#timber fic

Despite waking up with his arms around Tim and his face nestled in his boyfriend's neck, Bernard feels restless and anxious rather than relaxed and comfortable.

He slowly removes himself from their shared bed, careful not to wake Tim.

Once he's managed to wiggle his way out from under the blankets, he makes his way to the kitchen where he can put his jittery hands to work.

(he can't quite say it's his, no matter how long he's lived here, no matter how much of this city has seeped into his pores and bled his veins. the boy lying before him has a much bigger claim to it than he's ever had.)

the lower district of gotham burned tonight. firefly wouldn't be out of his full-body cast in months, but the damage had been done. screams cutting the air, feet pounding the cobblestone, drug dealers and nuns piling people into cars and getting the hell out of dodge. and in the middle of it—tim. he'd gone to visit stephanie, grinning shyly up at bernard through his lashes, saying he had something just a little important to tell her, babe, i swear. i'm all yours tonight, i promise. they wouldn't do much besides cuddles and a movie, but bernard was pink-flushed anyway.

then the emergency report glitched onto the news, oracle's robotic voice ordering everyone to evacuate the lower district as quickly as possible. bernard, doing the complete opposite, snagging tim's bike and flying into town, hoping against all hope he'd run into tim on the way there.

the bats appeared on the scene almost immediately, whether to stop more fires, apprehend firefly, rescue civilians, or work damage control, no one knew. probably some unholy combination of them all. bernard couldn't find it within himself to be excited at how close robin was, the closest since the cult. he just tugged his shitty, two-dollar gas mask tighter and revved the engine.

or, at least, he was going to. that was before saw a figure collapse into an alley from the roof of an apartment building, a marionette with cruelly snipped strings. and goddamnit, he needed to find tim but—

but. he couldn't leave someone to possibly die on the ground while he's right here to help them.

bernard's thanking every slight tug of his conscience, every gear in his oiled moral compass, that he listened. robin's lying in front of him, bruised, bloody, burned, not breathing.

he stares for a moment, hands trembling out of his skin, a bolt of shock freezing him to the ground. his hero is collapsed on the dirty ally floor in front of him, his hero, fucking robin what happened? the bats were three streets away working on damage control, all present, all accounted for, according to a livestream update. but here robin lies, a baroque tragedy in a skin suit, and this is twice in much too little time that bernard is realizing everyone knows, everyone he cares for, is one misstep from the top of the world to becoming worm food in persephone's garden.

it's that thought that kicks him into action. robin is not dying, not tonight.

(he fought back to back with robin less than a month ago. and now. and now and now and now he may never get the chance to do it again.)

bernard runs through a basic medical checklist in his head. call an ambulance, but this is a vigilante of gotham, so that option seems useless. there seems to be a device in robin's hand, though, some sort communicator, gloved finger hovering near a button near the side. bernard picks it up, notices the bat symbol on the back, and immediately presses the button. there. backup plan in place.

next, to check if he's responsive. a quick shake and a small slap to the face yielded nothing but a limp body. check if he's breathing. the armoured chestplate isn't moving, but it's heavy. bernard can see a latch on the side, just like the kind tim builds into his puffy winter jackets, and pulls it. the chestplate loosens and bernard tugs it off to find and utterly still chest.

(god. god. what happened? probably smoke inhalation, probably lightheadedness from not enough oxygen and a dizzy fall off a roof but—this wasn't supposed to happen to robin. robin is far more alive than anyone else, burning bright with a furious and brutal type of heat that put him a touch above all others.)

check for a pulse. bernard pulls off a glove, undoing another fucking latch, wasting another fucking second, and slips robin's lower thumb in between his second and third fingers. he waits, hardly daring to blink, hardly daring to breathe.

there's a pulse. robin still has a pulse, robin's still alive. bernard gasps wetly, then immediately sobers. even if he's got a beating heart, he doesn't have breathing lungs. he doesn't need to do chest compressions, but he'll need to do rescue breathing. he'll need to—

bernard stares resolutely at the other boy's mouth. robin's pulse might give out any second. he doesn't have any more ticks of a grandfather clock to wait, no more beads to count as they slip by his fingers. he needs to act now.

with a hop over to robin's other side, bernard lifts robin's head with one hand and pinches his nostrils with another. he takes a deep breath, leans over, and seals their lips together, tight and bloody and terrified. then, he breathes.

and breathes. and breaths. and breathes again until he's ripping their mouths apart.

"please," he whispers shakily. "please, please, come on. you're fine, you're fine."

he puts his mouth on robin's again, keeps breathing and breathing until he feels something jolt underneath him. he lurches backward in time to see robin cough once, twice. then he gasps, body arching up the slightest bit, taking in air like he's never tasted it before, like venus' first greedy breath above the waves.

beside him, bernard finally lets out a sob.

Words: 3657 Rating: Teen and Up Warnings: Internalized Homophobia, Religious Trauma/Imagery Relationships: Bernard Dowd/Tim Drake, a smattering of Darla Aquista & Bernard Dowd Summary: A Bernard Dowd character study, which focuses primarily on the religious imagery angle, and a possible upbringing for Bernard wherein he struggled with internalized homophobia. Inspired by the song "No Place in Heaven" by Mika.

Preview:

Bernard Dowd couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when he’d learned that his sexuality was something to hide. He couldn’t even say it was just one thing that put the notion in his head.

But by the time he’d reached high school, he was well-versed in what people meant when they called something gay. And he knew what happened to guys who kissed other guys. And he could recite homophobic buzzwords as easily as he could blink.

He wasn’t a religious kid. At least, not in the Western Christian way. He believed that gods existed; he just also believed that they walked among them, sometimes putting on capes to save the mere mortals below.

Which—that he could pinpoint: the first time he’d ever seen a god in real life.

He’d been in Metropolis for a class field trip. Gotham’s natural history museum was still under heavy reconstruction after a recent Black Mask heist had ended… explosively.

Unfortunately for them, so did their field trip.

I really loved this fic because it had an interesting and compelling plot with Tim solving a case, adorable Tim and Bernard moments and Bernard helping Tim with the case he was trying to solve! It's literally everything I want in a TimBer fic!

bernard hadn't thought about darla in years. people on online forums, ones he'll never tell tim how often he visited, spoke of their experiences with metas and myths and anyone in between. he knew what happened to people accosted by magic, knew of chains trapping them with their own terror, their minds turning against themselves as their nightmares came to life.

bernard, on the other hand, could say that he wasn't all that haunted by darla. she'd lifted his car off the ground in a display of power, told bernard she was laura fell now, no matter the fact that she looked and walked and talked like darla aquista, then threatened his life on behalf of her seemingly never-ending obsession with tim motherfucking drake. seemingly, because when bernard had brought up old times they used to spend with darla over lunch, casual as you please, tim had grinned a little before dismissing his fears. darla was training with some sort of enchantress to try and be good, growing more powerful by the day.

bernard wondered, for a moment, if all of his friends could make the earth quake with a press of their fingertips. if all of his friends could bend those figures of myth and meta and magic with only their will. if he'd spent his life in the company of gods in everything but name, right down to the perfect muscles pulling under skin and battle-worn glimmer in eyes too old to be on a faces so young. (bernard wondered, for a moment, if there was any way he could join them. if the madness in darla's eyes as she demanded tim's whereabouts and the screams of terror on his boyfriend's lips as he woke up with a knife in his hand were worth it.)

bernard knew there was nothing he could have done for darla. probably not now but definitely not back then. he had no power over life and death, he couldn't have saved darla from the bullet wound that cost her nearly everything had he even attempted to try. sometimes, darla shifted in his memories, morphed into someone with the same dark hair and same blue eyes, but with broader shoulders and a kinder smile.

there was the fear that one day, something would take tim down, a dark shadow grappling with his boyfriend's shining, golden soul before snuffing it out as surely as a candle. then there was the fear that one day, something would bring tim back, clawed fingers opening his boyfriend's eyes and twisting that golden soul into something dripping and jagged, as poisonously yellow as laura fell.

(bernard learned of what happened to jason todd on accident, a couple years after the cult of dionysus. there were some horrors he could force himself to speak aloud, some fates that he couldn't stomach.)

(if tim was surprised at the way bernard's fingernails dug into his back as he held the vigilante close, at the way bernard took advantage of the inches he'd lost to tim's late growth spurt to curl himself completely into his boyfriend's arms, then tim never showed a whisper of it.)

the quickest way to avoid all of that, bernard thought, was to just make sure tim didn't die in the first place.

"hey," tim said, bringing his hand up to flick bernard on the forehead. "only shit nurses get distracted when they're treating their patient."

"only shit patients have such abysmal bedside manner."

"oooh, abysmal," tim waggled his eyebrows. "that word-of-the-day calendar is really coming in handy, huh?"

bernard sniffed. "i'll have you know that i am a well-read intellectual. fuckin' sherlock at this point."

in the movies, people with wounds like the glaring one on tim's shoulder sagged into the wall, made tearful confessions through a mouth full of blood, shuddered in pain at the slightest touch. tim's fingers hurt where he hit bernard's forehead, he didn't lose his smart mouth for anything, and was tapping his foot in impatience before bernard propped it up on the sofa.

"you're fucking sherlock? that's such a sweet pet name, you should use it more often," tim teased.

"don't get a big head, you're not that good."

bernard opened the first aid kit, unusually large and unusually used. his fingers found the small pipe bottle of water and the gauze. he tore a small piece off before wiping off the rest of the dried blood as gently has he could.

"you know," tim sounded almost contemplative, musing. completely disregarding what should have been a throbbing pain. completely trusting bernard to take care of him. "ra's al ghul called me detective once."

bernard's fingers closed around the saline solution with more ease than what was comfortable, but he had plenty of practice pushing those thoughts aside.

"i have no clue who that is," he said, feeling tim tense only the barest bit when he poured the solution over the wound. it had to have stung something fierce. bernard had seen grown men whimper at the sensation. tim sighed and tipped his head back instead.

"no one important," tim chuckled. "but i do kinda wish damian was here to hear that."

antibiotics next, and if tim felt the urge to shy away from bernard's fingers as he brushed the wound with ointment, bernard couldn't tell; he suppressed it as impressively as always.

"come on, no sibling talk when you're shirtless and i'm on top of you." bernard joked. neither of them mentioned the blood staining tim's undershirt-slash-makeshift-bandage, the dried blood flakes all over tim's lap, the way bernard's thighs were clenching tim to the point of pain.

between one blink and the next, tim was all wrapped up, gauze in place and bandage taped on top. his boyfriend's lovestruck little smile gleamed up at him, one bernard recognized. a pinch of awe and a dash of trust and a sprinkle of comfort. mix them together and bake at 350, bernard thought a bit hysterically, and you get love for a man who's terrified at how fast he can use bandages.

still, tim took precedent. every night bernard spent washing his hands too roughly at the sink was another night his boyfriend was breathing on the bed in the other room. every night bernard opened that unusually large and unusually used first aid kit was another night tim's soul stayed whole and shining and untarnished by whatever creatures took people beyond the veil only to drag them back. every night bernard spend trying to rub the scent of copper and the spill of liquid poppy off his fingers was another night bernard used his bloodstained hands to keep tim's flame alive.

alfred had loved clear evenings.

bruce usually took a nap right before dinner and subsequent patrol, to make sure he was rested enough to be at his highest performance on in the field. but tim, still gripping tight to the throes of endless childish energy, could never bring himself to sleep.

instead, alfred would stir up some oddly-flavoured lemonade with whatever fruit he'd decided to buy that week, and the two of them would sink into the secret garden of wayne manor. the grand statement of a house was on a hill, so the lush manor grounds stretched out in front of the two of them, endless and full of any adventure tim's racing mind could think up.

it's hard to remember alfred as soft. no matter the gentleness of the pads of his fingers, no matter his ever-polite tone, there was a type of rigid backbone in him that tim now knew was rare to find a glimpse of. but here, treading those very same overgrown manor grounds, alfred's gravestone was a warm sort of gray, cable-knit and molten iron and downy feathers, far cry from the mocking sleet that tim was used to seeing when he bent his neck before a mausoleum. it was almost as if alfred was trying to offer him comfort from beyond the grave.

"sorry for not visiting earlier," tim said, then immediately winced. alfred never failed to admonish him when he started off a conversation by apologizing. still, shame trickled down tim's spine in a frigid pattern when he realized just how far back in his priorities alfred had been pushed to.

"i was," tim started, then paused to huff at himself in irritation. "i had a lot on my mind."

a wretched apology masquerading as an excuse

the words hung in the open air for a moment, caught by the fading golden sunbeams' web, tangling with tim's regret and anticipation and fear. he let the silence stretch out for a second longer, unwilling to ruin the peace with his fumbling words, before he sunk down cross-legged in front of the gravestone.

"i don't know if you remember this." tim said, staring at the grass in front of the grave instead of the painstakingly hand-carved inscription. someone had kept it trimmed, yet beautifully wild. "you were always busy, either cooking or restocking or organizing. but i used to come to the manor from school, once i got a bit more comfortable around everyone, and i'd tell you about things that happened at school that day."

those rose-tinted memories were a staple of tim's childhood; one of the first things that gripped his wrists tight and drew him into wayne manor's fold, telling him without an ounce of hesitation, you are one of ours.

"there was this one friend that i may have mentioned once or twice. he was, uh, one of my best friends in high school. civvie friends."

god, he hoped he didn't start stuttering. put him in front of a crowd and he could channel bruce's confidence, dick's smooth charm perfectly, bending them under his palms he way his family taught him to. but put him in front of someone he cared about, someone whose opinion took root inside of tim and grew like the most scopic of flowering plants? his confidence crumbled.

you're being dumb, tim told himself. it's a goddamn gravestone.

that didn't stop him from rubbing his fingernails together, from forcing his lips to keep moving.

"i saw him again a couple weeks ago. we were just supposed to catch up, but," a bitter chuckle, "things went a little sideways. like they always do."

tim sighed, bringing one leg up and folding the other underneath. "he got kidnapped. i went to rescue him as robin. and he said something that made me,,,well. i didn't exactly panic. but my brain wasn't working on anything but autopilot for a while afterwards."

the gold in the air was gone, replaced by a soft violet instead, and tim could just see the kind twinkle in alfred's eye, his mustache twitching minutely. do go on, master timothy. i'm riveted.

(and tim would cry stop making fun! and then alfred would say, no not at all, and tell tim exactly what he thought of the middle-school-drama situation he'd landed himself into, would tell him exactly what tim should do, and tim would just revel in the feeling of someone paying attention to what he had to say.)

"i went to go see him afterward," tim continued. "as tim drake, not robin. and he—" a waver, a quiver in tim's voice, balancing on the edge as delicately as a coin. "he asked me to go on a date with him."

tim's voice was almost a whisper when he said to the ground, "i said yes."

the trees kept gently swaying, light was inking across the sky in a deep indigo, and alfred's grave sat silent and still. the world didn't stop moving because tim told someone he went on a date with a boy.

of course it wouldn't. for all alfred could be old-fashioned at times, he'd loved every one of his children and grandchildren openly, wholeheartedly, unconditionally. phantom wrinkled fingers tipped his chin up, an imagined smile spilled over all warm and reassuring, and tim was looking right at alfred's gravestone for the first time tonight.

"i said yes," he said, louder, calmer, more sure. a hundred gathered matchsticks and a spark of novelty in his chest.

alfred's tombstone didn't change, but within the quiet of the buzzing, skittering air, at almost seemed like there was a gossamer thread weaved into it. it almost seemed like acceptance.

nervous was not fighting back to back with someone he was only just now realizing he trusted, enough to bare his defenses to. nervous was not feeling the confirmation of all the feelings shooting through his body that he'd always ignored, only to be given a name at last. nervous was not leaning into an arm thrown across his back, cheeks flushed for reasons tim couldn't begin to imagine, the word date deciding to burrow into his brain deeper than the universe itself. so no, he's not nervous.

but with the warm daylight taking all the worst parts of red robin and turning them into something soft and blossoming, bernard's house looked normal the porch railing was well maintained and the unfogged glass stretched across a door that tim had rarely hesitated to throw wide open in the past. tim still had a sluggishly bleeding wound on his calf, and the last time he saw bernard before their dinner, their date, bernard had loomed over him.

tim rang the doorbell and bernard opened the door and all of a sudden, tim realized he was looking down at the other boy, that those stupid sunglasses he'd wanted to yank off blonde locks every damn day for some godforsaken reason were nowhere to be seen, that his own shoulders filled out a shirt that used to be dick's but bernard was drowning in his hoodie. he almost turned around and left right then and there.

he couldn't muster up the courage to talk to steph unless the learned comfort of a domino was resting on his face and he only wandered aimlessly around the city or flopped on the edge of his bed when he wasn't thrumming with the adrenaline of another fight and swinging his fists like it was life or death, mind or madness. so who the hell gave him the idea to look bernard in the eye and tell him that tim drake wanted to date him? tim drake could barely keep a hold on robin.

except, listening to bernard's stammering and watching a grin that threatened to reach over to tim and swallow him whole, he remembered it hadn't always been like that. tim drake had always been as important as robin, if not more. tim's not sure when they fractured apart so far, he wasn't sure he could piece them back together.

stepping forward to see bernard offer him that same sly grin, tim decided it might have been when he stopped talking to this,,,,,,,,,this boy, this friend, this part of him that he'd failed to nurture. it might have been when bernard falteringly messaged him, texts getting shorter and shorter every time until they petered off completely, while tim put his phone on silent and ignored a part of him screaming at his own stupidity, his own self-destructiveness, throwing himself into his grief instead. it might have been when he stopped getting ice cream with cass after patrol, when he realized he was calling kon "superboy" in his head, when he learned to live with half of himself wasting away.

bernard had always been particularly good at dragging tim drake out hiding, though, and no one in the world could convince tim that the warm streaks of lightning electrifying him from the inside out when bernard asked him on a date was anything other than swell of an orchestra's climax, than the realization of oh.

i want that, tim said, and he didn't know when he'd let himself want things again, but he'd stay this way forever if it meant hearing bernard's breathless little laugh and seeing the hop in his step as he tugged tim into a hug more familiar than the weight of his bo staff in his hands.