedom Beast explained, dropping his hands from Conner’s shoulders now he was sure the man wouldn’t try to bolt. “I apologize for the fright, but I can’t afford for us to be interrupted.”
That made sense, to a certain degree, to Conner and he felt himself calm down. There were abilities and forces out there that stretched well beyond what anyone on Earth would be able to conceive after all.
“You want to talk to me about something,” he recalled, suspicious again.
Dominic shifted to make himself more comfortable, lifting up a leg to wrap his arms around in a move far more casual than the tense situation called for, and it baffled Conner how calm the man seemed to perpetually be.
“I do. See, our friend Garfield was born for something, born to be something. Foretold long ago, older than the Earth and many other planets combined.”
“Like Rachel?” He glanced at the cambion in Kory’s lap.
The man shrugged. “Not quite, but a close enough comparison. The Red likely orchestrated his meeting with the Raven, it has a sense of humor like that. It certainly planned for him to meet Koriand’r, of that I am certain.
But, I digress, I am not here to talk to you about them. Let me explain something to you about Garfield and the role he is to play. He is the Avatar of the Red, but he is to be the Red personified. Avatars of the Red before him served their roles perfectly but they were simply regents, serving the Red loyally until Garfield’s birth and ascension.”
It sounded a lot like the cultist drivel the Church had been sprouting about Sebastian and Conner felt himself start to tense again.
“Although more, Garfield is still an Avatar of the Red and still needs the same things his regents had needed. Control, peace of mind, a strong sense of self… A protector.”
Dominic waited a breath, as if considering what he was going to say, and Conner clenched his fists. He didn’t trust this man, no matter what reassurances he got off him, but Conner had learned the hard way about acting on impulse or falsely believing he was capable of handling a threat alone: so he waited Dominic out.
“Before Garfield, the Avatar was a girl named Maxine. She did a wonderful job. Her protector was her father, Buddy Baker. Before her, Alejandro had his cousin, Yolanda… many centuries before them Tabu had a wife. Every Avatar needs a protector. And there is only one requirement for the protector of the Red, Conner.” He pinned Conner with a bottomless gaze, freezing the clone on the spot. “They must love the Avatar, wholly and completely. It doesn’t matter what form of love that is, whether it is the love of family, or friends… or lovers.”
Conner’s breath hitched at the dip in Dominic’s tone, the odd emphasis sending a strange flutter through his stomach.
“I may know many things, Conner, but I will not presume to know in what way you feel the love of a protector for Garfield. All I know is that you do feel love for him, in whatever form it may be, and it is pure and strong enough to qualify you as a potential protector of The Red.”
He patted Conner on the shoulder, again.
“This may seem a lot in one go and very hasty, but you must understand my urgency. Some generations of Avatars have suffered from not having a protector. A woman by the name of Sonya Tarinka was once able to imprison, torture and steal the power of the Red from the Avatar of the time, and once she had his power she killed him. Countless lives were lost in the fight to restore order… and it would have never happened at all had the Avatar not refused to assign himself a protector: he stupidly believed he did not need one.” Dominic scoffed. “It may have barely been an hour since our mutual friend ascended to his destined position, but every second that ticks by leads him closer and closer to danger. Tarinka was not the first and she will not be the last.”
Conner cleared his throat. “Which is why you’re talking to me in frozen time.”
Dominic grinned, nodding. “Precisely.”
“You’re better off asking someone else, Dick or Rachel… Kory.” Conner looked down at Krypto in his lap, a self-deprecating smile twisting on his mouth. “Even a dog would be better than me.”
“You do not love Garfield?” The man’s tone was suddenly cold.
His head snapped up, an argument already on his lips. “I… I… I don’t know.”
Despite how frosty his voice had turned, Dominic’s face was still alive with compassion and amusement, and Conner’s cheeks burned.
“I am not asking you, Conner. It is not my place to decide who the protector is. That is entirely up to Garfield and his candidates,” Dominic mused. “But I did give him a heads up that you would be suitable– ”
That explained Gar’s tired smile and pink cheeks.
“– He could certainly do worse than the son of Superman and Lex Luthor, power beyond imagine and intelligence to rival a god… and tell me, Conner, have you not already been protecting Garfield for some time now?”
The words bring up memories of the many, many times Conner had. He stepped in front of bullets, bombs and swords for Gar. In front of countless enemies, even in front of friends. He’d handed himself over willingly to CADMUS under the naïve belief that if he did so they wouldn’t hurt Gar. Conner was a natural protector, he had protected plenty of people, but doing so for Gar had always come to him as easy as breathing, not even CADMUS’ mind control had been able to drive him to truly hurt Gar; the clone, even buried deep, had pulled his punches with the shapeshifter during their fight almost two years ago.
“Garfield will be back soon. I wonder, will he ask you first, or will you seize the day?” Dominic joked, grinning handsomely. Then Conner blinked, and Dominic was gone.
Heartbeats picked back up across the room, breaths were taken and Krypto came alive in his lap to look up at Conner, sensing a change in the clone.
Conner rubbed Krypto’s ears, a lump in his throat, hot cheeks and wet eyes, and tried to gather his thoughts together.
Barely two weeks ago he’d had to say good-bye to Blackfire, unable to go with her to Tamaran no matter how much he’d wanted to, because of how inhospitable the planet was for Kryptonians. Even with his half-Human nature, he’d never have been able to survive long on his lover’s home planet, and she had duties she had long dreamed of taking up that made asking her to stay on Earth an impossibility, even if he’d tried to destroy her chances of going. He’d been forced, in the end, to let Blackfire go.
The thought of letting someone else he cared about go, so soon after losing her, churned his gut. It was bad enough to think he might have ruined things between himself and the Titans with all he’d done during their fights with the Church of Blood, but the thought of letting Gar go into the Red made his throat close up and his heart speed up. He didn’t know if he loved Gar– no, he did know he loved Gar, he loved him so much. Ever since his awareness came back and Conner could only lie prone, eyes closed, listening as a pretty voice spoke to him and read to him, he’d known he cared about Gar. In what way he loved Gar was where he faltered, where he was unsure, but from the way Dominic had explained it, it didn’t seem to matter to the Red.
It mattered to Conner though. It mattered to him to know what the kind of love he felt for Gar was, and he wanted time to figure it out.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat thinking, mulling it all over and petting Krypto, before a shimmer of Red entered his peripherals, but it mustn't have been that long since Dominic left that he looked up to see Gar loitering next to him, fidgeting and biting his lip nervously.
“Hey,” Gar greeted softly, barely there, eyes meeting Conner’s. “Can we talk?”