Archive of Our Own

Tim moves two seconds too late.

The knife flashes down.  Bernard lurches in his bonds, arching his back, his mouth stretched open, and he doesn't scream. He doesn't. Tim grabs onto that fact with manic desperation; he didn’t scream, he’s fine.  Maybe Tim didn't see right. Maybe they didn't- maybe he's- 

Stabbing victims don’t scream.  He’s seen it happen, had it happen to him, once or twice.  All the air goes out and you gasp and choke like a landed fish, and make no sound at all.  Tim boxes up that knowledge and shoves it far out of his head like sweeping crumbs under the carpet.  Bernard’s fine.  He has to be fine.

His hands are ahead of his brain and the smoke bombs billow and fill the place wall to wall with fog. Tim smashes his way across the room. The leader goes down hard, mask clattering to the ground, and Tim reaches for Bernard. 

Blood is coming out of his nose. He's gurgling, face ugly and red, and he's alive. 

The knife is in his chest. 

Tim's heart drops into his stomach, his eyes skittering over it, then back to Bernard's face.  Bernard is gasping and choking, his mouth full of blood, so he’s breathing, so they must have missed anything vital which makes no sense , but he’s breathing and Tim’s afraid questioning it will make that fragile thread pop like a soap bubble or a pierced lung.  He slices the ropes, one, two, neat and quick.  The skin underneath is raw and chafed, rubbed through in places where Bernard struggled, and the sight of red beads along that red line shoves a white-hot ball of fury under Tim’s ribcage like a branding iron.

Bernard’s eyes are rolling in his head.  Tim touches Bernard's wrists, gentle as he can be, and he has to get him out of here, he has to stop the bleeding, he has maybe two minutes before Bernard's dead on the ground (he's fast it's fine he'll be fine he's done more with less time) he- 

Bernard blinks, eyes purple-pink in the weird light, and he jerks upright. 

"No!" Tim barks, grabbing his shoulders, trying to hold him without jarring him, especially his chest, "Don't move-" 

He shouldn't be able to breathe, let alone sit up. But suddenly he's jerked around, shoving Tim away with strength he shouldn’t have, until he’s kneeling on the altar, head bent over and one arm braced against the stone, the other clutching his stomach, the knife sticking out of his chest like a cosmic joke.  He heaves violently.

Tim doesn’t scramble, because he’s a professional, but his heart is pounding hard with something sharper than the usual cocktail of adrenaline and stress. Bernard should not be able to move, but he’s moving, and he’s strong, and Tim’s brain skitters over that and tucks it away to solve later.  

He touches Bernard’s shoulder.  His friend’s hand comes fumbling up and clutches at him until he's gripping Tim’s sleeve, Tim catching his elbow to support him, as he rocks and gurgles.  The fury in Tim’s chest has turned sharp and cold, draining into something else.  Fear, says his brain.  He tells it to shut up.

Blood dribbles from Bernard’s mouth, his eyes wide and flat white with terror, and then he vomits. It sounds like it’s punched out of him, a horrible guttural sound, and he keeps going, like something is going to come up, and the blood smells acrid and sharp and... like... alcohol... 

“Breathe,” Tim’s mouth is saying, quietly as it can, like they’re in hiding and can’t be spotted.  They’re not in hiding, they’re on the altar, and the cultists know where they are and they’ll be on them in thirty seconds, tops, but right now sound is muted and the fog makes a bubble and he can pretend they’re okay. “Just breathe, Bernard, please-”

Bernard makes a noise like a drain unplugged, something finally loosening, and vomits up a bloody thing the size of Tim's fist. 

For a second Tim doesn't know what it is. He's distracted by Bernard, breathing freely, his eyes still weirdly pink in the light, his blood black and stinking sharply like antiseptic, like wine, like Janet Drake home late, and he's clutching at his chest and Tim has to snatch his hands so he doesn't jar the knife. 

"Don't touch it," he says, sharply, falling into the commanding voice Bruce instilled into him for directing civilians.  He can only do a shadow of Batman’s voice.  "Stay still-" 

The thing Bernard threw up convulses on the ground. Tim's eyes jerk to look at it. 

It's a heart.

---

Junior year of high school is a little weird.

Tim is Robin.  He spends more time at the Wayne manor than at home, and each night til about three AM he hurtles across the roofs and concrete architecture of Gotham, following Batman (Batman!) over the streets.  They are lit from beneath like moths over flame, dropping into filthy side alleys and streets and parking lots and creeping into bunkers and putting puzzles together on the fly, Tim (Robin!) watching Batman’s back and absorbing the new experiences like a sponge.

He gets about four hours of sleep a night.  This is normal for high schoolers.

“... which is why the new Robin was made via secret shadow-government funded cloning technology,” Bernard is saying.

Darla groans.  Tim peels his face off the desk to stare up at the whiteboard Bernard has filled end to end with his theory.  He’s used six different markers but not for any decipherable color code, just for emphasis.

“Think about it!” Bernard says, eyes bright, his hand resting the board, the other gestures wildly like there’s not enough space for it.  “The last Robin disappears, right, and this new one, what, just happens to look just like him?”

“Uh, a teenager with black hair?” Darla says.  “Have you seen ninety percent of the students at this school?”

“A skinny teenage boy-” Bernard says, and Tim briefly has time to be offended before he follows it up with, “With lean muscles, like- like an acrobat!  Or a gymnast!  It can’t be the same guy because it’s been like a decade-”

Eight years six months one week two days, Tim’s brain rattles off, since Batman first let thirteen-year-old Dick follow him on patrol-

“-and he ages for like three years at a time before he’s replaced!  By a clone!”

“And what, Batman murders the old one?” Darla asks, sardonic.

“Don’t be morbid, darling Darla,” Bernard says, placing a hand on his chest to swoon theatrically.  Darla rolls her eyes so hard they almost pop out of her head.  “No.  He wouldn’t need to!  They’re clones, they probably degenerate after like, five years, tops.”

Dick lasted five years.  Jason Todd lasted less than eleven months.  Where does that put Tim?

… he really needs to change the subject before his head cracks open and leaks brain on the desk.  He is.  So tired.  

“Maybe he just really likes dark haired kids,” Darla says.  “Or they’re all his sons, or something.”

“My theory,” Tim says, voice just as dead as he feels, “Is Batman’s a goth furry so he makes his sidekicks dye their hair for the aesthetic.”

Darla looks at him in abject horror.  Bernard looks delighted.

“Tim, that’s genius,” he says, wild-eyed and brighter than the sun, and he whips around to the board to scribble something else down.

“Why,” Darla says, in despair, “Why would you encourage him-”

“It needed to be said! Speak the truth Timbo!”

“Oh god there’s two of you-”

“What are you doing?”

They all look up, Bernard dropping the marker, Darla grimacing, her feet still up on the desk and absolutely covered in cheeto crumbs.  Tim can feel drool stuck to the side of his face where he fell asleep halfway through Bernard’s explanation.    

Their math teacher stands in the open door, staring at the covered whiteboard.  He looks impressed and disturbed and maybe a little afraid.  A picture of Robin (Tim!!) taped to the board peels off and flutters to the floor.

“Shit,” Darla says.

“Scatter!” Bernard shrieks, and Tim dives for the open window.

He’s falling when he remembers- oh yeah.  This isn’t patrol.  He isn’t in costume.  He doesn’t have the shock-absorbing layers, which isn’t really an issue, it’s just the second story and he knows how to tuck and roll (thanks Dick) but it’s kind of a problem because Robin can do what he wants but Tim Drak e definitely shouldn’t know how to do that.

”Fuck!” someone shouts, and oh yeah, students eat lunch outside. Tim hits the ground.

It’s not his cleanest fall.  His elbow stings and his knee twinges in protest.  He’s a little out of his head.  But he rolls to his feet and since most of the student body is staring at him, books it in a different direction.

He makes it around the corner of the building, towards the quieter parking lot, and ducks behind a bush, crouching instinctively so he’ll be harder to spot.  Sits there for a second.  Thinks, well what now, genius?

The building doors burst open, and Bernard comes scrambling down the stairs.

He looks terrified.  His eyes are flashing and wide and oh shit fuck what happened is a supervillain holding up the school again-

“Tim!” he shouts.  His voice cracks.  “Tim!”

Darla rushes out of the doors, too, shouting his name, and for another second Tim still doesn’t get it.  Then, oh yeah, he jumped out a window.  Oh fuck, he’s the world’s worst friend.

“Bernard!” he calls, quickly, standing up, “Darla-”

Darla sees him first and darts over, and Bernard is looking around wildly, breathing like he’s on the edge of a panic attack, so Tim opens his mouth to call again but Bernard’s eyes snap to his and suddenly he’s charging.  Tim represses every self-defense instinct he has, ready to be slapped or punched or-

Bernard crushes him a hug.

Tim opens his mouth, momentarily stunned, as Darla says, “Holy shit, Tim,” and he can’t focus because Bernard is shaking, just a little bit.  It’s probably from the running.  It’s probably nothing.  His arms are frozen and he unsticks them and tries to close the hug, clumsy, but Bernard breathes out a short huff and steps back, gripping Tim’s shoulders.

“What the fuck, dude,” he says, and his eyes are still wide and he’s still breathing a little too quickly.  “Like, what the actual hell.”

“Are you bleeding?” Darla asks, touching just under his elbow without brushing the scrape there.  “Jesus christ, Tim-”

“I’m fine!” Tim says.  Oh god he’s the worst.  “Really.”

“You’re bleeding,” Bernard replies, and his grip is still tight on Tim’s shoulders.  Tim’s hands come up to touch his elbows, unsure.  “You’re bleeding from jumping out a window, holy shit.”

“Only from the second story!”

“Only from the second story, Darla are you hearing this -”

“I have a first aid kit,” says Darla, best friend extraordinaire and daughter of a mobster, and swings her bag down to root around in it.  “C’mon, unless you want to get detention.”

Dad isn’t home for another month, and Mom’s already drunk herself into a stupor.  Detention would go unnoticed until Dad got home, and maybe not even that, if Tim bothers to get into the school databases.

But Bernard is making a face, and Darla is scowling at her backpack.  There’s shouting back in the direction of the students, and it’s only a matter of time before the math teacher figures out where they went.  Tim grimaces, thinking quickly.

“C’mon,” he says, starting to gently pull away from Bernard.  “I think I know a way onto the roof.”

“Are you going to jump off of it?” Bernard asks, only half-joking.  “God, Tim, save some stupidity for me.”

“You don’t need any more,” Darla deadpans, and Bernard sticks his tongue out at her.

Tim leads them away from the building, around the back where the fire escape can be pulled down with maybe thirty seconds of fiddling, his friends sniping each other and him.  Darla throws her hands up when he says he doesn’t need a bandage (he doesn’t, his elbow’s barely bleeding) and Bernard makes a show of keeping him away from the edge of the roof, pushing him down and practically sitting in his lap for the rest of lunch.

They talk about bullshit for an hour, throwing out new conspiracy theories, exchanging lockpicking tips (Darla’s a decent hand, Tim fakes being bad at it, Bernard holds the pick backwards) and the new Aliens movie coming out and whether they should go see it.  Small things.  Stupid things.

Sometimes Bernard glances over at Tim, and the sunlight catches in his hair and eyes, highlighting the concern that he’s clearly keeping on the downlow.  Probably for Tim’s sake.  Maybe for his own.

Tim’s chest is warm.

---

The heart pulses.

It’s red-black, some dark organ color, like liver.  It shouldn’t be that dark.  Tim’s seen hearts before, and all kinds of other organs.  Hearts are crimson red, or pinkish tan when they’re empty of blood.  This one is almost purple, oozing black tar, stinking like rotting meat and alcohol.

Okay, he thinks, hysterically.  So the situation has upgraded from “the cultists are doing weird rituals to Bernard” to “the cultists are doing weird, successful rituals to Bernard,” and holy shit that can’t be Bernard’s actual heart-

The pipe that smashes into his side probably bruises a couple of ribs.  Tim wheezes, his body already rolling with the blow to negate some of the damage, and it’s go time.

He ends up several feet away from the altar, and he hates that, he needs to fix that, but it’s him versus upwards of twenty angry cultists, and there’s still the other kids to take care of, and he’s done more with less but not while Bernard has a knife in his chest.

Bernard is sitting up, inspecting the knife.  He looks almost curious.

“Don’t touch it!” Tim shouts, and then ducks under another blow.

Most of the cultists aren’t actually any good at hand-to-hand.  The problem is largely that they’re swinging huge lengths of pipe, or knives, and it sort of doesn’t matter if someone’s good at wielding a weapon if they have one and you don’t.  Actually, people who have no idea what they’re doing are worse to fight.  No one does risky stupid bullshit like amateurs.

Tim can manage that, though, he can, and he’s making progress, laying them out one at a time, there’s just a lot of them and one of him and he has to play grab-ass, snaking in and out and ducking at every opportunity.  It’s taking too long.

Someone catches his arm in a hold, yanking him to a standstill so hard his teeth rattle.  His shoulder socket gives with a wet pop.

Great.  It’s the big guy.

“Impudent brat!” roars the man who kidnapped Bernard.  He’s shoved his mask back on his face- willing to waste time getting his costume back on, noted - but he’s done it clumsily and spittle dribbles out the chin.  Gross.  “You will not intrude on this sacred space!”

“I’m kind of already intruding,” Tim gasps out against the pain.

“You-” the man snarls, but Tim takes the opportunity to pinch his inner thigh hard enough to draw blood, so whatever he was gonna say becomes a shrill squeal.  His hold loosens and Tim slips free, ducking another blow and rolling to the side, backing up to clutch his arm and take inventory.

Great. Dislocated shoulder. Okay.  Okay, okay, okay.

The big guy goes for another hold.  Tim kicks him hard in the stomach, crushing the air out of him, and the guy still manages a weak attempt to grab Tim’s ankle.  He misses, but he can definitely fight, and Tim has a dislocated shoulder and bruised ribs and maybe another ten cultists moving around, which is not ideal.

He trades blows with the guy for a few more seconds, time he doesn’t have, before another cultist takes a swing at him and suddenly they’re separated in the confusion.  The big guy is turning away, wide-eyed, to look at the altar, and Tim can’t even take advantage of his distraction because five different people are trying their luck with him, and one of them has a hatchet.

He knocks down two, easy, one, two, one kick leading into the other, and goes to hammer someone’s knee.

“Dionysus!” someone cries out, exalted.

The cultist he’s attacking fumbles.  Tim punches her solar plexus and leaves her wheezing on the ground, and leaps in the same movement-

Bernard is floating.

Tim’s brain skitters over that even while his hands move to take down another person.  Bernard is floating.  Something tangled and green is in his hair, moving over his scalp.  His mouth and chin are black-red with blood, and his shirt is undone, and he is holding the heart in one hand and the knife in the other.

He removed the knife from the wound , Tim’s brain says, bleeding will increase-

He took the knife out of his own chest, another part of Tim replies, a tiny animal part that he can usually suppress that is now hyperventilating.

Except his chest isn’t bleeding heavily.  The shirt is undone and the wound leaks red-black-purple down his belly, but it isn’t spurting or anything it should be doing.  Instead, Bernard is letting go of the knife, and it remains hanging in midair, dripping gore, like those videos of astronauts in space letting go of pens or tools, and he is touching the edges of the wound, his face curious and benevolent, unpained.

“Dionysus,” the cultist leader is saying.  He’s fallen to his knees, his hands out in supplication or worship.

Bernard doesn’t even look at him.  Instead his hand explores the wound, and then traces over the rest of his chest, exploratory, thoughtful, and Tim ducks a wild punch as bile rises in his throat because what did they do to him-

“We welcome you,” the cultist is saying, breathlessly.  “To the mortal realm, oh father of Chaos-”

Bernard slowly raises his head, meets the cultist’s gaze, and he stutters to a stop.  Tim’s breath catches, because Bernard smiles, manic and benevolent and totally devoid of humanity.

The cultist, shaking with excitement or awe, bows his head.  Bernard floats down, and reaches to delicately touch the side of the mask, cupping his face.

“Stupid animal,” he says, kindly, “Why would I thank you for this?”

The cultist starts to raise his head, confused.

It’s not Bernard , says Tim’s brain, even though he already knew that, even though he was putting the pieces together the minute the knife flashed down, even though he shoved the knowledge away because it was unbearable to consider, it’s not Bernard , and it’s only that thought that keeps him from fumbling when vines explode from the cultist’s eyeball.

Not-Bernard lets the man fall over, unconcerned.  The screaming is quickly choked out by brambles, green and thorny, as the man convulses, clawing at his face.

“Mortal audacity,” Not-Bernard says, admiring, and the smile stretches too wide and his teeth are bloody.  “You summon me?”

The air is charged, literally; Tim ducks towards the wall and feels purple-pink sparks roll off his hair and the bare skin of his arms.  The cultists hesitate, sensing the change or just plain off-put by the man left dying on the metal floor.  Some of the smarter ones are already running.  The kids in the cage have scrambled away from the bars.

“ME?” Not-Bernard roars, and he lets go of the heart to float like the knife and slams his hands together.

It sounds like a thunderclap.  The room explodes into pandemonium.

Tim throws himself up into the rafters, mostly out of the way; the kids start screaming, the cultists scatter but there’s nowhere to go in the enclosed space.  The room is somehow lit up with pink and purple light like they’re soaking in wine, staining the the reds and yellow of the Robin costume and leaving streaks along the walls.  

The situation has changed.  Holy shit, the situation has changed.  Tim runs through the calculations, what can he do, and the answer remains tantalizingly out of reach, he doesn’t know enough.

Free the kids.  Get them out.  That’s what Batman would do.

Tim scrambles at how does he help Bernard, but Robin has his shit together.  It’s Robin that drops down the wall next to the cage door, and it's Robin that picks the lock, one ear on the screaming behind him, the terrified teenagers watching him with wide eyes from the depths of the cell.

“Hey,” he says, quietly, and offers them a disarming smile.  “Can everyone walk?”

There’s some nervous glancing back and forth.  He clicks the lock open but remains focused on his hands, nonchalant, like he hasn’t gotten it quite yet.  Waits, fiddling his lockpicks.  Behind him, someone’s scream turns into a long, choking howl, and he pretends not to notice.

“... Yeah,” someone finally says.  “An’ we can carry the ones as can’t run.”

Robin takes the lockpicks away and doesn’t look up.  The voice is low, of indiscernible gender, but sure of themselves; he makes a snap judgement that they can control the panicky ones and keep them together.

“Wait sixty seconds,” Robin says, low and calm.  “I’ll draw their attention away.  Go straight for the exit and up the stairs.  Can you do that?”

“I know how to count, Robin,” the voice says, and he takes that as agreement.

“Door’s unlocked,” he replies, and grapples back up into the rafters.

The fog from the earlier bombs is starting to settle, but it remains a low cloud around people’s legs, stained wine pink and red.  The back of his brain starts a counter, ticking down, and he gives himself five seconds to take stock.

Three more people are convulsing on the ground.  Only one of them has green vines, the others are crying in agony but with no immediately obvious cause.  There are maybe seven people still up and moving, but one of them raises a hatchet-

He brings it down on another cultist.  Her arm is severed with a meaty thunk.

The scream is bordering on inaudible, and over it, Not-Bernard laughs and it’s Bernard’s laugh.   It’s his giggle-snort, hysterical and snuffling, and it hurts like a punch to the gut, like fifteen different high school memories folded into a knife.

It’s a knife Tim can deal with later.  Right now, Robin drops down onto hatchet man.

He aimed well.  His foot drives into the back of the man’s head hard enough that his chin bounces off his chest- he can hear the lecture from Bruce now, never give head wounds- but he stumbles when he goes down, so he’s probably only stunned.  Robin rolls off him and pries the hatchet away as he goes, throwing it to the side so it skitters somewhere off in the fog, and launches himself at another cultist, fists up.  

“Hey!” he says, bright and sardonic, and the cultist’s eyes roll in his head as he snaps his neck around to Robin.  “So, ritual everything you hoped for?”

Or at least, that’s what he means to say.  He gets as far as “So-” before someone behind him kicks him hard in the spine, and he has to roll again.

That’s fine.  He got what he wanted, which was everyone’s attention.  Everyone except Not-Bernard, who is crouched over the woman and touching her bleeding stump of an arm, grinning and curious, while she thrashes weakly.  Tim wants to vomit, but Robin recognizes that he needs that distraction if he wants to get out alive, so he takes it.

The weird thing is, as Robin ducks and dives, drawing the cultists away from the cage full of children, is that they’re attacking each other as well as him.  It’s probably inner politics, who’s with the new god and who realized this might be a bad idea, but that doesn’t feel… right.  Something’s off.

Forty-five, his brain rattles off.  Forty-four… forty-three...

It’s hard to think.  The air is heady, stinking of blood and wine, and there’s a thin noise in the back of his skull, like it’s trickling in through his comms even though he knows they’re off, a sound like flutes.

His heel comes down hard on someone’s knee, making it crack backwards, and they go down howling and Robin realizes- he’s not this violent.  The cultists are attacking each other and his head is fuzzy and he’s not usually this violent, trained in nonlethal, harm-reductant take-downs.  He doesn’t do this.  He doesn’t maul people.

Glittering green flashes in the corner of his vision, and- no.  No.

He grapples back into the rafters.  He’s breathing harder than he should be, as he sweeps up and out of the fighting, and forces his head to think.

Mind-control.  Or some form of it, loosening restraints, making certain things easier.  He could fight it, he just has to be careful, he has to keep careful guard of his thoughts.

There’s a cold burn starting in his chest, that goes all the way through him like a rod of ice, a tightness that makes it hard to breathe.  He ignores it.

Thirty seconds, his brain rattles off, and he dives back in.

He darts in and out, drawing them further back as best he can, but it’s difficult because they’re so easily distracted, because the buzzing in the back of his brain is getting louder, because people are screaming and crying and someone starts laughing, hysterical, and usually Robin can cut the sounds out and not think about them but this time they’re sticking, dragging at his brain like water lapping at his heels.

Tim’s stomach and throat ache, but Robin keeps moving.  He lashes out, kicks stomachs, sides, calves, keeps his punches controlled and debilitating instead of crippling.  Twenty seconds.  Nineteen.  Eighteen…

He sees Not-Bernard in little flashes.  He’s following the cultists as they follow Robin, watching with earnest interest, pulled by the eddy of violence.  He catches one of the bleeding women as she falls back, and she convulses in his arms, something erupting from her forehead, her skull collapsing inwards, one bright yellow eye rolling.  Robin has to duck and doesn’t see anymore, but he pops back up and Not-Bernard is holding something covered in hair, a thrashing animal, and someone is behind him-

It’s one of the children.  Eight seconds, Tim’s brain rattles off, but they’re moving, close to the wall.  They didn’t wait til the end of the count, or they counted too quickly, damnit-

The kid behind Not-Bernard is a skinny, wild-eyed thing, maybe Tim’s age.  Their eyes are fixed on Not-Bernard’s back, and they’re holding-

The hatchet-

“No!” Tim screams.

Not-Bernard’s eyes are pink, purple, red.  Wine color.  They catch Tim’s through the mask, and something in his face breaks open, stunned and lighting up like sunrise, something awed and sweet and horrible, like epiphany, as Tim slides under his arm and brings his hands up.

He catches the hatchet just below the blade.  The kid stumbles, dropping it in their terror, and this time Tim keeps holding it, choking up on the blade so it can’t cut anyone.

“Go!” 

The kid flees, a high whine in their throat, and Tim whips around.

Bernard is looking at him like he’s the only person in the room.  Sound travels thick and muted, his hair floating like he is underwater.  The light is pink and red, lighting up his cheeks, and he is flushed and smiling.  The greenery tangles in his hair like a crown.

“Look at you,” Bernard says, breathless, “Brave, wonderful little mortal.”

It’s not Bernard.  It’s not.  It’s not.

Tim’s heart is racing and his face is hot with adrenaline and fear.  There’s sweat sliding under his mask and trapped beneath his suit like he’s soaked in sunlight, blazing under his skin like a hot afternoon.  The air smells like wine and grapes.  The flutes are getting louder, piping and airy.  Bernard’s eyes are liquid purple, the color of wine, the color of bruises.

Tim inhales sharply, and it’s not Bernard.

He grapples away.  Not-Bernard’s fingers miss him by a hairsbreath, and his laughter follows him up into the rafters as he flees.  Robin’s hand fumbles in his belt and throws out three smoke bombs, and they explode behind him in a hiss of fog, and he retreats under their cover.

---

The gray winter light filters in through the window, laying great pale stripes on the blue rug.  The afternoon is cold and the windows are closed, because Gotham air quality is cancerous on a clear day, but AC blows cool air and Tim can almost pretend it’s a breeze.

“It’s up-up-down- down,” Bernard corrects, and then rattles off the rest under his breath.  “Left-right-left-right-B-A.”

“That’s what I pressed!” Tim protests, even though it isn’t, not hiding the laughter in his voice.  “Look, up-up-down-down-”

“That’s B!” Bernard says, cracking up,  “You’re hitting B, you huge fucking nerd-”

Tim smiles, crooked, and deliberately presses it wrong again.  Bernard slaps his arm in weak protest, snort-laughing into his fist, as the character on the screen does backflips against the wall.

Bernard is nice.  Bernard is normal.   The school counselor had been pleased that Tim had been talking to a fellow “computer enthusiast,” never mind that hacking and video games were completely different, and honestly, Tim’s pleased too.  He didn’t really have friends in elementary, and then middle school was taken up by his obsession with Batman and Robin, and now high school is being taken up by actually being Robin.  Friends weren’t really high on his bucket list.

But Bernard is fun and loud and insistent.  So now, the rare times Tim has no extracurriculars and no weird injuries he needs to hide, he ends up in Bernard’s room, reading comics and getting his ass handed to him in video games.

It’s nice.  It’s normal.   Tim doesn’t usually feel like a normal teenager, or a normal anything, but with Bernard it’s different.  With Bernard he can pretend.

“Give it!” Bernard giggles, and manages to yank the controller out of Tim’s hands.  His laugh fills Tim’s chest with bubbles, and the tiny voice in his brain reserved entirely for memes pipes up with I am getting a good grade in Being A Teenager, something that is normal to want and possible to achieve-

“See?” Bernard declares, dropping the controller back into Tim’s hands.  “Thirty extra lives, if you press the right buttons and don’t mix up B and down.”

“Maybe I don’t want to cheat,” Tim says primly.

“It’s not cheating!  It’s just knowing more!”

“It’s definitely cheating.”

Tim wheezes into his hand as Bernard hits his side.  It doesn’t hurt, it’s not even as hard as Dick hits in training, and Dick hits like Tim is made of tissue paper, or wet bread on the edge of dissolving.

“Don’t laugh at me!” Bernard whines.  Tim laughs harder.  “You try and win Super Street Zombie Fighter-”

“That’s not what we’re playing!  That’s not even a game!”

“Part Two: Electric Boogaloo with five lives-”

“Maybe I will!” Tim replies, elbowing Bernard, careful to be gentle and not actually hurt him.  Since Bernard’s choking is mostly theatric, he thinks he succeeds.  “‘Cause I’m not a coward.”

Bernard reels back, sliding his hand over his heart, staring at Tim with his mouth partly open, his eyes reflecting the pale sky.  Tim’s chest is warm.

“In my own home, Drake?” he gasps, like Tim’s stabbed him or murdered a puppy.  “In front of my salad- ha! It stays when you load an earlier save!!”

Tim backs out of the menu and sure enough, he still has the extra thirty lives.  Bernard preens until Tim starts running the character off a cliff.

“Tim!” Bernard howls, trying to slap the controller out of his hands.  Tim shoves his foot against his stomach and keeps him at bay.  Bernard squawks, ticklish, and Tim is laughing, low and easy, bright inside as the game plays wah-wah-waannnh and flashes YOU DIED in red letters.  “No! Tim!  Fuck!”

Bernard is laughing, the snorting kind of laugh he does when something really gets him going, trying to suck in air and wrestle the controller free at the same time.  Tim's face hurts from smiling, and he doesn’t think he can stop.

He has to be careful with Bernard.  He’s not used to fighting as Tim instead of Robin, and it’s a delicate mind game.  Tim Drake is a wealthy civilian kid who can’t judo-flip supervillains three times his weight.  Robin only fights people who know what they’re doing (Bruce, Dick) or people trying to kill him (everyone else), so even if he were here as Robin he’s not sure he’d be very good at fighting Bernard without hurting him.

As it is, his hand ends up sprawled against Bernard’s ribs, and he can feel the heat through his thin cotton shirt.  Bernard laughs, breathy and loud, and the vibration of his voice in his chest buzzes up Tim’s arm and leaves his hand strangely tingly and electric.  Tim didn’t take his palm-taser with him, did he?  Bernard’s fine, right?

In that moment of panicked distraction Bernard manages to wrestle the controller free, shouting triumphantly. Tim fumbles to not knee him or elbow him in the scuffle, and Bernard falls back, laughing.

“You lost driving privileges!” he shrieks, triumphant.  Tim dives for the controller, but Bernard holds it over his head out of reach, and Tim’s wheezing too hard with ugly laughter to make any real attempt.  “Shit, you bastard, you died three times?  Thirty-two? Thirty-two?”

Bernard points an accusing finger at the screen, where the little counter beside the health bar indicates how many lives they have left. 32 glows back in white block letters.

“You still have more than thirty,” Tim sniffs, flopping onto the ground and giving up, for now.  (He’d wait for Bernard to take a break, and then run the character off the cliff as many times as he could.  They’d drunk a giant convenience store bottle of coke between them, it wouldn’t be long).  “That’s more than you’re even supposed to start with.”

“Everyone starts with thirty-five!” Bernard protests, as he starts marching the little character along, jumping over the pit Tim had run it into at least three times.  “No one’s crazy enough to do it in five!”

“I bet you could do it in one,” Tim says.

He regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth.  It’s manipulative and ham handed.  Bernard isn’t his parents, he’s not even Bruce or Dick.  He can’t change anything in Tim’s life, except maybe leave it; he can’t rob Tim of Robin or time or freedom.  There’s no need to compliment him, to stroke his ego and make him more amiable and open.  Bernard is already amiable and open.

“It’s impossible,” Bernard protests, taking the compliment at face value.  He wouldn’t see the traps Tim could set up in words, and that’s worse, because it means Tim has to be careful.  “No one can do it!” 

“What, so if I went on YouTube right now-”

“Okay, sure, some insane speedrunner could do it, theoretically-”

“That was fast.”

“Shut uuuuup,” Bernard whines, kicking at Tim’s leg.  “No one normal can do it, okay?  Are you happy?”

It stings more than it should.  No one normal.  Could he do it?  Before Robin, Tim would have said no, might have laughed it off.  But now… if Bruce was on the line, or Dick, or some stranger who’s only crime was they’d been easy to kidnap on short notice, if one of Gotham's insane themed villains decided old video games were the test of the week- well.  There had been that one time, with a terrified man held over boiling oil while Calender Man asked Robin jeopardy style questions about the celebrity birthday dates.  Tim before Robin wouldn’t have been able to save him, but Robin had.  If he needed to make it through a video game without dying...

He’s not Robin right now.  He’s Tim, and Bernard’s directing the little character over some logs and trying to punch a pixelated zombie, and the sunlight comes through the curtains and lays gray daylight on the floor.

He flops back on the carpet.  Tries to drag his brain out of the nightmare fog of vigilante-mode and into some sense of normalcy.  Being a teenager.  A civilian teenager, with his civilian friend.  Yeah.

“Yeah,” he says, trying to make it true.  “I’m happy.”

Bernard glances over at him, his eyebrows furrowed, a slanted smile on his mouth.  Tim grimaces, because it’s the kind of expression people make when they know you’re full of shit, but Bernard just nudges Tim’s leg with his foot.

“Nerd,” he says, fondly, and looks back at the screen.

And… that’s it.

He doesn’t coax or prod or pry, like Dick would.  He doesn’t rifle through Tim’s personal belongings and grades and medical records and god knows what else like Bruce would.  He doesn’t demand the truth, like his dad might, or not notice at all, like his mother does.

He notices.  And he doesn’t push.

There’s a part of Tim that demands he looks for the trick, that Bernard must want something.  Everyone wants something.  But Tim’s always been calm, and clear-headed, and rational, and his brain works through it, neatly, like math.  Bernard already has what he wants.  What he wants is to hang out with Tim. 

Tim blinks up at the ceiling, and listens to Bernard curse and the video game make little eight-bit noises, his breath feels short in the face of the enormity of it.  Bernard just wants Tim.  Not Robin, not the perfect son Tim Drake, not the money, not the grades, not the hacking skills.  Just Tim.

His chest is tight.  He didn’t even know “just Tim” was an option, but now that he knows, now that he’s been presented with the idea, his chest hurts with how much he wants that.  It feels like he’s been starving in secret, and only just now noticed, or like he’s been carrying twenty pounds of bricks and only now realized he should probably put them down.

He lays there and lets it wash over him.  It feels good.

---

“Okay,” Babs says, in the tone that means Tim’s in deep shit.  “So the reason you’ve been so deep in work it’s coming out your eyeballs for the past three days-”

“Two-”

“Is your old friend you were seeing for dinner, which I’m actually really proud of you for, got kidnapped, which I’m less proud of-”

“I didn’t get him kidnapped on purpose-”

“And you tracked them down without backup even though you know Steph and Connor would drop literally everything if you asked-”

Okay, Tim’s not touching that with a ten foot pole.  There are very good reasons for not asking Steph and Connor to drop everything to help him, one of them being they would drop everything to help him.  He glares at Babs’ head but she’s looking at the computer screen, so his perfectly good do-not-test-me look goes to waste.

He should be grateful she was the only one at the ‘cave when he limped in, trying to figure out how he was going to relocate his own shoulder.  Alfred would never stand for that kind of nonsense, and Bruce and Dick and literally everyone would have something to say about it, but at least Babs hadn’t realized that he was going to try and do it by himself.  She’d popped it back into place and gave him an ice pack, then wrapped his ribs while making him recite the alphabet backwards, and when he’d passed her concussion check, made him report basically everything.

Which leads to a lecture.  Damnit.

“And the cult performed rituals on your friend and now he’s possessed by Dionysus.  The wine god.  The one in charge of madness and ecstasy.”

“Something calling itself Dionysus,” Tim says, pedantically, because Bruce hates absolutes and Tim’s always been a quick study.  “But yes.  That’s it.”

“Got it,” Babs says, and then wheels her chair around and nails Tim with her do-not-test-me stare.  This is hardly fair.  “So, again, why didn’t you ask for backup?”

“Do you want to have this conversation again?” Tim replies, instantly, but it’s habitual.  He knows he should have called for backup, and there’s a horrible raw anger in his chest, because if he had asked for help maybe Bernard wouldn’t be- where he is. Wherever he is right now.  His mouth presses on, spurred by the pain of his own mistakes to dig himself a bigger hole.  “You’ve had it with every bat, we’re all allergic to the comms.  We get it from the big man.”

Babs leans back in her chair, rubbing her eyes under her glasses.  Tim feels a little bad.

“Yes,” she says, infuriatingly reasonable.  “It’s just that I usually have this conversation with, say, Cass, who was raised by assassins, or Steph, who's allergic to authority.”  She lets her glasses fall back down into place.  “Sometimes Jason, even.  Just not usually with you.”

“You tried to tell Jason to use the comms?” Tim asks, clawing wildly for a subject change.  “How’d that go?”

Babs shoots him a look that says I know what you’re doing and I don’t appreciate it.   But she also lets the conversation switch directions, saying, “Not well.”  Tim could kiss her.  “I’m calling Bruce.” Kiss rescinded.

“No.”

“Yes.” Babs is tapping on her keyboard and it’s only a healthy amount of fear that keeps Tim from trying to slap it out of her hands.  The last time Dick tried to slide her laptop away from her she had judo-flipped him over her own chair.  “You need more people in the field, and I can’t help you with that.”

“He’s off-world-”

“He’d come home for you.”

“Babs.”   His voice comes out more desperate than he meant it to.

She looks back at him over the rim of her glasses, studying him.  Tim doesn’t know what he looks like, with his mask off, but he feels naked and vulnerable, and he falls back on old skills, like he’s begging Jack Drake.  Lets the vulnerability and fear stay, because his dad had liked that.

He knows everyone else hates it.  Dick gets overbearing and reassuring whenever he pulls that move, Jason suddenly leaves the room, Damian- well, he’s been careful not to do it to Damian.  The little bastard’s a menace, but he’s also twelve.

He doesn’t know how much the rest of them know it’s an act.  He doesn’t know how much of it is an act.  Sixteen years of survival tactics is hard to shake.

“Please,” he says, and his voice cracks, and he doesn’t know if he planned that or not and he hates that he doesn’t know.

Babs’ mouth is a tight line.  After a moment she turns back to the computer and starts typing again, but something in the line of her shoulders suggests she’s given in.

“Compromise,” she offers.  “I call Dick.”

That’s not as bad.  Tim’s shoulders slump.  “Okay.”

Calling Dick, it turns out, also means calling Jason.  Half an hour after Babs sends out the notification, Tim pries his face out of research papers on Dionysusian history and rituals as a motorcycle engine rumbles throughout the cave.  Nightwing is prying a helmet off, running a hand through sweaty hair in a move Steph fondly calls “sexy-flip,” which is normal.  

What’s less normal is Red Hood in the driver’s seat, one foot resting on the ground and his shoulders tight, helmet angled at the far wall like he’d rather be anywhere else.  He probably would rather be anywhere else.  Alfred and Babs have made a lot of progress on getting Jason to talk to the rest of them without it ending in someone getting thrown into a wall, but he still avoids the manor and ‘cave like the plague.

But he’s here, now, and it looks like he gave Dick a ride.  Tim tries to make some sense of that, eyes flicking to Dick for an explanation.  He either doesn’t see the look or ignores it, his mouth twisted in quiet concern as he comes over and ruffles Tim’s hair.

“Hey, little wing,” he says, gentle and overbearing and Dick-ish.  “Heard you got trouble.”

“I don’t,” Tim says automatically, and it sounds incredibly childish even to his ears.  He tries again.  “I’m fine.  It’s just a mission.”

“Yeah?” Dick’s eyebrows raise.  “What kind of mission?”

They fill him in on the details.  Red Hood never actually gets off the motorcycle, bent over with his arms folded on the handles, but Tim has little doubt he’s listening.  He feels raw and flayed open.  The expressionless mask isn’t even turned towards him and his mouth is dry of spit.

He still rattles off the mission details- he’s a professional- and Dick listens, calm, asking occasional questions, probing different angles Tim didn’t think of.  Red Hood doesn’t really react until they get to the part about mind control.

“He could… make people lose inhibitions,” Tim says, trying to find the right words to pin the feeling in place.  “I saw how violent the cultists were being, and I didn’t think it was anything unusual.”

He swallows, and adds, because it’s important, “I didn’t realize how violent I was being.  I crippled someone.”  Probably multiple someones, but it blended together.  He recited the one he remembered.  “Through the side of the knee.”

Dick’s eyebrows are furrowed, but it’s concern, not accusation.  Red Hood has turned his head, just a little bit, his shoulders tense, so Tim finds himself trying to explain.

“I don’t think he was one of the ones that got out,” he says, fumbling.  “All of the kids were rescued, but a bunch of the cultists- I can get the police report.  Two of them are hospitalized, the rest are dead or disappeared.”

“Tim,” Dick says, gently, effortlessly cutting Tim off before he starts blabbering.  He waits until Tim looks at him, and says, “Can you describe the mind control?”

Right.  Tim breathes, slowly.  Tries to fall back into Robin, where he can report and state the facts.

“It… wasn’t exactly mind control,” he says.  “More like suggestion.  It felt... like everything was fuzzy but very bright.  Saturated.  Like being drunk,” and that’s the best descriptor so far, actually, and he wrinkles his nose in thought.  “... a little like being high, but mostly like being drunk, but only for the parts of you that care about not hurting other people.”

Red Hood is frozen on the bike, staring down at his fingers.  Some tiny, animal part of Tim’s brain wants to move so Dick’s between them.  He doesn’t, and he hates himself for thinking of it.

“Once I knew what was happening I could resist it.  I had to think about it constantly, but it was doable.”

“Like memory-sparring exercises,” Dick says.  Tim grimaces, because those sucked.  “Alright.  So Dowd’s loose in Gotham, possessed by something calling itself Dionysus.  He can make people violent.  What’s the goal?”

“Depossession,” Tim says, instantly.

“Priority is capture,” Babs says, and she’s right, and Tim hates it.  “He could hurt a lot of people.”

“It’s not him,” comes out of Tim’s mouth before he can stop it.  He pinches the bridge of his nose and wishes he was wearing his mask, even though they never bother in the ‘cave.  “You’re right.  Sorry.”

“Tim,” Dick says, gentle, and he can not handle that right now.

“Capture, and then depossession,” he rattles off, before Dick can keep going or god forbid talk about feelings.  “We could use Zatanna’s contingencies; the powers are similar even if the source is not.”

“We could also call Zatanna,” Babs says.  She’s typing on her laptop.  “Or Constantine.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tim, I will call him if I have to.”

“Constantine turned the last god he saw to dust- to literally a pile of dust,” Tim says, keeping his voice firm and not cracking.  “Bernard is a person.  We do this ourselves.”

“For fuck’s sake-” Babs rubs her face.  Dick opens his mouth and she cuts him off.  “Don’t ‘language’ me, Dick.  Constantine doesn’t kill people if he can help it, Tim.”

“Keyword being if he can help it.”

She throws her hands up and goes back to typing on the computer, but doesn’t fight him further.  She’s letting it go, for now.  Tim will take that and run with it.

“Capture, using Zatanna’s contingencies to hold him,” he says, meeting his older brother’s gaze.  “Then we figure out the possession.”

“Your call, Timbuktu,” Dick says, soft.  “Do you want Steph and-”

“No,” Tim says, quickly, because he doesn’t need Steph and Connor on top of everything else.  “It’s fine.  They’re probably busy tonight, anyway.”

They probably are, too.  They’re vigilantes.  There’s work to do.  Work that other people can handle, if they had to leave, and they would leave to help him if he asked, even though his brain jerks away from that thought like it’s a hot stove.

The look Dick gives him says he knows Tim is full of shit, but he drops it, for now.

“Okay, little wing,” he says instead, which is infuriating in its own way.  “We do it ourselves.”

---

“We,” it turns out, also includes Jason.

Jason is… complicated.  Tim actually only feels a moderate amount of anxiety around him; finds him refreshing a lot of the time, because he doesn’t treat Tim like glass or with open derision.  The anxiety he does feel he’s managed to keep successfully hidden from Bruce (easy) and Dick (more difficult).  It’s not even much, his chest just hurts, and his mouth goes dry, but that’s pretty much it.

Steph knows, but she also knows that Tim likes Jason.  Of everyone else, Steph was probably the only person who got it.  Sometimes people come back from the dead a little crazy, and they’re not responsible for chasing you down in your own home or place of work or whatever and almost killing you.  It wasn’t their fault, even if Tim’s body hasn’t gotten the memo.

Jason has never brought up what happened in the tower.  All of his interactions with Tim, the good ones, have been very shallow.  There’s this gaping hollow between them, in the shape of a sword just to the right of Tim’s heart, which makes conversation pretty awkward.  Which isn’t bad.  It’s nice to talk to someone without worrying they’ll start asking about your feelings.

Except now, Jason grunts, annoyed, and kicks Tim’s shin.

They’re perched on a building overlooking a park.  Vines spill over the trees and fences, weighed down with grapes; Dick had circled around to look at the other side, and the police have already set up a line to prevent civilians from touching anything, so there’s a moment of peace before they have to start working again.  Except Jay kicked him.  Tim looks at him, offended.

“You’re thinking too loud,” Jason grumbles through the mask.  

He’s turned off the voice modulator, so his voice comes out low and growling but human.  Tim knows he has a voice modulator, but he also knows he turns it off as soon as he’s in proximity with Tim.  He’s never mentioned it, and Tim’s never asked, and Tim’s grateful anyway.

He does shoot Jason a look, because he’s not thinking too hard.  He’s thinking the correct amount.

“So…” Tim draws out, because he’s curious and also because it’ll annoy him.  “You working a case with Dick?”

Jason grunts and gives him a narrow side eye through the dark glass of his helmet.  His eyes are hazel green, which is a little funny because in all the pictures in the manor before his death his eyes are brown.  There are probably weirder side effects to resurrection than eye color change, but it’s still off-putting, because sometimes they flash electric green.  Also they definitely glow in the dark.

“No,” Jason says shortly.  

It’s not his drop-it tone of voice, but it does suggest some embarrassment, or maybe uncertainty.  It’s still said in an angry growl, but the tone is a little different.

“So you’re just driving him around.”

Jason keeps watching the park.  The rod of scar tissue through Tim’s chest aches like a path of ice.  He ignores it, gives Jay some time.

“... It’s not weird,” Jason says, finally.  “He wanted tacos.  If he wants to spend his money buying me food, his loss.”

“Oh my god, you were hanging out.”

“They were shitty tacos.”

“Hanging out.”

Jason flips him off.  Tim grins.  This, at least, is easy and more recognizable, piercing through the haze that’s been at his feet ever since Bernard was kidnapped.  Also, it’s good.  Of all the siblings, Jason and Dick have probably had the most trouble learning how to get along.  Getting food together was progress, even if Tim suspected Dick had bribed Jason into it with more than just food.

Speaking of, Dick lands lightly beside them, looking none the worse for wear.  He has one of the little plastic bags they use for evidence, full of little grapes, which he slides into his belt.

“He’s not here anymore,” Dick says, which they all already knew, but confirmation is good.  “Headed northwest.  There’s vines that way; other signs.” He doesn’t clarify, and doesn’t need to.  Tim can imagine. “It’s not hard to track.”

“I’ll ask Oracle-”

“Spoiler already is.”

Tim shoots Dick a look of pure betrayal, but he holds up his hands in surrender.  

“She was already on the trail,” he says, simply,  “I just let her know it wasn’t Ivy.”

Oh, bullshit.  Tim should have known when Dick dropped the subject that just meant he was going to go behind his back.  Of course Spoiler would find the swatch of plant life through the city, of course she would follow to make sure Ivy wasn’t up to her usual tricks, but Dick could have said any number of things to divert her interest.  Fuck.

“Why didn’t you tell her-” Tim cuts himself off, frustrated, and taps his ear.  Dick gives him a look.  Jason folds his hands under his head and stares up at the sky.  The comms channel crackles to life.  “Spoiler, disengage.”

“Uh, don’t tell me what to do?,” Steph’s voice crackles back, but then there’s a faint hiss, like a sigh caught in the mic.  “I’m not attacking, I’m just observing.”

Tim was expecting a gentle, if frustrated response, not a snappy one.  Shit, shit shit shit.

“How close are you?” he says, and his voice is not as even as he would like it to be.  “He has a form of suggestion, we don’t know the range.”

“Oh,” Spoiler says, hoarse and thoughtful.  “That, uh.  Explains why I almost broke that lady’s nose.  Okay, backing up.”

Tim’s already up and moving as he listens to Steph creep away on the line.  They do this sometimes, when working together, just leave the comms open and listen to each other breathe, even if it just sounds like static.  He listens to the buzz as he drops down from the building, moving to where they left their ride.

Behind him, Jason is saying, “Give me back the keys, you drive like you’re eighty.”

“We want to get there without drawing attention.”

“You want to get there without drawing attention.  I want to get there before he leaves again.”

“You just want to run every red light.”

“That too.”

Tim wants to punch Dick.  He swallows that down, tucks the irritation away- it’s not like it’s even unusual for him.  Of course he’d be concerned about how Tim’s acting, about what he’s hiding, of course he’d rope in the people who can usually get him to open up.  

“Red Hood should drive,” he says anyway, because at heart he’s petty.  “Nightwing can ride bitch.”

“Holy shit,” Jason says, like he’s trying not to laugh.  Nightwing’s mouth is open, offended.

“I’d like to get there on time, too,” Tim says, primly.  On the line, Steph snorts.

“You know what, I will ride bitch,” Dick says, sticking his nose in the air and stalking past them all.

Robin has his own bike, thank fuck, and he spends most of the drive listening to Steph’s quiet report and following the wake Red Hood leaves behind as cars swerve out of the way.  

“He has maybe thirty women in here with him,” she says, softly.  “And some snakes. And a big, like, stuffed tiger? There's no way that's real.  They’re having a party?  It’s hard to focus-”

“Back out of the building,” Tim says, instantly.  “Spoiler-”

“They’re playing weird music on the radio.  Panpipes, I think-”

Her breath hitches, and every muscle in Tim’s back goes tense.

“Engaging,” Spoiler says, over the comms, in the kind of tone she uses when debate is not an option, and then a flurry of sound.

“Hello, pretty thing,” Bernard’s voice says, caught in the mic.

Fuck.  Fuck fuck fuck fuck.  Tim guns it, speeding past Red Hood, and Nightwing is already balanced on his toes on the back, ready to spring.

“Look at you,” Not-Bernard says, admiring and delighted, in Bernard’s voice, and Tim wants to puke.  There’s other noise in the background, a chorus of low, smoky laughter, and some fluting sound.  “You are remarkable.”

“Ah, thanks, babe,” Spoiler says, bright and flirtatious, the tone she uses when she’s scraping for time.  “It’s the hair, I use this mud treatment-”

“It’s the sorrow,” Not-Bernard says, breathy, and this Tim can almost stomach because Bernard doesn’t sound like this.  “You glitter like sunfire with it.”

“Okay, a little weirder, but I can roll with it.  Tell me about my sexy sadness.”

“Keep him talking,” Dick’s voice says over the comms, low and sure.  “Almost there.”

“Someone hurt you,” Not-Bernard croons, and there’s shuffling, like they’re starting to move in a circle.  Tim’s chest is tight.  “And you’re still fighting for them, loving them… how sweet, how kind.  How controlled.”

Shit.  Fuck.  Tim opens his mouth, closes it, can’t think of the right thing to say, to reassure her, to- make it right, or make it better-

“That’s it?” Steph says.  “Dude, I thought you were going to talk about my dad dropping me on my head as a baby, or something.”

Tim doesn’t fumble with the turn, and closes his mouth.  Shit, right, Steph can handle herself.  God, he’s an asshole.

“Aren’t you tired of being nice?” Not-Bernard says, sweet, “Don’t you just want to go apeshit?”

“Is that a meme?  Are you memeing me?  What is this-”

They swerve into the empty parking lot of a building overgrown and green, offensively bright in the gray monochrome of Gotham.  Most of the windows are shattered, and the door is thrown open.  Music and laughing voices spill from the open door. One wall is plastered over with a stylistic woman in pink, turned to look over her shoulder, and Tim doesn’t see much more because over the comms, Steph makes a sound like hurk.

“Holy shit, it’s a Good Vibrations store,” Jason says, and then Spoiler bursts out of a second story window.

It looks like she’s been thrown.  Tim guns it, opening his arms, catch her catch her catch her, and the impact of her against his chest knocks them both off the bike, sends them spinning head over heels on the asphalt, a tangle of limbs, as his bike crashes into a wall.

Tim’s head spins with the impact, but he’s already running his hands over Steph’s sides, looking for the injury, and she feels okay, bruised probably, and then Steph kicks him in the chin.

“I had it!” she snaps, struggling upright, her eyes narrow.  Then she closes them, punching the side of her head.  “Shit, I mean, you lost touching privileges, asshat!”

Tim’s throat is thick with guilt and anger, but something is lapping at the back of his brain and anger wins.  ”Sorry for saving your neck!”

“Not like that!  You know I didn’t mean like that!” Stephanie throws her hands up.  “Fuck!”

“Focus!” Nightwing barks, his sticks in his hands.  

Red Hood is already off his bike, loading a gun with casual efficiency, which makes Tim’s heart lurch until he realizes it's being loaded with bean bags.  He rolls to his feet and extends his staff, and after a second’s hesitation twists the handle so the shock is at its lowest setting.  Beside him, Spoiler has her sticks out, falling into her guard stance; she’s gonna back him, which leaves Red Hood to take potshots and Nightwing to run interference.

Bernard is floating in the window.

He is outlined in pink light from the inside of the store, painting him in reds and pinks and purples; his hair a tongue of gold flame.  His shirt is open to the last button, tucked into his pants like a pirate prince, exposing an expanse of skin and the dark red wound in his chest, still leaking down his belly.  His chin and mouth are bloody, and his eyes flash, red, purple, pink, and the green vines in his hair have crawled down one side, taking root in his left temple, a crown of thorns.

In his left hand, the knife flickers in the light.  In his right, something dark and organic pulses.

Not-Bernard is looking at Tim.  His face is lit up like sunrise, the way Bernard’s face had lit up at the hamburger joint, and it hurts so much for a second Tim think his heart will pop.

“Pretty little mortal!” Not-Bernard says, delighted.  “You came back!”

Robin would say something clever, here; fuck, Tim would usually say something clever.  The purple eyes glitter in Bernard’s face, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. 

“Miss me?” he says, which is the best he can come up with, sue him.

“Oh, unbearably, darling,” Not-Bernard sighs, a breathy thing.  Behind him, Steph makes puking noises.  “You’re so interesting.”

“Thanks.  Hey, any chance you’ll just let him go and leave?  You don’t even want to be here.”

There’s movement in the open door, and people start to stumble out.  They seem slow, drunk.  One of them straightens up and wipes her mouth; she’s wearing pants and nothing else.  Another low shape moves in the doorway, the prowl of something large and powerful.  Red Hood moves his sights but doesn’t shoot yet, Nightwing moves to cover Tim’s open side.

“I didn’t,” Not Bernard sighs.  He’s stepped out of the window, and now he floats, two stories off the ground.  The flute music is getting louder.  “But now!  I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be mortal, little thing, to have blood roar in your ears, to feel the breath catch in your throat… oh, it’s so strange!  Delightful!  A body has thoughts of its own like nothing godhood can conjure, little wants and needs and petty little indulgences.”

“Sure, but it kind of sucks, too,” Tim says.  Not-Bernard is floating down, slowly, slowly.  “There’s pain.  And needing to pee.  And eating.”

“And drinking two liters of coffee a day,” Steph mutters, just low enough to be caught on the comms.

“And sleep,” Tim adds.

“Oh, pain,” Not-Bernard says, dismissively, twirling the knife.  “This body knows all about that.”

He turns his arm so the inside of his elbow is visible, drops the heart so it floats, oozing, in midair.  Lays the flat of the knife on the inside of the forearm.

Tim’s breath catches in his throat, he tenses, ready to move.  “Don’t-”

Bernard moves the knife across the arm; Tim’s knuckles are white around the staff.  But he’s just scraping something away with the back of the knife.  It’s make-up.  Bernard had make-up on his arms, and it peels away, and underneath it-

The welts are long and ugly.

Tim knew Bernard was hurt.  He knew Bernard entered the cult and that required the same process Tim sat through; the chain whip, the knife, but it’s different to see it in person, different to look at the red, irritated stripes, not yet healed enough to avoid infection.

Not-Bernard trails his fingers along the cuts, his eyes fond and distant, like an old lover.

“I’m not hurting him, little mortal,” Not-Bernard’s voice says, gentle, soothing, and it sounds like Bernard and Tim tastes bile.  “No, no, no.  He does that all by himself.”

Nightwing has a sixth sense for stupidity, which is why he’s already moving before Not-Bernard finishes his sentence.  He’s too late.  Robin’s grappling hook catches the glowing maybe-god around the ankle, and Tim throws his weight down, and Nightwing swerves from stop doing stupid shit to fuck okay we’re commited now, and throws himself at the crowd of people.

The parking lot explodes.  Not-Bernard laughs, high and delighted, as he’s yanked down by the grappling hook; Red Hood’s gun pops, Steph darts away to ram her stick into someone’s jaw.

Not-Bernard doesn’t hit the concrete, he smashes forward into Robin, his hands open and empty.  His eyes are wide and his pupils blown out and he is shrieking with laughter, high and manic, and he smells like alcohol and iron and sweat and something rotten and sweet, and Robin is sweating with warmth, his vision fuzzing at the edges.

He ducks under Not-Bernard’s grab, swings his staff for his legs.  He dances over it, light as air, and the concrete beneath Robin is buckling.

He dives to the side on gut instinct.  Greenery erupts out of the ground where he just was, a tangle of brambles that thickens, instant by instant, and then he has to move, dodging away from Not-Bernard.

He sees the others in little flashes; Red hood is sniping the people in the doorway, breaking noses and fingers and knocking people down with bean bags.  Steph is going toe-to-toe with the ones Jason isn’t getting, keeping them distracted, Dick-

Dick is fighting an actual tiger.

It crouches low in the pink light, rippling with orange and black stripes, snarling a gutteral noise.  Dick is dancing just out of its reach, as it lashes and misses; he’s an acrobat he was in a circus and Tim rocks his brain to try and remember if the Grayson’s had big cats-

The moment of hesitation costs him; something thorny lashes around his leg and yanks him sideways, biting into the cloth of his suit.  His back cracks against the ground, but he saves his skull from smashing against the concrete and readies his staff.

He swings at Not-Bernard as he’s dragged in range, launching himself into a standing position, and Not-Bernard catches the staff with his outstretched hands so Tim is close, their faces a bare inch apart.

“Not using your knife?” Tim pants into the space between them.

Not-Bernard’s eyes scan his face with naked adoration, his hands tight on the staff.

“Oh, little mortal,” he says, fond, “My death isn’t for that.”

Tim’s heart is in his mouth, and his eyes flicker down to the wound in Bernard’s chest.

Vines explode out of his staff, cracking it fully in half.  Tim curses, thrusts himself away, spinning over the broken concrete.  Greenery is moving in his staff, leaves blooming open through the hard enforced metal and plastic; he throws the two halves to the side and draws his sticks.

Not-Bernard is laughing again, wild and free, and floating after Tim with bright, bright interest.

“You’re such a curious little thing,” he says, as Tim scrambles for space.  “So quick.  You know, Bernard thinks you’re going to save him?”

Tim’s throat seizes.

“What?” comes out of his mouth, without his permission.

“He’s so insistent,” Not-Bernard sighs, drifting closer, and Tim can see trailing after him, the knife and the heart, floating in midair.  “That his Robin will come through… he sees the difference between you all and you were his favorite, Robin-who-lies.”

Tim’s brain scrambles for something, anything, but he can’t focus past the mind-numbing horror of what it’s caught on.  

“Bernard’s awake?”

Not-Bernard’s smile widens, horrible, toothy, delighted, and that’s an answer by itself.  Tim shies away from it.  Possessed people aren’t supposed to be aware.  It makes things too difficult for the ghosts, or gods, or whatever; to have another brain shouting at them constantly; Bernard can’t be awake.

“He’s crying,” Not-Bernard says, sweetly, “The poor, poor little mortal… you know, I didn’t want to come, but as hosts go, he’s perfect for me.  Already balanced on razor-wire, with the kind of madness most humans live in ignorance of… swinging so wildly between mania and the void...”

The saliva in his mouth is thick, he fumbles with the sticks.  The blood is pounding in his head, his ears hear the panpipes and laughing from far away, but Bernard’s voice is clear.

“Shut up,” he says.

“Did you know he has needles in his apartment?” Not-Bernard says, like he hasn’t spoken.  “Now there’s a body that knows you need to unravel sometimes… he tried to quit six different times, before that little stunt with the cult.  He’s tasted madness and he can’t come down.”

“He doesn’t- Bernard’s clean,” Tim says, even though there’s no proof he would be, “He’s happy, he has friends who love him-”

“Does he?” asks Not-Bernard, curious.

The question lodges under Tim’s chest.  Of course Bernard has friends, of course he has people who love him; Bernard is easily charming and quick to laugh.  He had friends, those people the police interviewed, he had…

Except the friends had seen the welts, and not done anything about them.  Just thought it was something at home.  Hadn’t asked.

“He used to have friends,” Not-Bernard says, slowly, thoughtfully, and raises one hand to brush his temple.  “Oh, he’s trying to hide them from me, naughty thing…”

Not-Bernard’s face pinches in concentration at something only he can see, and Tim should strike now.  He can’t.

“Don’t hide...” Not-Bernard says, coaxingly, like he’s talking to a skittish dog.  “Oh, a pair of friends… one who died… one who left... and they both always had better things to do-”

Tim doesn’t remember moving, but the stick cracks hard across Not-Bernard’s face, jerks his head hard to the side.  

Bernard’s face comes up grinning, his mouth full of blood and his head crowned in greenery, his eyes flashing purple and red, wild and in awe, like staring into sunlight.

“There you are,” he says, savage, and his hands catch Robin fully by the throat-

It smells like wine-

And blood-

And salty air off the sea, and honey, and cooking meat-

The world is hyper-saturated, everything blooming with color; the pipes are crying out in symphony and Tim can hear it now, how they blend and thread together in song, how his heart squeezes in time, and Bernard’s hands burn around his neck like a lightning bolt cracking through an empty house, a thousand pins and needles in every point of contact, flushing his chest and neck and face with blood and life and his pulse pounds in time-

The hands leave his neck, smooth over his collarbone, and it doesn’t help.  Tim is choking.  Everything is bright and hyperrealistic, and his skin is hot like sunburn, sweating and unbearably warm beneath his suit, and Bernard’s eyes flash, like sunlight off water; dizzyingly bright.

“There,” Bernard’s voice says, fondly, “Welcome to my mysteries, Robin-who-lies.”

The rage catches Tim completely by surprise.  His skin is overheating and there’s a sharp, stabbing pain in his chest that he recognizes as too much adrenaline, and the madness lapping at his heels comes surging up all at once, submerging his skull in thick, heady fog.

His fist shatters Not-Bernard’s nose; he feels the cartilage crunch and give, and he realizes he’s screaming, triumphant and burning up with fury.

Not-Bernard hurls him away, and he doesn’t land right, tumbles head over heels, the pain scraping him raw and hypersensitive and it’s good, like something finally coming clean.  His chest hurts, his skin is tight, he leaps to his feet, heaving for air.  Someone is laughing, elated, and he realizes from somewhere far away that it’s him.

He’s never felt so good.  He’s never felt so sure.  The struggle of who he is, what he wants, all washes away; there is only this, the people around him, exalted and howling, and the need to tear them limb from limb, to be torn apart by them in turn and laid clean and empty, like an ember, like the coals of a dying fire.

He screams and dives for the nearest person.

It devolves into flashes.  He throws the stick into someone’s stomach, smashes someone else’s elbow so they crumble, screaming, and it has none of his usual grace, needs none of it.  There is just brute force and the joy of it, of not thinking, the air pink and red and the panpipes calling.

“-bin!”

Someone grabs his arm, he whips around and sinks his teeth into their hand, feels the skin give, something crunching underneath.  Blood pours into his mouth; it tastes like iron, it tastes like wine.

They snarl and something smashes into his head and he holds on, he holds on, scrabbling at their arm with his hands, and they hit his head again and again and again, his skull rattling like a drum, a beat to the panpipes, lightning lancing through his head like a shattering sky-

Something wraps around him.  It’s wrong, it’s cloying, it sticks his skin, layers itself over his face and teeth like a film, drags him away.

He shrieks and tries to convulse, to shake it off, something, anything, but it stays like a second skin, holding him in place, and it hurts, why can’t he move-

“Robin!” someone is reaching out for him, curly hair and blue eyes.

“Fuck you!” he screams, fumbling with words, “I’ll fucking kill you-”

“-wrong with him?”

“Mind co-”

“-bit me, the little-”

Tim can’t move, and it feels like being wrapped in plastic wrap, like being buried alive, alien and too much, and he sobs, dry-heaving, but… but the feeling is familiar.  He knows this.  Where does he know this?

His mouth tastes like blood.  He doesn’t… it’s all wrong.  Mind control.  He has to focus.

“Fuck you,” his mouth is slurring without his permission.  “Fuuuck, le’ me go-”

He tries to squint against the bright, painfully colorful world.  The piping is quieter, the air no longer afternoon-hot in his lungs.  It still smells like iron, but also like diesel, and smog.

Someone is floating to touch down beside him.  It’s not Bernard, or the thing possessing Bernard; it’s a dark-haired man his age, with blue eyes and a leather jacket, metal studs in his ears, and Tim knows that face.

“Robbie,” Connor Kent says, genuinely distressed.  “What the fuck?”

---

Darla sits in the red cart, her feet sticking out of the basket, scrolling on her phone and not even trying to look for birthday supplies.  Tim debates shoving her into the shelves and decides it would not be worth being kicked out of yet another GothMart.

“Hey,” he says, instead.  “Blue or yellow hats?”

She throws her head back and groans.  “Fuck, what’s our budget?”

Tim doesn’t really have a budget, because the amount of money in his allowance is obscene, but he is worried about trying to lug a giant pile of supplies on the bus.  “One box.”

Darla clicks her tongue, looks up from her phone.  The sprawl of birthday supplies on the shelves blink back in bright, plastic colors, the kind of thing Darla hates but Bernard adores.  To her credit she only grimaces for a couple of seconds before pointing to a mix-and-match bag, a rainbow of yellow and pink and blue.  It’s offensively tacky, and Tim wears Robin colors on the regular.  Bernard’ll love it.

“Birthday hats,” he says, as he steers the cart close enough for Darla to grab them off the shelf.  “Forks, plates, napkins, the really awful tablecloth-” Darla makes a face in agreement- “And cupcakes.  What else is there?”

“Balloons.” Darla makes a fist and pumps the air, looking appropriately dead inside.  “Hurray.”

“Hurray,” Tim echos, empty and exhausted, and pushes the cart towards the balloons.

They have a Batman balloon.  Tim spends a terrible amount of time staring up at it, wondering if it would be funny or just insulting if he got one for Bruce.  Maybe the Superman one for him, because he’d hate that.  If he got one for Alfred he wouldn’t be able to complain, and Alfie was always down to play mild, harmless pranks on his oldest charge.

“Get the Robin one,” Darla says, “That’s his favorite.”

Tim squints at her, trying to process.  His ears flush, but it’s cold in here.  She’ll probably blame that.

“Robin?”  He looks back up at the balloons, and there’s a couple of different Robins, mostly in the traditional costume, red and yellow and green and no pants.  They’re all the shiny, cheap plastic shaped balloons use.  There’s one with the green tights, thank god, and he reaches for that one, trying to finagle it clear without letting go of the cart and letting it roll slowly away on the uneven floor.  “Really?”

“Celebrity crush the size of the mooooon,” Darla drawls, looking back at her phone.  An employee gives her a dirty look.  Probably for sitting in the cart.

Tim’s face is pink, and he finds himself fumbling.  There’s nothing wrong with saying celebrity crush; she probably doesn’t even really mean crush.  Bernard just likes Robin.  Tim’s Robin.  That’s fine, that’s normal; it’s pretty cool, actually.

“More like hero worship,” he finds himself saying anyway.  He doesn’t fumble or groan like an asshole, which is good.  Keeps his voice light and airy.  “Bernard doesn’t like boys.”

He untangles the balloon from the others, tugs it free.  Smoothes the plastic string between his fingers, looking up at the cartoon representation of his own face and wondering how his life got this weird.  Turns to give it to Darla to hold.

Darla is looking at him with a mix of disgust, horror, and disbelief.

He squints, confused.  “What?”

“Wow,” Darla says, and the withering tone packed into that one word could shrivel Ivy’s best plants.  “O- kay.”

“What?” Tim watches, bewildered, as Darla clambers out of the cart, almost knocking over the cupcakes.  “What I’d- Bernard flirts with every girl that moves!”

“Yeah, so, I just remembered I have to go slam my head into that wall, now,” Darla says, brushing her skirt off.  “You absolute fucking moron.”

“Darla-” Tim lets go of the cart to chase after his friend, who is trotting away.  “Darla, does Bernard like boys?  Darla?”

The cart ends up running into the balloon stand and knocking everything over, and they do end up kicked out of yet another GothMart.  This one luckily lets them purchase their stuff before they get booted to the curb, and Tim gets distracted laughing and pulling Darla away as she makes rude gestures at the manager.  They lug everything into the bus, and Darla falls asleep on the one clean(ish) seat, drooling on Tim’s shoulder, and Tim spends a strange stretch of time in that liminal space, watching the pale shock of his reflection in the window, the lights passing in orange flashes, as he holds the balloon with his cartoon face beaming triumphantly at nothing in particular.

Bernard does flush like a tomato when he passes the balloon at school, and Tim’s own face goes warm in flustered embarrassment.  It’s funny to think about that, about Bernard having a crush on his alter ego.  He doesn’t think much about it, outside of warm confusion, but he remembers Bernard’s shy smile.  They sing Happy Birthday in the middle of the hall and gorge themselves on cupcakes, and the smile remains throughout, turning Bernard’s face soft and pleased.

---

“Hey.”

Tim stares at the ceiling of the ‘cave.  Connor’s face hovers over him with poorly masked concern.  He can see Steph’s blonde hair out of the corner of his eye; can hear Dick and Jason and Babs deep in some conversation further away.  Analyzing chemistry, somehow.  Right, Dick got those grapes, they’re probably dissecting the structure to see if there’s any scientific bullshit before they start blaming magic.

“Hey,” he rasps back.  It comes out grouchier than he intended.  Connor’s face relaxes into relief anyway.

“Are you gonna go off the rails again?”

“.... Naw.”  He reaches up, feels his head.  “Who’d I bite?”

“Hood,” Steph says, off to the side, while Connor tries and completely fails to repress his smirk.  “It was pretty great.”

Ah shit, he bit Jason.  Tim groans, low, grinding the heels of his palms into his eyes.  His mask is off.  He remembers, foggily; Dick’s gentle hands stripping him down and coaxing him into the decontamination shower; then appearing with soft clothes and dressing him like a child, unbearably gentle, smoothing his hair down.  Conner trying to check on him throughout it all, hovering and impatient; Steph pulling him away.

“How’d you know?” Tim asks, his throat dry.  He thinks he knows the answer, he’s dreading it, actually.

Conner has the decency to look guilty, at least.  “Uh, remember how you told me to stop checking on your heartbeat?”

Tim sighs, low and frustrated.  Steph leans over him far enough that he can see her shoot Conner a look that says I told you so as he scrambles to defend himself.

“And it was weird, Tim, okay?  It didn’t sound like thrub-dub , like it’s supposed to, it sounded different.  Drier, like- like drums.  Like percussion music.  It freaked me out.”

“How did you know it was my heartbeat and not drums?” Tim challenges, but his stomach churns, disquieted.  Not-Bernard changed his actual heartbeat, holy shit.

Conner folds his hands, unfolds them, grimaces.  “I, uh, heard the change.  I can’t not hear the change.”

Tim can feel the polite mask trying to come shuttering down, to block everything out.  Conner hates that, Steph hates that, everyone hates that and he’s been working on that, on not shutting people out.  He makes himself rub the bridge of his nose, an annoyed gesture, hates that he has to plan and telegraph it instead of letting it happen naturally.

“Conner,” he starts.

“I know, okay?” Conner interrupts.  “I know you hate it, I know it’s invasive, it’s just- I can’t turn superhearing off, not without swallowing a bunch of kryptonite.”

“You don’t listen to Steph’s heartbeat,” Tim shoots back.  Steph makes a peace sign but offers no other contribution.  “You’ve been around her long enough to know it.”

“I can hear hers, too!”

“But you don’t pay attention to it.”

Conner makes a face and ducks his head.  Tim feels ugly and curled up inside, but mostly he feels tired.  Bruce and Alfred hover, Dick coaxes and Babs talks with Steph behind his back about how he’s doing, what he’s feeling.  And he can’t feel anything that might get his heart pumping without his best friend showing up, puppy-eyed, saying, it sounded like you were having a nightmare can I come in?

Not that he wants them to stop.  Not completely.  But just- he knows he’s maladjusted, he knows his early childhood spent in isolation has given him a twisted view of how much time people should spend with their family.  He doesn’t know if he’s being unreasonably upset, he just- he wants time.  He wants time alone without having to ask for it and fend off a hundred different worried, well-meaning, nosy family members.

His childhood is raw and empty behind him like an old tooth, but there are a few parts he misses.  One of them is privacy.

Steph pops her gum, annoyingly loud.  It has the desired effect; Conner’s shoulders slump, some of the ugly tension leaving.

“Yeah, so have you thought about going to Black Canary?” she asks.

Tim groans, because he does not want to have this conversation again, but then he opens his eyes and Steph is raising her eyebrows at Conner.  Conner scowls at her.

“I don’t want therapy.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Okay.”

“She said I was cleared to work with the League again.”

“Okay.”

Tim sighs, letting his head fall back.  For a moment he just listens to Conner defending himself and Steph’s dry responses, something not quite an argument.  His throat is thick, but it doesn’t hurt as much as it used to.  He knows they love each other, he knows they love him, he knows the debate is born out of care.  He knows they’re just stuck in place, like he is; he knows they’ll find their way again.  He will, too.  Somehow.

“Hey, little wing,” Dick says, cheerfully, trotting over.  Conner straightens up; he never really got over the cold shoulder the rest of the bats gave him when he first started hanging out with Tim.  “Feeling better?”

Tim does not punch him, mostly because he’s sore and he can feel stitches in his side.  He must have gotten cut in the fight.  “M’fine.  How’s Jason’s hand?”

“Hurts like a bitch!” Red Hood calls from across the ‘cave.  He’s leaning over Babs as she works on something.  “Thanks for that!”

“You’re welcome!” Tim shouts back.  Hood shoots him the bird.

“He’s fine,” Dick says, looking pleased.  “I got him to take antibiotics.”

“From the cave?”  Tim squints at Dick.  Jason has paranoia around weird things, and it’s still a struggle to get him to accept food unless Alfred cooks it directly, nevermind drugs.  “How’d you manage that?”

“I ate one in front of him,” Steph says, smug as a cat.

“Cool,” Tim says, instead of that’s so bad for you or Hood trusts you?? Or even how’d you do that without Dick flipping his shit?   “Did he pay you or are you poisoning yourself for free?”

“Didn’t pay.  I’m thinking of unionizing.”

“Incredible.”

“Cass’ll help,” Dick says.  He seems relieved at the easy back-and-forth; it probably affirms his decision to dump Steph and Conner on him even when he specifically asks him not to do that.  Goddamnit.  “We’re going over Dionysusian rituals; trying to get a better feel for what’s happening.  Come on and tell us what you think.”

Dick doesn’t offer his hand, because he has a sixth sense for how something will be received.  Conner tries to help him upright, and Tim ducks under his hands because he can fucking stand by himself.  He’s sore, and his limbs fuzz faintly at the edges like his extremities are asleep.  His shoulder still aches from where it was dislocated, but the ache in his ribs has dulled to a faint twinge.  Steph casually inserts herself between him and Conner, which is a relief.  Tim loves Conner, but if he does any more of the overprotective I-am-big-and-Krypton-and-you-are-small-and-fragile routine Tim will actually flip his lid.

“So it’s magic,” Babs starts as they come over, which is not encouraging.

“Fuck,” says Steph, which is how Tim notices that Alfred isn’t in the ‘cave.

“Yu-up.”  Babs pops the p at the end.  She taps a couple of keys on her laptop, and wheels back to display two charts.  They’re complicated lists of chemicals, and unfortunately, they’re exactly the same.  “So, left side, grape from the grocery store.  Right side, grape from Dionysus’s plants.”

“Maybe Dionysus,” Tim says, because he’s petty and pedantic.

“They’re the same chart,” Conner says, because he has a grip on what’s important.

“Yeah.  There’s no chemical difference, or physical.  According to every test I can run them through in two hours, they’re just regular grapes.”

“So can I eat them?” Steph asks.

“NO,” everyone else says, except Jason, who says, “Only if I can record it for TikTok.”  Steph high-fives him.

“If,” Babs says loudly, before Dick can try and wrestle Jay or Steph into the ground.  “It doesn’t ping as unusual on any of our tests, it’s either a totally normal grape, which will make me feel really stupid, or it’s magic, in which case, I told you so.”

“Great.  Noted.” Tim says.  He drags a hand over his face.  “So where does that put us?”

“Well since you don’t want to call Constinace or Zatanna or literally anyone from the League-”

“Nope.”

“-that leaves us with Hood.”

Tim stares at Babs, who stares back, utterly unimpressed.  He turns to look at Jason.  Jason makes jazz hands.

“You aren’t magical,” Tim says, horrified, because he will not survive Red Hood with magic.

“No, I paid attention in AP Lit,” Jason replies, which okay, fair.  Tim slumps, relieved. “Who wants to learn about Dionysusian cult rituals?”

No one wants to learn about Dionysusian cult rituals.  Unfortunately, life sucks, so they all obediently crowd around the computer.  What they learn is not encouraging.  Dionysus is a god, which means he has no exact definition or canon, no one true form that can be pinned down and made exact.  He is fluid and wavering, and that has never been Tim’s skillset.  He can track a thousand texts and emails and deposits and trace a complex, weaving network from their numbers; he can code facial rebuilding programs and voice-recreation and make false videos from their output; hell, he programmed most of the Justice League’s cyber-security.  But Dionysus is about guesswork and stories, and Jason understands stories better than Tim.  

Also he would never take this chance away from Jason to show off.  He’s gotten better, but most of his interactions with the other bats are still flat, awkward reports or cruel jabs.  At least this is something Jason is interested in.

What they learn is: Dionysus is older than Greece.  He is probably as old as alcohol.  He might have been imported to Greece, he might have originated there.  He has a hundred different versions, celebrated in a hundred different ways, a kaleidoscope of drunk trances and dancing and rituals.  They have their own special word for dismemberment.  It’s bad.

“He has a heavy reincarnation theme,” Jason says.  He’s relaxed, moderately, more than usual for being in the ‘cave.  He almost sounds like an English teacher, or an eager friend infodumping, less like the tense monster he usually faces them with.   “Because he’s killed in one of his origin stories and then sewed into Zeus’s leg- or balls, depending on how you read the Greek- and then reborn, which ties into fermenting grapes into wine.  The unpicked grapes represent his first life, the crushing and processing of grapes represent his death, and wine, the end goal, represents his rebirth, when he’s at the height of his power.”

“You know a lot about this,” Conner says, because he has the self-awareness of a six-year-old. He is literally six-years-old.  Dick and Babs shoot him shut-up looks which he predictably does not understand.  Tim doesn’t interfere because something’s scratching at the back of his head.

“Yeah, I went through a resurrection kick for a while.”

“Oh, neat.”

“Bernard said something,” Tim says, suddenly, catching the thought before Dick or Babs can murder Conner.  “Or- the thing in Bernard- Maybe-Dionysus.  I asked him why he wasn’t fighting with the knife and he said.. ‘My death isn’t for that.’”

“Isn’t for fighting with a knife?” Conner asks, a little helplessly.

“The knife used in the ritual,” Babs says, and she starts explaining.  And that’s something annoying for another time, that apparently Conner did not get caught up to speed while Tim was out of it.  Was he that distracted?  Did he need to hover over Tim that much?

Jason is studying Tim, thoughtful.  His eyes are green, but not bright, not electric, and for once Tim’s skin doesn’t prickle under his stare.

“Did he call it anything but ‘my death?’” he asks.

“... no,” Tim says, after a moment.  “The cultists said things like sacrifice, and awakening.  But Maybe-Dionysus only said ‘my death.’”

“Okay.  So he might not have been referring to the stabbing thing.”  Tim’s chest aches, and he remembers Bernard’s open shirt, the dark, raw wound, and he needs to scrape his brain together before he vomits because the person who stabbed him in the chest is talking about his friend who is, currently, stabbed in the chest.  “He might have been referring to the knife.”

Tim cocks his head.  If Jason notices his discomfort, he doesn’t say anything.  God fucking bless Jason. 

“Maybe-Dionysus-” ha, take that Babs, Jason calls it Maybe-Dionysus too- “-has two ritual items, the heart and the knife.  The point of Dionysusian mysteries is a celebration of his life and his death, and the transition from one to the other and back again.  So, assuming it is Dionysus and not some other freak, the heart’s his metaphorical life, the knife’s his metaphorical death, and Bernard’s the place between.”

Something starts to shrivel in Tim’s stomach.  His mouth is dry.  He can remember the echo of Bernard’s laughter, a giggle-snort sharp and loud.

“Bernard is… the place between,” he repeats.

Conner turns immediately, hyperaware of every swoop and dip in Tim’s tone.  Steph turns, too, but the weight of her attention is less heavy, and Dick and Babs are watching him, and he hates this.  His skin is crawling, and he can’t take their quiet, heavy concern, a moment’s away from reaching for him or touching him or trying to talk to him.

Jason doesn’t look at him with worry or pity.  There is only something factual there, grim understanding, and that is solid.  Tim likes solid.  He can ground himself with solid, hold himself together with facts, not drown in the ocean of other people’s concern.

“The balancing point,” Jason explains.  “As long as he holds both the heart and the knife, he’s stable.  If he loses one, he tips.”

“Tips how.”

Jason shrugs, a long, slow movement.  “Dunno.  Maybe he gets really drunk, or turns everyone in Gotham into dolphins.”

He’s being obtuse.  There’s something else.  Tim stares at him.

Jason’s mouth slants.  He says, bluntly, “... there’s different rituals where Dionysus gets dismembered.”

“No.”

Tim doesn’t realize that he’s the one who said it until Conner touches his shoulder.  He shrugs him off, hard.

“Bernard’s a civilian,” he says, and his voice is so hard he almost doesn’t recognize it.  “We don’t fuck around with his life; we don’t need to.  Whatever we plan, he can keep the knife and the heart until he can be exorcised.”

“Tim.” Dick doesn’t touch him, but his eyes are gray and sad and his face is gentle, like he’s soothing a frightened animal.  It’s not the voice he uses for civilians; it’s the voice he uses to coax Damian out of his furious crusades and Cass out of her quiet fugues, the voice that says I love you and I know you and please come back.  Tim turns away from him.

“We don’t need him to be unstable to capture him,” he plows on.  “We went in without a plan last time; we’ll do better now.  We can make contingencies before reconnaissance,” (“Hey,” says Steph, annoyed, “Don’t blame me.”) “We can try the magical analytic scanner, it’s getting better all the time-”

“They’re probably the source of his power,” Jason says, crashing Tim’s argument in on itself, fucking up his life like he always does.

“Probably?” Tim doesn’t vomit, but it’s a close thing.  “You want to risk his life on probably?”

“No,” Jason says, which Tim does not believe for a second.  He whirls on Dick, furious and accusatory, because Dick would never agree to this.

But Dick holds up his hands in the universal gesture for peace.  “If we take away both at the same time, he won’t tip one way or the other.”

“Are you kidding me?” Tim grits his teeth.  “He could die!  Oh sure, let’s just yank away whatever’s powering Bernard while he’s stabbed through the fucking chest, I’m sure that will work out fine!”

“Tim-”

“One of them’s his heart! It’s Bernard’s fucking heart! I watched him vomit it on the floor!”

“Tim!”

It’s not Dick’s voice; it’s Nightwing, steely and sharp.  Tim swallows back a snarl, turns away, obediently falling silent.  Everyone is watching him, faces naked with concern, and he hates it, he hates it, like any minute now they’ll start prying him open and rifling through his thoughts and fears.

Dick’s hand lands on his good shoulder, squeezes, gently.  Tim’s face is hot.

“We would never suggest this if we thought he might die,” he says, gentle.  Tim chews the inside of his lip furiously but doesn’t punch Dick in the kidneys.  “Babs is still running the magic analyzer to see what it says, but to the best of our knowledge, Dionysus doesn’t need the ritual items to keep Bernard alive.  That’s not how his power works.”

Tim swallows back the instinctive demand for sources.  If Dick says that’s not how his power works, that’s not how his power works.  Dick is a lot of things, but he’s not a liar, and he’s not someone who would deliberately mislead another Robin.

But Dick knows Tim, because he adds, “Jason’s read about a hundred books on it, and I texted Aunt Diana some questions.  Not the specifics,” he says, putting a hand up to stop Tim’s protests.  “But she knows Greek legends more than we do, and we needed her help.  We’re as sure as we can be without calling in another expert.”

Tim tastes blood in his mouth.  He bit his cheek too hard.  He runs through the meditation exercises Bruce drilled into him, breathes long and slow.  Conner doesn’t touch him, which is good.  Dick’s hand on his shoulder is bad enough.

“Okay,” he says.  His voice sounds dull to his own ears.  Dick squeezes his shoulder, once, pulls away.

“Okay,” Dick agrees, gentle.  “Let’s work on a plan.”

---

In a lull in the planning, Conner touches Tim on the shoulder- gentle, not a grab, not anything demanding.  When Tim pulls his nose out of building schematics, bleary-eyed, Conner jerks a thumb over his shoulder, towards a corner of the ‘cave.

Tim swallows down irritation, because Conner is well-meaning and deserves better than Tim lashing out, and also because Conner has been his teammate and best friend through some of the worst periods of their lives.  He gets up and follows.  Steph’s there, too, seated on a medbay bed and kicking her feet.

Oh god.  If this turns into another intervention attempt, Tim will fully grapple out of there.  He has an emergency Kryptonite sliver in his belt, he could do it.

“Hey,” he says, sitting on another medbay bed, and bracing himself.

Steph’s mouth slants to one side, a wry, crooked corner of a smile, and then drops.  Conner sits on the bed next to Tim, scooching himself back.

“So he vomited his heart?” Steph says.

It’s straightforward because Steph’s like that, and it’s not the how are you feeling speech, even if it’s veering pretty close.  She’s not saying ‘it’s okay to be upset’ or ‘there was nothing you could have done,’ like Dick might drop on him.  This just has a tone like ‘that sucks.’  Not a feelings talk.  Just an acknowledgement, and some morbid curiosity.  Tim’s surprised by how much he relaxes, something loosening in his stomach. 

“Yeah,” he says.  He scrubs a hand through his hair.  “It was purple.”

“Gnarly,” Steph says, appreciatively, because purple’s her favorite color.

“Are you sure it wasn’t his liver?” Conner asks, concerned and curious, and oh yeah he helps the Kents raise their animals to slaughter.  He’s seen all kinds of internal organs before.

“Heart-shaped,” Tim replies.  “Pulsing and everything.”

“Whack.”

They sit quietly for a minute, just digesting that.  Conner stares at the wall like he’s trying very hard not to stare at Tim’s face, which he appreciates.  Steph’s mouth is slanted, something awkward and careful.  Like how Tim is being awkward and careful, not quite sure how to navigate being exes with one of his best friends, with someone he loves to pieces and isn’t even sure why that relationship had started to hurt.

Steph’s definitely not sure either, because her attempt at comfort is pretty bad.

“You’re pretty fucked up over this guy,” she starts.  “You alright?”

Tim makes himself sigh and pinch his nose.  Show your frustration.  “Guys, I can’t really- can we do this later?  I can’t do this now.”

Steph’s face drops a little more, and Tim’s the world’s biggest asshole.  She shares a look with Conner, and then back to Tim, and he feels hyperaware of that quick glance between his friends, how they’re talking about him without even really talking, communicating something about him that he is not privy to.

“I mean, yeah,” Steph says.

“Sorry,” Conner adds.

They kick their feet in silence for a minute.  Tim stares at the ground, feels awkward and horrible.  Wonders if he can go back to researching or if that’s too weird, too abrupt.  He feels like he’s burning up here, unsure, fumbling with the relationships that usually come so natural and easy.

Conner’s feet still.  He doesn’t bump into Tim, or does any of the easy, companionable touching he usually does, and Tim doesn’t know if it’s because he’s respecting Tim’s space or if he feels awkward too.

“You know, uh,” Conner says, softly.  “If you want us to not take the ritual stuff, we’ll do that.  We can do that.”

Tim glances up at him, meets Conner’s earnest expression.  Glances across the table to Steph, half-expecting her to disagree, but to his surprise she looks back, even.  Offers a weak smile.

“I mean, Dickhead’s not stupid,” she says, quietly.  “I think his plan’ll work.  But if you want to do something else, we got your back.”

Something lodges in Tim’s throat.  He looks down.

They’re good people.  They don’t deserve to bear the brunt of his uncertainty, how he withdraws from their lives and leaves the frost of his absence behind, like his parents did to him.

“It’s okay,” he says, and that’s not enough.  “... Thanks.”

Conner nudges him with his shoulder.  Steph gently kicks his shin.

It’s good.

---

“I can’t wear that,” Darla says, and then she sighs.  “If papà caught me someone would die.”

She doesn’t clarify who would be on the receiving end of Henry Aquista’s wrath.  She doesn’t really need to; Aquista is close to a household name in Gotham, in hot competition with the Odessa’s and the rapidly expanding Black Mask mob.  Gangs don’t have the same flashy theatrics supervillains do, and they don’t get the same attention, but in trade-off they tend to be more thorough.  If something offends, Aquista will probably put Tim, Bernard, the store owner, and all the employees in an acid vat and set it on fire.

“Whaaat?” Bernard whines, apparently unconcerned.  “But it matches your earrings!  And it swishes.”

He holds the dress up and swings it invitingly.  At first glance it’s a rich, if plain, brown, but as it moves glimmers of gold undertones flash in the light, matching the amber drops in Darla’s ears.  Bernard’s got a good eye for visual detail.  Tim wonders, in passing, if he should try and get him into photography.  Also the skirt swishing is very satisfactory.

“It’s twenty bucks,” Darla says, dryly, ignoring Bernard’s exclamation of a steal!! “It has to cost as much as a car, or-” she drags a line across her neck and makes a convincing hrrrk noise.

“Why’d we even come here,” Bernard mutters.

“You picked here!” Darla throws up her hands.  “You said, hey, I love you guys, but do you wanna go somewhere where it isn’t five hundred a pop for shoelaces-”

“Irrelevant!” Bernard squawks.  “Don’t call me out on my own bullshit!  Please, I am so small-”

“You’re the tallest one here!”

“And I have no money-”

“We know, Bernard-”

Here is a thrift store at the edge of the Old Gotham, far enough from the bougie, gleaming streets of the Heights that the one normal kid of their trio can afford most of the shops, but also far enough from the Bowery that they probably won’t be stabbed.  It’s in a touristy part of town, or as touristy as Gotham gets, close to the old clock tower and with old fashioned brick buildings lining the sidewalk, bustling with wide-eyed people fresh off the train and locals helping themselves to easy pickings.

It’s nice.  It feels normal.  When Bernard had shouted girls night!! and dragged them into an impromptu shopping trip, Tim hadn’t expected it to feel as normal as it does.

“You try it,” Darla says, finally, gesturing with her hands.  “It matches your hair.”

Bernard flushes red, then stark white, then red again.

“Ha!” he says, shrilly.  He shoves the dress back onto the hanger.  It’s weirdly defensive.  “Nah, I’m not- ha!  Good one, Darla.”

Darla scowls.  Tim sees the oncoming argument like a brewing storm, but the anxiety it causes is faint.  There’s not really a comparison between his parents’ fights and his friends’, even when Bernard prods some sensitive subject and Darla bites his head off, or when Darla shoves her way, bullheaded, into Bernard’s walls while he retreats under nervous laughter.  They never expect him to fix the argument or bear the fallout, and the biggest thing they’ve thrown at each other is a dirty sock.

He drifts in and out of the conversation as they argue.  There’s a pale sweater with batwing style sleeves that he’s really thinking about getting just so he can see if Bruce knows there’s a kind of sleeve called batwing, but it’s too small even for him.  He’d have to let it out, and he’s not that great at sewing, so really he’d have to beg Alfred to let it out, and Alfie doesn’t deserve more work.

“Sure, if Tim wears one,” Bernard declares.

Darla is rolling her eyes, exhausted, and Bernard looks a cross between victorious and desperate.  He shoots Tim a manic smile, spreading his hands wide.

“Want to wear a dress, Timbo?” he asks, his tone rhetorical.

Tim tries to scrape his brain together.  It’s been a while since he’s done Carolina Hill and he could use the practice.  Something in Bernard’s voice- the defensiveness, the sharp laughter, like Bernard in a dress could only be a punchline- rubs Tim the wrong way.  Also he’s running on three hours of sleep and no longer gives a shit about anything.

“Sure,” he says.

Bernard fumbles with the shirt he’s briefly pulled from the rack, staring at him.  Darla is staring at him too, but she seems pleasantly surprised, maybe even delighted, a grin starting to curl on her mouth.

“Yes, Tim!” she says.

“I- wait-” Bernard says, and then he laughs again, that grating, nervous laugh.  “Funny!  Really funny-”

“Fuck yesss, Tim, holy shit-”

Tim pulls the brown dress out again and looks at it critically.  Too cheap to wear to a gala, Darla’s right.  Also, not his color unless he wanted to put in colored contacts.  He shoves it at Bernard anyway.  “Hold that.”

“I-” Bernard fumbles with it, uncertain, and Tim ignores him to look for something black.

Darla is delighted.  After a few questions about color and cut she starts helping, sliding dresses along the rack and running her hands over the cloth.  Bernard trails after them, listless and nervous, trying to protest and insist ‘it’s ironic, right?’ and fumbling to keep hold of the clothes Tim dumps in his arms.  He’s wide-eyed and flighty and it digs under Tim’s ribs, a face he’s seen flashes of in the mirror when the garage door opened while he’s scrubbing the last of nail polish away, and he hates it, he does.  

There’s only so much he can do about it.  He starts with this, ushering them into the little changing room and picking a stall, holding his hand out imperiously, the elegant gesture he learned from Janet Drake.

“Cocktail dress,” he demands.

Bernard fumbles.  His cheeks are flushed high pink.  “I, uh-”

Darla plucks the dress out of his arms and passes it to Tim.  She’s grinning at Bernard, enjoying his bewilderment and blatant shock, just barely keeping herself from bullying.  Tim can see the danger there, that Darla might scare Bernard off, but Darla’s not stupid.  It should be fine.  He shuts the stall door and starts to change.

“This isn’t… I mean, this is a joke, right?  Right?  Darla, don’t laugh-”

Darla's low, growly cackling only gets worse.  Tim toes off his shoes and pulls his shirt over his head, and listens to Bernard’s frantic, high-pitched voice.  Darla does manage some assurances, mostly Breathe, Dowd, and There, there, you nerd.   Tim slips into the dress, the cloth smooth like water against his skin, and inspects his reflection.

He is a boy in a dress.  He straightens his back and lets his shoulders go a little lax, curling, not as broad, and pulls his legs closer together, and that is more like Carolina Hill, a young woman with a pixie cut and sharp, half-lidded eyes.

It would be a better transformation with make-up.  As it is, he’s still obviously a boy in a dress, but he fits into it more.  It no longer reads like a joke.

He opens the door, rests a delicate hand on one hip.  Bernard and Darla look at him, and their eyes pop out.

“Ladies,” he greets in his husky woman’s voice.

“Holy shit,” Darla says, like a prayer, something awed and delighted.

“Holy fuck,” Bernard says at the same time, high-pitched and strangled, and his whole face flames bright red.

“You’re gorgeous, Tim, what the fuck?” Darla lurches to her feet, grinning.  Tim smiles at her with just a corner of his lips, cocks one hip out as best he can, which isn’t far.  He’s a skinny white boy, bite him.  “Have you done this before?”

“On occasion,” Tim demurs.  Darla barks a bright laugh, but it’s not mean.  It’s just happy, and surprised, and giddy.  She circles him, gently tugs on a strap to straighten it out, and it’s such a delicate, gentle thing he’s seen girls do for each other, and it makes something in his chest hiccup and relax.  He smiles a real smile for her, warm and breaking open.

She smiles back at him, just as warm, face flushed, and then flicks her eyes to Bernard and back.  The message is pretty clear.

He sweeps past her, cool and gorgeous, and bares down on Bernard like a hurricane.  His eyes are ready to pop out of his skull, his mouth is half open, the remaining dresses forgotten in his arms.  Tim spreads his hands and sways, moving his weight to one side in a way that would show off his curves if he had any.

“What do you think?” he asks, cooly.  “Black is always in season, of course, but I could be convinced to try something blue.”

“Uh-” Bernard chokes on half a laugh, but it’s a token thing, like he thinks he has to, his eyes sliding off to the side.  “I mean- it looks really good on you, dude, haha.  Like, damn, you can really pull that off- I mean-”

He fumbles, like he’s desperately looking for a joke, some way to make this not genuine.  Tim interrupts before he can figure something out.

“I can,” he agrees, and arches an eyebrow, the wry, cool look he’s learned from his mother.  “Your turn.”

“Yeessss,” Darla says, triumphant, but Bernard goes pale, and then pink again, and looks at the dress in his arms.  He doesn’t stand up.

“I, uh,” he says.  “I don’t think that’s really a good idea?”

Darla must hear what Tim hears, in his tone, something tiny and distraught, because she doesn’t protest or call him a coward.  Tim glances at her, and they share a brief look, something a little out of depth.

“What’s up, Berns?” Darla says.

“I mean-” Bernard flounders, and then he smiles, like he’s found the joke at last, his eyes crinkled in the corners.  His voice is strained.  “You guys look fantastic, and you know, there’s- like I’m not ugly, but I’m not exactly-” he makes a gesture, and then a self-deprecating little laugh.  “You know?”

Tim’s stomach hurts, his chest tightening.  Darla is frowning.  Bernard shrinks between them, in the space of their silence, bending his head and picking at the dress in his lap, and Tim hates that, he does.

He leans forward, rests a delicate hand on his friend’s shoulder.  Bernard looks up at him.

“You’re pretty,” he tells Bernard, serious.  “You’ll be pretty in a dress, too.”

Bernard flushes again, glowing pink, his gaze flickering like he’s having trouble looking Tim in the eyes.

“Let me show you?” Tim asks.

Bernard swallows.  His hands fidget in the cloth of the dress.  Behind them, out of sight, Darla makes a soft sound like the start of a word, but doesn’t speak.

“Okay,” he says, in a small voice.

Bernard is shy and uncertain in the changing room as Tim shows him how to reach the zipper, how to arrange the skirts.  He shivers at the first touch of cloth and Tim’s chest does something complicated, a hiccup of fondness, as he eases the dress over his friend’s head.

Bernard makes a couple of jokes, like a habit he can’t quit, but Darla from outside the door says, “Give it a real shot, Berns, come on,” and after that the jokes peter out.  Tim arranges the collar, straightens the straps, and murmurs quiet instructions, pushing Bernard’s shoulders down but his back straight, guiding with his hands.  Bernard’s skin is warm, and he habitually touches the back of his neck, his shoulder, self-comforting gestures, but when Tim smiles at him, pulls out the gentle, sunshine smile he’s seen Dick wield like a sword on unsuspecting friends, Bernard melts.  He offers a shy smile to Tim in return, sweet and quiet, and Tim’s ears are warm.

When Tim gently pushes him out of the changing stall, Darla says, “Hot damn, Dowd,” and Bernard’s shoulders relax a little bit more.

“So I look good, right?” he says, only half a joke.

The brown dress compliments Bernard’s skin tone, his scattering of freckles.  He strikes a pose, and the glimmer of gold flashes in the light again, an amber undertone to his hair.  Darla is grinning, delighted, and she wolf whistles.

“You’re stunning, babe,” she says.  “If you were anyone else I’d ask you out in an instant.”

“Aw, Darla,” Bernard pouts, but it’s ruined by his beaming face.  He lays a hand on his chest, unpracticed and sweet.  “How is that the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me?”

“What can I say, I’m a petty bitch,” she says, but she’s smoothing Bernard’s sleeves, arranging them with light touches, and she grins up at him.  “Try a spin!”

Bernard laughs, and spins tentatively, and then faster as Darla hoots encouragement.  The laugh bubbles up out of Tim, an echo of Bernard’s shy joy, and it feels like flying, it feels like rooftop tag or landing a complicated backflip or Bruce smiling at him.

The skirt on the dress swishes.  It’s very satisfactory.

---

The plan… kind of sucks.

It’s not awful.  It’s just not great.  Conner can’t be anywhere near Maybe-Dionysus, because Kryptons are weak to magic and no one wants to see Rampaging Chaos-Mad Superboy, so he’s been regulated to their emergency bailout.  Steph and Dick are on crowd control, to keep any civilians from hurting themselves or each other.  Jason is gonna camp out on a roof and snipe Not-Bernard with the specialized tranquilizers they use for Flash, J’onn, Wonder Woman, just going to go down the list of meta-sedatives until something sticks.

Tim’s the distraction.

“Tim’s the what?” Conner demands.

“The distraction,” Babs repeats, in the quiet, deadly tone of voice that every bat knows means don’t fuck with me on this.  Conner’s not a bat, so he scowls deeper, opening his mouth to argue.  Babs beats him to it.  “Dionysus likes Tim.  He recognized him when they met for the second time, talked to him specifically, and when he had Tim’s head in his hands-” Tim mouths who told her that and Dick smiles at him and suddenly loses the ability to read lips, the bastard- “He didn’t turn it into vines or goats or anything else he’s been doing.”

“Also he had bedroom eyes,” Steph says unhelpfully, which Tim was not going to point out.

“He had what?” Conner says.

“Bedroom eyes,” Dick says, in a soft, deadly voice.  Everyone went quiet, even Conner turned to him, listening.  “Which is why we need you as back-up, Conner.”

Conner’s mouth presses into a thin line.  Tim’s stomach sinks, because they’re going to talk about him like he’s not here, like he’s not party to the discussion on his own safety.

“If anything,” Dicks says, quietly, “And I mean anything goes wrong, or smells off, or sounds weird- you’re the fastest person here.  You get him, you get out, we re-group later.”

“Wait,” Tim says, because Conner is already nodding seriously.  “Conner, no.  We can’t do blanket permission on just anything funky; he’s a god of chaos.  He will do something new and unexpected.  I can handle that.”

Conner is making faces, opening his mouth, and Tim can see the disagreement in his face.

“Trust me,” Tim emphasizes.  “I’m not helpless, and I’m not stupid.  If I need it, I’ll signal you.”

Conner scrunches up his face.  Behind him, Jason and Babs are sharing a glance, and Dick is watching Tim with his mouth pressed together, like he wants to say something but is holding off.  Steph, because she’s the best, is inspecting her nails like they’re the most fascinating thing in the world and not like she chews them to the quick on the regular.

Conner deflates, slowly, and Tim should be relieved.  He’s not.  Instead he feels low and angry; angry that Conner wants to argue with him on this, angry that people keep poking and prodding and interceding.

“If you give the signal or if something is seriously wrong,” Conner compromises.  Tim doesn’t grit his teeth because he’s a pile of bad habits held together with spit and so far teeth-gritting is not a Very Bad One, but it will be if he keeps doing it.  “Which I will judge with the combat skills you taught us, Rob.  Titans style.”

He’s turning the ‘trust me’ thing around on him, the asshole.  Tim chews the inside of his cheek because that’s not as bad as gritting his teeth.  “Flirting doesn’t count as seriously bad.”

“Touching does.”

“It’s combat.”

“Don’t get hit,” Conner shoots back quickly, but he slumps and gives it up just as fast.  “I mean outside of regular combat stuff.  If he creeps on you.”

Tim doesn’t say he’s been creeped on while on the job before.  He doesn’t even bring up any of the semi-honeypot jobs he’s done undercover, or even any of his experience with the League of Assassins, because there are some things Dick and Jason still don’t know, or don’t know explicitly, and Tim’s not going to trigger any bad memories for either of them.  There are some parts of the job you just don’t talk about, or at least don’t talk about with your brother who grew up streetside or your other brother who had some nebulous experience he refuses to clarify.

Steph is watching him.  She knows most of the details, just like Tim knows most of the details of what happened to her.  He tries to take comfort in the steady gaze instead of feeling prickly and overexposed.

“Touching my arms is fine,” he says, because Maybe-Dionysus had Bernard in there, and Bernard liked to sling arms around shoulders or clap hands or any number of things, and if he manages to struggle to the surface Tim can picture him grabbing for a hand to hold, or an elbow to grip, something solid and alive.  “Face is okay, too.”

“You got mind suckered when he touched your face,” Jason points out, unhelpfully.

“Also he makes vines pop out of people’s heads,” Dick says.

“Ivy’s probably super jealous,” Steph adds.

“If I get mind controlled Conner will be able to tell anyway when my heartbeat changes,” Tim points out.  “And he doesn’t want to make vines pop out of my head.  That’s why I’m the distraction.”

It was flimsy reasoning at best, but they’ve done more than worse.  Tim sees the moment Conner gives in, scrubbing his hand through his hair.

“I hate this,” he moans.

“That’s nice,” says Tim, because he’s running out of patience.  Dick’s mouth is still a thin line, but Steph snorts and Jason laughs low in the back of his throat.  Tim’ll take that.  “Oracle, do we know where he is?”

If Babs takes issue with him using her alter ego name instead of her civilian name, she gives no sign.  Instead she clicks her tongue, thinking, and taps the laptop.  The analytics program she has running over a map of the city lights up the giant screen of the ‘cave.

“Plantlife suggests he’s circling a lot of downtown,” she says, finally.  “Clubs and little theaters.  People are noticing he’s not Ivy; there’s a bunch of emergency calls for animal transformation.  A lot of complaints for drunk and disorderly conduct.”

“Thespian,” Jason says, approvingly.

“He’s broken off, though,” Dick says.  He points at a green line cutting out of the old recreational district and wandering away, loose but definitely purposeful.   “Look.”

He traces the path with his finger, moving ahead to the projected destination.  Their eyes follow it and when they pass over the obvious goal there’s a collective horrified breath.

“Fuck,” Babs says.  “Damian’s going to kill us.”

---

Gotham’s City Zoo is one of the most well cared for, secured, up-to-date, and humane zoos known to man.  This has a less to do with villains trying to break into the enclosures to use the animals in their weird themed schemes and more to do with the personal work and donations of Damian al Ghul Wayne, who at twelve years old is remarkably good at getting rich people to contribute to the charitable enterprise of animal-protection-or-die-by-my-sword.  Normally Gotham’s elite wouldn’t be moved by insistent demands for money, but Damian once stabbed a Two-Face goon at a gala-turned-hold-up, and it’s hard to say no to someone you’ve seen splattered with gore and scowling because his airheaded father wouldn’t let him wipe his knife on an injured man’s clothes.  

Tim’s definitely going to lose another organ by the end of this.  Maybe he can get Conner to donate a kidney.

The zoo fences are already overgrown by the time they grapple in; the huge, imposing iron gates have blown open so far most of the metal fence on either side has curled outward.  Greenery, nondescript and overpowering, crawls over every building and cage.  The air smells heady and sweet, like earth after rain, something fruity and powerful.

The sky is slowly lightening from the smoggy black-brown of night to the smoggy gray-brown of morning, the sun slowly but inevitably approaching.  Tim hasn’t slept all night, but he also hasn’t slept much in the past four days, so this is hardly a change.  Also he managed to pop two caffeine pills before Dick came in the kitchen, so the world is sharp and his reactions are crisp, even if his head is pulsing with what promises to become a bad migraine.

Nightwing lands lightly beside him on the patterned stone path, and studies the gates with his hands on his hips.  Whistles.

“There’s no plants here,” he says, which is untrue.  But Tim realizes what he means as he gestures towards the gate; it’s overgrown with vines, yeah, but not enough to bend the metal so far.  “Think he’s got superstrength?”

“Maybe he hypnotized a bunch of people and they all shoved together,” Spoiler says, which is not how physics works.

“Maybe he turned the fence into snakes and back again,” Red Hood says, which might actually be how Maybe-Dionysus works.

“The cages are open,” Tim points out, which is by far the most important thing to focus on.

The others turn and see what Tim, landing first and scanning quickly, has already noticed; the huge stone walls of the crocodile exhibit are smashed in places, and there are thick, damp trails where something pulled itself through the gap and slithered along the concrete, further into the depths of the zoo.

“Holy shit, the brat’s gonna flip,” Red Hood says.

“Focus now, die later,” Nightwing says, which okay, fair enough. “Top of the aviary’s got a pretty good view of everything if the glass isn’t broken.”

Red Hood gives him a little two-fingered salute that smoothly transitions into the middle finger, and heads off, his gun slung over his shoulder.  The rest of them break off and, by wordless agreement, follow the still-damp trail of the crocodiles.

It’s not hard to figure out where Maybe-Dionysus has gone.  The further they get into the zoo, the thicker the overhanging trees and greenery and the more the cages are choked and bent and broken by vines.  They find evidence of more animals, but not people; dusty and muddy pawprints leading out of their broken enclosures, loose feathers, elephant dung.  Nightwing grimaces at the last, glancing away.  Probably thinking of Zitka.  Or at least how much trouble an angry elephant can be.  Or how mad Damian’s going to be when he finds out they got the elephant murdered.

There are traces of blood, too, but not nearly as much as Tim would have expected.  He’s not sure it’s a good thing.

The birds and rustling of branches have gotten steadily louder the further they go on.  Tim takes out his staff, the others take out their sticks, waiting for something to strike out of the overgrown brambles and bent metal of the cages.  He can hear more sounds, monkeys hooting and the high laughing bark of a hyena.  And back, further back, a faint sound, so soft that Tim doesn’t register it at first, growing steadily.  A fluting noise.  Panpipes.

They turn a corner and stop.  Most of the plaza in front of them has been carved away, broken concrete and growing vines, thick and green, and a heavy, sweet, savory, rotten smell, like moldy fruit, like sweat or cooking onions.

It’s the tiger pit.  The walls of it have been sloughed away so now it’s a gentle dip down into a green hollow.  Even from here Tim can see the gray back of an elephant, wrinkled and breathing, and can hear the sounds of the other animals, chittering and hooting.

Well, shit.  Damian’s gonna lose his fucking mind.

The comms crackle to life.  Nightwing says, softly, “Red Hood?”

“Hold on-” A grunt, some soft shifting.  Then, “Ready.  Get me a clean shot, he’s surrounded by fucking tigers.”

Tim’s a little afraid it’s literally going to be fucking tigers, considering who it is, but the music is getting louder, scratching at the back of Tim’s skull.  They better hurry this up before it gets worse.  He flashes Nightwing handsigns, stay back, let me go first, and doesn’t give him time to dither about it, sliding his bo staff away into its sheath and starting to make his way down.

It’s him.

Tim’s mouth is suddenly very dry.  He knew it was going to be him, he’s done this twice already, and it makes his heart jerk around in his chest to see Bernard laid out like that, casual and liquid relaxed in a way he never is by himself.

He is splayed out on a great throne of vines and greenery, breaking up the center of the tiger pit.  On every side is a throng of animals, laying against each other like drunken friends falling asleep on a couch, relaxed and stupidly content.  The elephant is actually sitting, it’s enormous gray side leaning against the stone climbing wall, it’s great trunk stroking the rubbery gray-pink back of a hippo.  There are lions, sprawled out in the slowly warming patches of morning light like tabby cats sunbathing in windows; there are howler monkeys peacefully grooming one another, rhinos laid on their side, napping, zebras and a pair of giraffes and the crocodiles that left that wet trail over the concrete and flamingos like ballet dancers on break and birds of a hundred different colors and species over everything, strutting up and down every back and grooming every tuft of fur.

The air is thick with a strong animal smell, the kind of heavy, natural smell that can’t be chased away with soap or perfume, like wet dog or horse sweat.  This is overlaid with alcohol, bitter and sharp, and something else, salty and sweet and savory like air off the sea.

Not-Bernard is framed on either side by a pair of tigers, like a scene in a renaissance painting, leaning against their enormous, striped hides, their tails twitching lazily.  One of them yawns, exposing enormous teeth.  At first Tim thinks the green vines in his hair have expanded all the way down his shoulders, before he realizes its a snake, thick and green, winding lazily around his arms.

His nose is one huge, purple bruise, crooked and leaking blood.  Oh fuck, Tim did that.  Not-Bernard didn’t fix it.  His stomach churns with a mixture of guilt and dread.

Tim swallows down stomach acid.  Starts down the crumbling stones and vines.

Not-Bernard doesn’t open his eyes as he approaches, but the animals raise their many heads, a wave of sleepy gazes in yellows and greens and liquid brown.  No one’s eaten anyone else, and no one’s started arguing over space or food or hierarchy; they all seem content to laze against one another, half asleep, the drunken, floating kind of residue a party gets when everyone sober enough to go home has left and the half-unconscious stoned people have been left behind to sprawl on the couch and floor and kitchen table.

“Mortal,” Not-Bernard sighs, laying back against a tiger like a spy movie villain, arms lazily slung across one rippling, powerful red-gold side.  “You’ve come back.”

“Hey,” Tim says, like an asshole.  “You didn’t fix his nose.”

Not-Bernard smiles, crooked, opens his purple-pink-red eyes.  “I like it this way.”

“I don’t.”

“But it’s so pretty, little mortal!” Not-Bernard stretches out, and it’s such a Bernard way of moving, arms and legs extended like a cat splaying and stretching all its limbs and toes, elbows and knees cracking.  “He bruises so easily… Like a peach! Ripe and tender! Oh, I would bite his cheeks if only I could.”

There’s a lot fucked up there Tim doesn’t want to unpack.  Instead he jumps on the line of thought Not-Bernard’s left open.  “You probably could if you, y’know, vacated his body.”

Not-Bernard rolls his eyes, purple irises bridged by the purple bruise.  The vine rooted in one temple is healthy and livid green, in strange and horrible dichotomy, leaves out of injury, life out of rot.

“You’re so insistent,” he sighs, annoyed.  “Don’t be boring, Robin-who-lies.”

“I thought I was interesting,” Tim says, blandly, as Robin moves, closer, closer, stepping over animals and squashed fruit and dung.  The various animals are more awake, more interested, but watch him go uncontested.

“I thought so, too,” Not-Bernard says, ruefully, face propped up in one hand.  “I like this body.  I like Bernard… not like you humans like one another, you understand.  But more than that… I am meant to live mortally, to drink and howl and tear my hair out my head, to revel in the bloody knuckles and teeth and blackened eyes… but I am meant to live mortally with company .  How can I live if I have nobody to live with?”

“With no one to possess?” Tim sucked his teeth.  “Have you tried possessing, like, a vase.  A toilet bowl.  Literally anything else.”

“I am not meant to sing alone, little mortal,” Not-Bernard says, mournfully.

“Aro people manage.  Single people manage.” Baby Tim managed for most of his childhood.  He steps, careful, over a porcupine.  “C’mon, are you gonna tell me hermits don’t know how to party?”

“Not like I do,” Not-Bernard says, soft.

“That’s a cop-out,” Tim replies, easily.  He’s closer, closer, and Not-Bernard is watching him.  For all his gaze is half-lidded, there is something sharp and aware in his eyes.  Robin slows, stops entirely, in the clear space before his throne.  “Don’t be boring, Dionysus.”

The name is a calculation.  Tim’s rewarded with a terrible, growing smile, eyes widening in some combination of awe and surprise.  Not-Bernard raises his head off his hand, grinning, delighted and impressed.

“Oh, I like you,” Not-Bernard breathes.

Tim’s chest does something complex.  Bernard’s voice is genuine and smoky and lovely, somehow in harmony with the panpipes, low and raw.  It feels like a knife slipping under his armor, it feels like fire in his ribs, to hear Bernard’s voice come out of Bernard’s face and know it’s not him, that someone else is looking back.

“Thank you,” Tim says, and his voice doesn’t crack, but it does slide into something smooth and cool, the company manners coming back like shielding, like ice.  “I understand you do not wish to leave him, but maybe I can change your mind.  We can work out something more… interesting.”

“Robin,” Dick’s voice says warningly in the comms, low in his ear, almost inaudible over the panpipes.  Tim ignores him.

“Oh?” Not-Bernard rises, languid, easy, and his expression is painfully earnest and it’s such a Bernard expression that Tim wants to cry.  “What do you have in mind?”

“Let me show you,” Tim says, and offers his hand.

It’s a horrible risk, and not one Tim would usually take.  Normally anyone Tim tangled with would recognize that for the attempt at maneuvering that it is.  But Maybe-Dionysus is about stories, and gestures, and there’s poetry in a hand extended, in the offer let me show you.

Not-Bernard’s eyes glitter purple, but it is Bernard’s shy, hopeful expression that shines on Tim, and Tim focuses on that, on the half-smile, the earnest crinkling in the corners of his eyes.  He reaches out, slowly, takes Tim’s hand, and his palm is fever-hot and alive even through Robin’s gloves.  For a second Tim can’t breathe, and he can’t even pinpoint the reason why.  The company manners recede somewhat, melting into something warmer.

He takes a careful step back, and then another.  Not-Bernard follows, pliant, and he has an actual god holding his hand, the point of contact electric and hot like a live wire.  The animals watch, heads turning in lazy, curious unison.

The first dart hits Not-Bernard neatly in the juncture of his shoulder.

He blinks, his expression fading from wonder into confusion, slow as honey.  Tim keeps his grip loose and easy, reaches up to intercept Not-Bernard’s curious free hand before he can reach the dart, takes it gently like a friend holding their drunk friend’s hands.

Not-Bernard squints at him, bewildered and slow, and then he grunts and stretches his neck to one side like he’s working out a crick.  He starts to grin, the confusion melting into manic delight.

“Sleeping ecstasy,” he says, giddy, and he beams at Tim.  “Darling mortal, you are too kind to me.”

Welp, Tim’s brain supplies.  That’s not good.

The next cluster of darts hit one after the other.  Not-Bernard doesn’t bother to remove them, or brush them off, or even jerk his way out of Tim’s hands, but there is a tidal wave of movement, a hundred animals standing and heaving themselves to their feet, the deafening thrum of a thousand birds taking off at once.  Nightwing and Spoiler will be moving in, somewhere behind Tim where he won’t see immediately, and he starts to jerk Not-Bernard forward, to put him in a hold-

Not-Bernard comes forward easily, pressing his chest into Tim’s, and somehow his hands are free, cupping his face, feverish hot on either side of his jaw, and his heart is pounding and he feels frozen and flustered and warm, and Not-Bernard’s gaze drops to his mouth.

Conner slams into him.  They are suddenly a hundred feet away, the air cool and the music quiet, floating above the greenery.

“I had him!” Tim scrambles to get out of Conner’s hold, his friend curses and nearly drops him.  “Let me go!”

“Rob-” and Tim nearly bites his head off, and he’s not sure if it’s because of the Dionysus madness or because Conner grabbed him before he gave the fucking signal.   “Stop squirming, fuck-”

“I didn’t signal you!” Tim snarls.  “I said touching faces was fine!”

They are ninety feet above the greenery of the zoo, too far to fall realistically, even if Tim’s survived worse and he’s fairly sure Not-Bernard finds him too interesting to let him splatter across the tiger pit.  Conner holds him tighter, his face twisted up with panic and anger, and Tim can’t help driving his heel into the crook of his elbow.  It’s like kicking a brick wall.

“He was going to kiss you!” Conner shouts.  “I’m not gonna let him hurt you like that!”

“That’s just the way Bernard looks at me!”

And the truth of it is- that is just how Bernard looks at Tim.  Bernard’s always looked at Tim like that, earnest and in awe, like Tim hung the sun.  And Tim can see the obvious conclusion stealing over Conner’s face, but that’s wrong too, because Bernard doesn’t want to kiss Tim, or at least, he doesn’t want to kiss Tim more than he wants to kiss anybody else, because Bernard looks at everyone like that.  Darla.  At least six other classmates that Tim can think of off the top of his head.  Dana, one time, but Tim was ninety percent sure that was Bernard fucking with him.

“Oh,” Conner says, and Tim opens his mouth to correct the entirely wrong conclusion his best friend has come to, and then Conner blinks hard, his gaze going hazy and dark.

Mind control, his brain supplies, and instinctively Tim drives his thumb into Conner’s eyeball.

The great thing about having a superpowered friend is it's really hard to hurt them.  Tim’s human fingers won’t do jackshit to Conner, but it’s hard to curb the kneejerk reaction to oh shit someone is poking my eye, and sure enough, Conner shouts and lets go.

Tim almost drops, manages to cling, catlike, and scramble onto Conner’s back while his friend wipes at his face and howls.  They tumble towards the ground, slower than an actual fall, still too fast to be really comfortable, Conner screaming and lashing out at nothing.

He let Conner get mind-controlled.  Conner is fucking mind-controlled.

The music in Tim’s ears screams, joyful and terrible, in strange harmony with Conner’s deep-chested bellowing, a cacophony of noise sliding into symphony, the moment after the orchestra finishes tuning and the thousand jarring sounds melt into a singular, full chord.  The fall down to earth feels like it happens in slow motion, a horrible, long tumble, as Robin scrambles to keep behind Superboy where he can’t reach him while still holding onto Superboy so he doesn’t die, and the world passes in wide, spinning sweeps of grey morning sky and blackened city horizon, and below, below, below, the great, vivid green of Dionysusion plants, unnatural and unwelcome and jarringly out of place, reaching up to catch them.

He had been able to hear words, when he had been mind-controlled, he just hadn’t cared about them.  But he has to try.

“Superboy!” he shouts over the wind.  “Sup-”

Conner roars, throws an elbow back in a shadow of his usually fighting form, clumsy and viciously powerful.  Robin ducks out of the way with no real effort, Tim’s chest squeezes hard, they are forty feet from the ground, thirty-five, thirty.

“Conner-” he tries.

One flailing hand almost crushes his head, snaps shut near his ear like a clamp, too close.  Robin jerks back, jabs his fingers into the sensitive places behind ears and jaw, but Kryptonian nerve points are harder than iron, and it’s useless, it’s all useless, Conner’s mind-controlled and he’s going to kill them all.

He catches glimpses of Not-Bernard below, looking up with manic, delighted attention, the eye of a storm of animals thrashing and howling, Nightwing and Spoiler caught at the edges, points of blue and purple.  Robin could make the fall if it's just a little lower, but Conner’s fingers clutch around his ear and crush down, hard enough that pain flares through the adrenaline and something hot and wet splatters his cheek, and Tim makes a horrible calculation.

“Dionysus!” he screams over the wind, and Not-Bernard’s eyes are wide and earnest, and Tim jumps.

The music blooms, flows fully into his head, overjoyed and triumphant, as Not-Bernard beams up at him, eyes wide and delighted, his hands up and open like a lover reaching to catch a dance partner, all earnest awe and delight like Tim hung the moon and stars, and Tim’s face burns hot with adrenaline and something giddy, drunken and high.

Mortal, he reads on Not-Bernard’s lips, red-cheeked and affectionate, and the greenery comes up to catch him.

It’s like falling into water, like falling into bed.  The greenery curls around his midsection and cradles him, impossibly careful, slowing his fall into a long, gentle swing.  It’s like falling into a dream, falling asleep, leaving Tim breathless and faltering, the madness lapping at the back of his brain, tender.

Bernard is there, eyes dark as wine, face open and adoring, the vines withdrawing so it is just him and Tim, in the sunlight, in a bubble of privacy as thick as syrup, the howling animals muted and the music fluid, a heady warmth in his head and chest.

“Mortal,” Not-Bernard says, in Bernard’s voice, and his hands are on Tim’s face, fever-hot, his thumb running over the edge of where his mask meets his skin.  “I am here.  You have called, and I am here, clever, brave, vicious mortal.”

The plan’s gone to shit, the plan is in ruins.  Tim’s brain crawls, in fits and starts, and all he can see is Bernard, Bernard, Bernard, all laughter and jagged edges, with a stranger’s eyes, flat and manic and godly, raking his gaze over Tim’s face with inhuman awe.

“What do you desire?” Not-Bernard asks, breathy.

Tim’s life runs on lies.  He is a tangled web of manipulation and even stripped down to the bone, even made stupid and slow, even here where his brain churns and churns and cannot turn, Tim knows to lie.

“I want,” he says, his mouth fumbling, and the best lies start with the truth.  His hands settle on Not-Bernard’s hips, and the contact burns like sunshine.  “I want Bernard back.”

“I can strip away your body’s doubts and fears,” Not-Bernard says, and his voice is a breathy whisper.  “I can heal the scars in your brain.  I can grow the organ your body pulses without.”

Tim’s fingers brush something in Not-Bernard’s belt.  The knife.  My death .

“I can make you healthy and whole and sane, little mortal,” Dionysus says, softly, his face the only thing Tim can see, and he creeps closer still, touching his forehead to Tim’s, and the contact is a starburst of fire, of lightning, reeling and heady.  “Madness is my charge, but so is freedom, and you are chained, chained, chained.  You are locked into paranoia, you are imprisoned by trauma, your mind walls itself into an empty house and rots within.  I can steady you, I can blunt your fears so they do not rule you, I can help you walk free.”

“No,” Tim’s mouth says, hand closing around the handle of the knife, slowly, slowly.  “I want Bernard.”

The eyebrows furrow, the mouth is a sorrowful slant, Bernard’s concerned expression but a stranger making it, regretful and tender, his thumb brushing Tim’s cheekbone.  “I can give you so much more than just Bernard.”

Just Bernard catches in Tim’s ears.  Like Bernard is just anything, like Bernard is unimportant, like Bernard doesn’t matter.  The shock of anger in his chest is as much the magical influence as it is his own and yet he can’t quite control it; his fingers cramp around the hilt of the knife, white-knuckled.

Not-Bernard’s hand touches his own.  Folds over the knife handle, lacing their fingers together, gentle, gentle.

“Do you want my death?” Not-Bernard asks, earnest, and Tim can’t breathe-

A wall smashes into them.  Not-Bernard is ripped from his hands, the knife yanked from his fingers.  Tim stumbles, keeps his feet, and suddenly the world is clearer, not as humid and heady, and he sucks in huge gulps of air.  It feels like resurfacing, or a shock of cold water, suddenly and violently awake.

“Robin!” Nightwing says, low and tense in the comm.  Fuck, he didn’t even hear him.  “Robin, come in!”

Tim fumbles, touches the comm.  “Here,” he says, which isn’t even the correct response.  He stumbles away from the circle of vines, blooming with grapes, trying to put some distance between him and the flattened circle of grass where Not-Bernard had held his face, like space will somehow make his heart stop pounding.

“Hey, so hippos kill like thirty people a year, right-” Spoiler is saying breathlessly over the comms, followed by, “Shit!”

“Spoiler, get on the elephant- Robin, report!”

“I-” his head is still spinning, his mouth is thick with saliva.  “No injuries,” because he’s not seriously hurt.  “Superboy.  He got Superboy.  Mind control.”

Nightwing curses and Spoiler barks out a short, high laugh.  She clamps down on it just as quickly, but that high knife of sound catches in Tim’s ears and drags, simultaneously soothing and terrifying; they have to finish this, they have to leave .

He tries to get his bearings, his head turning on a swivel.  The animals are howling, a storm of bodies and snarling and snapping jaws; Nightwing is on the back of the elephant, an island of safety, trying to haul Spoiler up out of the crush.  The noise is indescribable, pushing on his shoulders like a physical force, and threading through all of it is the panpipes, high and triumphant, a ribbon of music, and sprawled a little ways away, barely any distance at all-

Conner is bent over Not-Bernard.

His hands are around Not-Bernard’s neck.  His pupils are fully black with only a thin ring of blue, and he is snarling, teeth bared, trembling with rage, inhuman and savage.  Green vines wrap around his throat and shoulders, constrict his arms; he trembles with the effort to free himself; the vines are splitting and cracking.

Not-Bernard is smiling up at him, benevolent, face blue-purple and saliva bubbling in the corner of his mouth.

The horror slams up out of nowhere and drowns the dreamy, otherworldly anger out.  The animals fade into the background, Nightwing’s voice drops away.  There is only Conner, reduced to everything he’s ever feared he might become, an empty shell under someone else’s thumb; and Bernard, bright, soft Bernard, gentle, human Bernard, untouched by vigilantism or suffering; impossibly normal, impossibly kind, turning blue under Conner’s hands.

Tim is moving, his hand in his belt, flipping open the lead lined pouch.  The Kryptonite is cold and glittering, a sickly counterpoint to the verdant green forest of Dionysus’s plants.  The old sick horror of hurting Conner churns at the back of his brain, and so does the heart-numbing terror of Bernard dying, but Robin is sure-footed, Robin is swift, Robin only sees the civilian and the danger and the need to resolve the situation quickly. Robin flips the Kryptonite into his hand.

Conner does not react to his approach, snarling, face red with anger, until the Kryptonite is inches away.  He shrieks, recoiling, his hands leaving Not-Bernard’s neck.  Not-Bernard inhales, chokes; Conner is caught in the vines and restrained which is good , they need him to stay down , and Tim holds the Kryptonite steady, pawing clumsily at his comm.

“Nightwing,” he says.  His voice is wheezing and strangled.  “Superboy’s down, Dowd injured-”

Conner screams and lunges.

Tim ducks the first blow, but the second clips his side, sends him spinning onto all fours, desperately trying to keep his head.  Conner turns his attention back to Not-Bernard, who is starting to sit up; raises one huge fist.

“No!”

He barely catches the blow in time.  He bowls into Bernard, shoving him savagely to the side, and then Conner’s knuckles smash his collarbone.

The pain is so sharp and immediate that for a moment there is just an endless stretch of white-hot, fiery agony.  His vision swims back, and he is on the ground, his arm numb and useless, his chest throbbing like an exposed nerve, his tongue thick, dizzy and reeling.

“Robin!” Nightwing is saying through the comms, tight and panicked, “Robin-”

Conner is shrieking and scrambling away, eyes locked on the green crystal in Tim’s hand.  His face is wan and he bolts, disappearing into the storm of animals.  There are rainbow sparks in the corners of Tim’s eyes; the sky is dizzyingly bright.  His mouth tastes like blood, or maybe bile.  

Bernard’s face swallows up his vision.  The light outlines him in gold, his eyelashes are glowing, cornsilk strands, his nose and cheeks are scattered with faint freckles.  His face is drawn into wonder and bittersweet concern, tender and intimate.

Nightwing’s voice fades away.  The animals fade away.  Not-Bernard’s eyes are dark, smiling a shy, wondering smile.

“You saved me,” he says, the panpipes interlacing with his voice.

Tim’s throat is dry.  He hasn’t saved Bernard, he hasn’t protected him, there is a stranger in his face.  He opens his mouth and the truth comes out, desperate.  “I’m trying.”

“Oh, mortal,” Bernard says, softly.  He is leaning over Tim, one hand braced against the ground, bracketing him between arm and thigh, like someone leaning over their lover in a field, and Tim’s chest hurts with the growing bruise and his heart is jackrabbit fast.  “Oh my darling, brave, incredible mortal.”

His hand brushes Tim’s hair out of his face, featherlight.  The point of contact burns like sunshine.  Tim can feel his pulse in his ears, in his throat, everything overly warm.  He can’t look away.

“You shall have my death,” Bernard’s voice says, honey warm, adoring and genuine.  “I can think of no one better.”

He is pressing something to Tim’s chest; Tim fumbles and reaches to take it.  His hand feels like it’s moving through mud, or quicksand, or in the throes of sleep paralysis, his brain struggling and thrashing and not quite able to swim to the surface, his fingers slow and stupid.  They catch on the thing on his chest, fumble over hard plastic and metal, and Bernard laces their fingers together over the handle of the knife.

Tim can’t breathe.  He looked up into the purple, wine eyes of Not-Bernard, smiling with naked admiration.  

No.  This is bad, this isn’t what is supposed to happen.

Not-Bernard leans in, gold hair and freckled skin, and presses a kiss, featherlight, to Tim’s temple.  And then, between one breath and the next, he pulls away, and Tim can’t grab him, his vision tunneling and the sky swinging overhead, slow and stupid and useless .

The curtain of Not-Bernard’s hair casts his eyes into shadow, steals the color from the greenery in his temple.  As the world fades, it could be just Bernard, smiling down at Tim, affectionate, voice gentle and earnest.

“You will never use it.”

---

The late morning light paints the inside of the room in broad, gold strokes.

Tim is lying on the floor, reading Bernard’s Superman comics (funny) while his friend kicks his feet on his bed and reads Batman comics (even funnier).  Chip bags lay scattered on the floor, and a half empty soda can lies in danger of tipping over Tim’s sleeping bag.

The sleepover had been mostly impromptu.  Tim would usually refuse, citing his parents even though they were never home to notice, but Dick was in town for something or another and had agreed to take his shift.  Bernard had been pleading with him pretty consistently, too, even though Tim knows his parents don’t like him.

Except when he brought it up, Bernard had waved him off.

“They’re away in Chicago,” he said, easily.  “Won’t be home til Monday.  Come on, Tim, it’ll be fun!”

And welp, that was that.  Tim’s used to an empty house, but Bernard is bright and talkative and consistently desperate for attention, and there’s not a reason for them to be stuck alone in their big, empty houses when they can be stuck in a big, empty house together.

It was good, too.  They’d stayed up til about four- not bad for Tim, clearly pushing it for Bernard- just hissing to each other in the dark and saying, hey, you awake? And then showing the other a horrifying meme on their phone and smothering laughter while the other groaned and blindly flailed.

Four for Tim means waking up at seven thirty, so he’d spent a lazy morning dozing and fixing the code on his phone and listening to Bernard snore, his face slack and quiet in sleep in a way it never was when he was awake.  Early morning sunlight fell across his face and didn’t wake him, like it would Tim or Dick or Bruce.  He just laid there, unbothered by the slowly changing environment, his hair pale gold in the sunlight, snoring softly.

Then he woke up because he drooled on his pillow and hacked up his own saliva while Tim snorted and smothered his laughter.  Bernard flipped him off.

Now, Tim is splayed across the sleeping bag hastily pulled from a closet somewhere, reading about the Amazing Superman and his secret fort where he lives in the Antarctic.  Tim tries to picture the shy, responsible Clark Kent not visiting his mom for that long and has to repress snickering, because he’d be so sad about disappointing her.  He drops the comic on his chest and rolls to his side, imagining a hunched, giant man listening earnestly to a little gray haired woman. Tim has never met the famous Ma Kent and has to imagine what someone would look like if they raised a superpowered alien on a farm in Kansas.  The picture makes him smile.

This is how he sees the bagpipes wedged in Bernard’s closet.

He squints at it.  It remains bagpipes, a complex leather bag with metal tubes like fingers on a jaunty handwave.  Tim hasn’t seen any in real life outside of a funeral, years ago, of a distant cousin he had never met.  His father had scoffed at them, his mother’s mouth going the particular kind of tight it got when someone did something fatally embarrassing, like vomit on the floor.

“Dude, you play bagpipes?” Tim asks, the only question he can think of, because he cannot picture Bernard learning literally anything that’s not video games or weird conspiracy theories about Batman.

There’s a startled yelp, and a smack that sounds like he dropped a comic on his face.  Then Bernard is off his bed, scrambling to sit awkwardly with Tim on the floor.  He’s actually blushing.

“Uh,” he says, uncertain in the comedic, over-the-top way Tim has come to recognize as a cover for actual embarrassment.  “No, because that’d be super dorky?”

Tim cocks an eyebrow.  Bernard crumples like wet toilet paper, slumping in defeat.

“Yeah.  I, uh.  You know, parents.”

Oh yeah.  Tim knows parents assigning extracurriculars without asking or considering.  He nods, understanding, and Bernard seems encouraged.

“Yeah.  They wanted me to learn a musical instrument, and I didn’t want to,” Yup, there was Bernard, allergic to work.  “And the compromise was I got to choose the instrument, so.”

He gestures towards the closet, a little helpless.  

“And you like bagpipes?” Tim guesses.

“They’re the most annoying.”

Tim has to process that for a hot second, because it’s such a Bernard thing to do.  He cracks up, rolling onto his side so he can laugh into the plastic-y stiff fabric of the sleeping bag.  Bernard groans and punches his calf, and when that doesn’t stop him he starts pulling his leg hair.

“It’s not that funny, Timmeralla, come on.”

Tim makes a noise like a dying animal, heaving for air.  There are tears in his eyes.

“And they wouldn’t let me pick kazoo-”

Tim laughs harder.  Bernard lifts his nose into the air, theatrically huffy, but Tim prods his side with his toe until he giggle-snorts, ticklish and looking betrayed, batting his leg away.

“You picked it just to annoy them?” Tim wheezes. 

“Yeah, they hate it,” Bernard says, and without the theatrics there he seems genuinely proud.  “I learned all the classics, too, so they can’t complain.  I did Für Elise at the family Christmas dinner.”

Tim tries to picture lanky, blonde Bernard, in front of his extended family, playing bagpipes so loud the windows rattle.  He has to wipe tears from his eyes, tries to smudge his grin away with his hands.

“What does that even sound like?” he asks, caught between laughter and genuine curiosity.  His brain lights up with an idea, like a flare, and he grins wider.  “Do you still know how to play it?”

Tim has dumb teenager ideas a lot, that he mostly suppresses because they’re not the kind of thing his parents tolerate, but with Bernard- it’s like taking a match to dry tinder.  Bernard grins, wild eyed.

Für Elise in a bagpipe’s shrieking voice sounds like a rubber chicken put through a wood chipper.  Tim has to press his index fingers to his ears so his eardrums don’t pop, which leaves his hands full so he can’t cover his wheezing laugh.  Bernard’s eyes scrunch shut, his cheeks ballooned out, and he’s bright red with the effort of playing, and Tim’s chest is light like he’s on patrol with Batman and Nightwing on a good night, something free and fiercely alive, laughing as Bernard runs through the first rapid staircase notes.

Bernard plays the opening to Für Elise, and then the William Tell overture, and then the opening to an anime Tim knows Bernard likes but can’t remember the name of, and then a song from Fortnite, then the Time Warp, kicking at Tim until he stands up and dances (badly, because ballroom dancing does not translate to put your hands on your hips! Pull your knees in ti-ia-ia-ght!) and it’s good, Tim is breathless with laughter at how stupid it is, how stupid they look, and Bernard makes a horrible honking noise when he accidentally giggles into the pipes.

It’s stupid good, stupid wonderful.  Tim’s heart does somersaults in his chest; he loves having friends, he loves Bernard.

Then Bernard stops playing, abruptly.

Tim’s feet keep moving for a moment, glancing up, and Bernard looks like he’s been shot.  He has the same gut-punch, wide eyed expression Tim’s seen on Nightwing, seen on Batman, the moment when the brain is still processing and the pain hasn’t arrived yet.

He’s instantly on alert, eyes flitting to the window, and he hears it, too: the garage downstairs is opening.  Tim knows that shot of adrenaline, parents are actually home, but why does Bernard look like that?  Bernard’s parents aren’t the Drakes.

“Hide!” Bernard hisses, standing, and he’s slinging his bagpipes over his shoulder.  His eyes dart around.  “Under the bed!”

The picture forming is ugly.  Tim drops and slides under the bed.  It’s quiet and claustrophobic, and Bernard is shoving boxes against the bedframe, closing him in.

A door slamming.  Heavy footsteps.  Bernard shoots Tim one last, wide-eyed look, his irises pale ice chips, and then stands, out of sight, and sits on the bed.  

Tim’s stomach churns with some deep-seated instinct born out of nights swinging over Gotham.  He could grab Bernard and bundle them both out the window.  He could run them around the corner and hike them somewhere safe; he could dart out and distract the oncoming threat, he could…

He can’t.  He thinks of Bruce’s invasive questions, Dick’s pointed glances, Barbara’s blunt argument.  What are you doing for the holidays, Tim?  How’s your parents, Tim?  Do you know where they are?  When they’ll be back?  He dodged every question with crisp, neat civility, the company manners built into every bone, the lies smooth and neat as glass between his teeth.  It drags Tim through the frozen wastes of his parents’ absence, faking warmth that isn’t there, and it’s tiring.  It’s so goddamn tiring.  He won’t subject Bernard to that, to lying to friends even when they both know the truth.

Which means he can’t do anything.  He’ll lay here, and he’ll do nothing.

The door slams open.  Tim can see the back of Bernard’s feet, swinging idly as he sits on the bed like nothing is wrong, and he can the heavy loafers of Mr. Dowd as he marches in without knocking.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Hey Dad,” Bernard says easily, like Mr. Dowd doesn’t sound two seconds from roaring, frothing with anger.  “You’re home early.”

“Don’t play coy with me!” Mr. Dowd spits.  “You were so loud the neighbors could hear you down the street!  Mrs. Hardison was in tears!”

“From laughing?” Bernard says, coolly, and he never sounds like this.  Cold and cruelly dismissive.  “Was it the Cha-Cha Slide? That one always has her in hysterics.”

“Bernard Lowell Dowd.”

The snarl goes straight down Tim’s spine and presses some primal fear at the base of his skull.  The blood is pounding in his ears.  He can hear his father reflected in Mr. Dowd, and he doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to humiliate Bernard by listening to what’s coming.

“Yes?” Bernard says, unimpressed.

“Your mother is mortified!  She’s out there, right now, apologizing-”

“Why?  She’s the one who said I should practice.”

What is he doing?  What is he doing?   Here is where Tim would bow his head and apologize, pull out the beaten-dog look, here is where he keeps his breathing a little fast, his eyes a little wide, so his dad could bask in that imitation of fear and pull away.  

Bernard’s not doing any of that.  Bernard is casual and caustic in the same sentence, unafraid and annoyed.

“Your disrespect is not gaining you any favors!  Do you know how much I’ve done for you?  How much we’ve done for you?  And you pay us back by rotting in your room like pig and only sticking your head out to scream at the neighbors-”

Bernard’s feet still, briefly, then keep swinging.  He sits quietly while his father spits vitriol, working himself up, and Tim is coiling, quietly.  He sounds like he’s working himself up to slapping him, or worse, and there Tim draws the line.  If he lays a finger on Bernard he’ll break all the bones in his hand.

“-the kind of opportunities some people would kill for!”

“Give it to them, then,” Bernard’s voice, easy and casual, is almost lost over his father’s screaming.  Mr. Dowd falls silent and Bernard says, “Since I’m such a waste of time.”

Tim’s heart lurches in his throat. Bernard is going to get himself killed.

“You never used to be this bad,” Mr. Dowd says, and his voice is lowered, more dangerous.  “You were well-behaved your freshman year.  Lazy as hell, but not-” a violent, jerky movement, like he’s gesturing.  “-this.”

“Don’t worry, I disappoint me, too.”

“Where’d we go wrong?  Is this that smarmy little- what was his name- Drake?”

“Don’t you fucking talk about him!” 

Bernard is on his feet shockingly fast.  Tim stares at the backs of his heels.  The whiplash from cold to straight fury has his head spinning; he’s never heard Bernard shout like that.

“Don’t take that tone with me, I am your father!”

“Tim’s the best goddamn thing that’s ever happened to me!” Bernaud is screaming.  “He’s smart, he’s kind, he’s worth a hundred of your pathetic ass-”

Tim’s heart is pounding.  The fear seems weirdly far away, and in its place is something else, warm and burning hot, almost pleasant.  His ears are flushed, he can tell.

“Don’t you dare use that kind of language-”

“He talks to me like I’m worth something!  He actually likes me!”

There’s a hitch in Bernard’s voice at the end.  He sounds on the edge of tears, and Tim’s chest hurts, he wants to reach out, he wants to pull Bernard under the bed with him, into this tiny, safe place, out of sight.  His face is red, too, anger and flustered affection together.

“I did not raise you,” Mr. Dowd snarls, “To be that.”

“To be what?” Bernard challenges.  “To want people who can stand me?”

“I mean gay!”

There’s a heavy pause.  Bernard’s breath is all funny, and Tim is going to kill his dad.

“Pan, actually,” Bernard says, voice high and strained with anger.  “And not that it’s any of your fucking business, but Tim and I are just friends, because he doens’t treat me like actual shit-”

“Pan?  What does that even mean? ” Mr. Dowd shouts over Bernard.  “That’s not even a real goddamn thing!”

“Oh like you’d know, you fucking business major-”

“I raise you to be respectful, I feed you, I clothe you-”

“Congratualtions on doing the bare fucking minimum-”

“And you hop on the newest fag trend all your little friends are on for what?  Attention?”

“Gosh, Dad,” Bernard snarls, poisonous.  “How bad did you fuck me up that I fake sucking dick for attention?”

“Don’t turn this around on me-”

“Why not?  Why not?” Bernard screams.  He’s moving now, lunging at his father, and Tim can picture his arms spread wide, trying to hold all his anger.  “You’re fucked up!  You’ve tied yourself in knots!  You’re so pathetic and desperate that you turned around and told me I was pathetic and desperate because you can’t imagine a life not like that!  You’re a fucking desk jockey and you’ve never made anything worth shit in your entire goddamn life!  No wonder Mom hates you!”

Silence.  Tim stares at Mr.Dowd’s feet, frozen, and Bernard’s, balanced and rocking, like at any moment he’s going to start throwing punches.

Mr. Dowd turns and leaves.  The door slams shut.

Bernard huffs a short, furious breath.  Sits on the bed.  He curls his toes into the carpet, and Tim can hear how he grips the covers, shifting.

“Don’t come out,” Bernard says.  His voice is short and strained, on the edge of crying.  “Stay there.”

“Bernard,” Tim says, softly.

“Not yet, Tim.”

Tim falls quiet.  But he reaches out, careful, and brushes his fingers around Bernard’s foot.  His friend jerks, and Tim grips his ankle, squeezing once.  Bernard’s breath hitches, a sob barely restrained.

“Okay,” Tim agrees, quietly.

He withdraws his hand.  Bernard breathes out, trembling, and Tim is burning up with anger.  It’s not fucking fair.  He feels like a child, thinking it, but it’s not fucking fair.  Bernard deserves better than this.

Stomping footsteps again.  Bernard breathing evens out, until it is cold and calm, and Tim can tell by the way his feet relax and shift that he is straightening up, and he can picture him, chin held high.

Mr. Dowd slams the door open.  Tim tenses, gets ready to spring, but the feet turn past Bernard and out of sight, blocked by the quilt hanging half off the bed, and Tim can’t see what he’s doing, what he’s going to do.

Hinges opening.  A squeal as something’s yanked off a shelf.  The only thing Bernard keeps in that cabinet is his console, the console Mr. Dowd drops in front of Bernard.

It cracks as it hits the floor.  And then Mr.Dowd grunts, swinging a hammer down.

The console cracks with the first blow.  Mr. Dowd doesn’t stop, smashes down, once, twice, three times, plastic chips flying everywhere.  Tim stares from under the bed, hidden carefully away, and Bernard doesn’t move.  Mr. Dowd pants, like destroying his son’s possessions is hard work, and his breathing is unbearably loud in the silence, animalistic.  Bernard makes no sound at all.

“You’re grounded,” Mr. Dowd snarls.

Bernard says nothing.  He doesn’t cry, he doesn’t shout.  Tim can’t see his face, he doesn’t know what he needs.

Mr. Dowd stomps away.  The door slams, and the footsteps fade away, rattling down the stairs.

Bernard is still for a minute.  Two minutes.  Voices coming from downstairs, like arguing, and Bernard breathes out, short, barely controlled, and then he stands.  Kneels on the carpet, starts to pick up the shattered plastic and metal pieces.

Tim moves carefully, starts to gingerly pull himself out from under the bed.  Bernard doesn’t look at him, his hair hanging over his face, but Tim can see his mouth pressed into a thin, trembling line.

He doesn’t know what to say.  He recognizes the scene, intimately, a reflection of every time Jack Drake smashed Tim’s camera or laptop or phone, screaming obscenities.  He knows it, but he doesn’t know what to say, because he doesn’t know what he would want someone to say to him, if they were there.  If they saw.

He hates Dick’s assurances, Bruce’s pitying looks.  He hesitates.  What would he want?

What does Bernard want?

“You should go,” Bernard says, softly.  His voice is almost inaudible.  “Out the window.”

He always leans into touch like something starving, Tim remembers.

His hand curls over Bernard’s neck, and his friend makes a short, abrupt sound, like the start of crying, and Tim pulls him close so their foreheads touch.

Bernard doesn’t pull away, bites his lip, hard.  Through the curtain of his hair, Tim can see his eyes, glassy and screwed up with the effort of not crying.  Tim’s arm moves around, til he’s sitting on the carpet, pulling Bernard into his chest.  Bernard slumps into him, shaking, and Tim hates Mr. Dowd, hates him with a fire that burns hot and ugly.

Tim rocks him, softly, gently, and Bernard’s fist comes up and bunches up his shirt.  Just holds it, tight, to keep Tim from moving away.

They stay that way.  Bernard is a warm weight against him, trembling, and after a while Tim can feel a wet patch on his shoulder, where Bernard is desperately trying to keep his crying quiet, and Tim’s stomach burns with deep-seated anger.

Sorry for being here doesn’t sound right.  Sorry for seeing that.  Sorry your dad outed you to me without realizing it.  Sorry your console’s broken.  Sorry you’re treated like shit in your own home.   If Dick tried to say any of that to Tim he would punch his lights out.  There’s no good way to say you deserve better.

“... do you want a pan flag?” he asks, instead.

Bernard laughs a wet, snorting little laugh.  “What?”

“For your room.”  Tim presses his cheek to the top of Bernard’s head, keeps his voice low, soft, like they’re teenagers hiding a secret.  They are teenagers hiding a secret.  The secret is Tim.  “My friend went through a couple of different ones before he decided on bi.  I can go steal his pan flag.”

Bernard wheezes, softly, and wipes his face, hard, scrubbing away tears.  Tim cards his fingers through his hair.  “What, I’m not good enough for a brand new flag?”

“Reduce, reuse, recycle, Bernie,” Tim deadpans in their biology teacher’s nasally voice.  Bernard giggles and hiccups.  “Do you want a brand new flag?”

“You don’t have to get me stuff, dude,” Bernard replies, throat thick.

“Pansexual pin.  Pansexual scarf.  I bet they make pan socks.”

“Oh my god.”

“Pansexual sweater.”  Tim tries to think of what else Dick brought home, after Bruce caught him making out with Wally under an overhang.  “My friend has a stuffed animal called a bisexu-whale.”

Bernard snorts, or maybe chokes, pushing him lightly.  Tim smiles and starts to lean away, stops when Bernard jerks after him.  Looks back to Bernard, hovering, to see what he needs.

“This,” Bernard gets out, voice thick.  “This is good.”

“This?”

Bernard’s ears are pink.  He tightens his hold on Tim’s shirt.  Leans in, so they’re pressed side to side again, the weight leaning into each other.

“Oh,” Tim says, softly.  His chest is warm, his throat aches, he is so unbearably fond.  “Okay.”

He holds Bernard.  They stay there for a long time.

---

Tim wakes up in tiny increments.  His mouth is dry, but someone is combing gentle fingers through his hair and if he has to get up he’ll actually die.

The person sighs, low and rumbling, just the right cadence to set off red flags.  The hands are calloused and tough and so, so careful.  Bruce isn’t supposed to be back yet.  Bruce is… somewhere in space…

Tim makes a faint, questioning noise, trying to blink his eyes open.

Bruce’s cowl is off.  He is sitting in the hospital cot with Tim, looking at a tablet balanced on his knee, his face creased in a frown.  He glances at Tim, looks over him with concern as Tim blinks up at him, bewildered.

“Yer ssu’pos’d be in space,” Tim says.

“Heard you were having trouble,” Bruce says in his low voice.  Goddammit Dick.

“I c’n handle it,” Tim says, because it’s true.  Bruce runs his fingers through his hair again, and his eyes almost slip closed, but then the hand leaves and comes back with water.  “I can… how long’ve I been out?”

“Eight hours,” Bruce says.  “Drink.”

He carefully levers him up, like he can’t sit up by himself, but Tim can’t bring himself to protest.  He leans into the touch, and Bruce rubs his arms, warm and brisk, before putting a glass of water in his hands.  Tim drinks.

They’re in the cave.  Dick is in the cot over, and Tim’s heart leaps in his throat, but he’s not even hooked up to anything, and he’s snoring a light, airy snore, drooling on the pillow.  In the distance, Jason is sitting next to Babs at the Batcomputer, and Steph is sitting by the sparring area calling advice while Conner goes toe to toe with-

“No,” Tim says, instinctive, and starts to stand.  He’s a little loopy, but keeps his feet, Bruce hurried catching his elbow to support him.  Tim’s wobbly and unprepared but Damian hates Conner and he hates Tim and he cut Tim’s line-

“Breathe,” Bruce says.

Tim breathes.  The world is syrupy, but it starts to come back into itself.  Damian and Conner and Steph are frozen, watching him, hyperalert, and Jason and Babs have looked over from the Batcomputer, and behind him Dick’s snoring has stopped, and the weight of their attention rests on him like a physical thing, dragging him back in.  Right.  Right.  Damian hasn’t hurt any of them in over two years.  He tolerates Conner and wouldn’t hurt him even if he could, not unless he had to.  

Now everyone is watching him and their attention is too much, and there are other alarm bells ringing beneath his skin.  He fumbles and sits back down, carefully, and Jason and Babs look back at the computer, thank fuck, and Steph looks away, bless her, but Conner and Damian are coming over.  Goddammit.

The other thing clamoring for his attention comes back to the forefront of his brain, insistent.

“Where’s the knife?” he asks hoarsely.

Bruce is quiet for a long moment, and Tim’s stomach drops in horror, but he nods to the metal table full of medical equipment.  Someone has placed a heavy box there, the kind they line with lead and silver and use to contain anything meta or magic.  Tim feels something pull at his chest, and he doesn’t know if it’s just him or if Dionysus’s mind control bleeds into his objects, but he leans forward to reach for it, stopped by Bruce’s arm curling around his chest.  His hand comes up to clutch at Bruce’s wrist, but he doesn’t fight as he’s pulled back, gently.

“You wouldn’t let go of it,” he says, quietly.  “And we didn’t want to take it from you.  We got you to put in there, eventually.”

“I don’t remember,” Tim says, because he doesn’t.

“You weren’t lucid,” Bruce says.  Tim doesn’t flinch, because he’s better trained than that, but his body instinctively braces for a lecture.  Instead he gets fingers running through his hair, gentle.  “You weren’t violent, but you weren’t responsive, either.”

Tim relaxes into the attention.  There are more important questions to be asking, anyway.  “What about the situation in space?”

“The situation in space will have to be resolved by the Justice League,” Damian snaps.  His youngest brother seats himself on the other side of Tim, scowling.  “Since you are a fool of monumental proportions.”

“Hello, Damian,” Tim says, tired, as Bruce and Dick warn, “Damian,” and Conner catches up in time to say, “Lay off him, man.”

“You have insisted on attempting to resolve a situation involving magic, for which you also insisted on not calling Father, or anyone with any magical expertise,” Damian replies, ignoring the others.  “You have gotten yourself carelessly injured despite being immunocompromised, and you are attached to the civilian in question-”

“No one obeys the ‘don’t-interact-with-people-you-know-rule,’” Tim complains.  Bruce makes a protesting noise, but everyone knows he’s right.  “Literally no one-

“And now you have gone and gotten yourself tied to a magical artifact of dubious origin that the rest of us cannot touch lest we compromise Dowd’s health.”

Tim doesn’t want to touch that, and he doesn’t want a lecture from Damian.  Bruce and Dick, that he can stomach, but from the arrogant princeling who tried to kill him like sixteen times? Absolutely not.

“Jealous you didn’t get a cool magic knife?” he says.

Damian scowls harder.  “Do you truely think so little of me-”

“He’s injured, man, come on,” Conner says.  Damian whirls on him.

“And whose fault is that?”

“Dami,” Dick says, half warning and half soothing, as Conner flinches.  Tim’s stomach hurts.  Damian looks away, scowling.  Dick’s hand settles on Tim’s shoulder, and he wants it gone but can’t quite bring himself to shove him away.  “How are you feeling?”

Tired.  In pain.  Frustrated.  His entire shoulder throbs like a second heart, and it’s adding an edge to his voice, but he’s had worse.  He can see the suggestion of bedrest in Bruce’s face and needs to nip that in the bud.

“Fine,” he says, and starts to get up.  Conner makes a wounded noise, but Bruce gently supports him and no one looks really surprised.  “What happened to Bernard?”

The silence is not promising.  Tim’s heart is pounding in his chest and his mouth is dry.

“What happened to Bernard?”

“Tim,” Bruce starts, and Tim jerks out of his hold.  He can’t have another person die, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t.  Conner lurches forward to support him and Tim almost hits him.  Bruce’s hand settles on his back.  “Sweetheart, you need to breathe.”

Tim doesn’t need to do shit.  But Bruce won’t tell him until he’s calmer, and he will try to bench him if he can’t behave, if he insists on throwing a fit, if he can’t keep himself together.

Bernard gave him the knife.  Bernard gave him the knife.

“Rob,” Conner is saying, frightened, and then Steph’s voice.  “C’mon Tim, Tim, you’re alright.”

Tim grabs Steph’s arm, because Steph wouldn’t lie to him.  “Is he dead?”

Dick makes a pained sound, but Steph just squeezes his arm.  “Nope.”

Tim wheezes and drops his head.  The world starts to swim back.  Conner is holding him, carefully, probably because he doesn’t want to jar the injury but it feels like it's because everyone thinks Tim is fragile, Tim is broken, Tim is self-destructing, Tim can’t decide what he wants.  Steph’s hand remains clasped around his forearm, an anchor.

“We can’t find him,” she says, which makes his heart jerk around in his chest, but she follows it up with, “But Zatanna seems to think if he died there would be a much louder exit.  Explosions, city wide mania kind of thing.”

“You called Zatanna?” Tim manages.  Conner squeezes him, comforting.

“I did,” Bruce says, gravelly.  

It stings, and the worst part is Tim knows calling Zatanna was the right choice, the smart choice, maybe even the one he would have made if he wasn’t grasping so tightly to the reins to keep this closeknit.  The loss of choice hurts like a physical thing, worse than the shoulder.

“She won’t be helping us,” Bruce continues, in some terrible attempt at comforting.

“She has remained with the Justice League to deal with the situation in space,” Damian says, because he exists to rub Tim’s failures in his face.

“Fine,” Tim says.  He exhales, low, finds the last vestiges of his self-control.  “Fine.  What’s the plan?”

“We’re figuring that out,” Dick says, softly.  “C’mon.”

They really don’t want Tim moving around too much, because no one protests when Conner helps him limp across the ‘cave to the computer, not even Damian.  Dick keeps following just at Tim’s elbow, like somehow Tim will trip and fall when it’s his arm that’s hurt, aching like one traumatized nerve.  Steph is close, too, but not hovering.  Jason stands and leans against the desk, passably casual except for the fact that Conner immediately deposits Tim in his vacated chair.

“So here’s what we got,” Babs says, right down to business.  Tim loves her.

What they have is nothing.  Radio silence from Maybe-Dionysus or Not-Bernard or just Benard.  The trail from the remains of the zoo- which Damian does not mention, holy shit, reparations must have been steep and immediate- trails off into the fashion district.  The GCPD is busy helping animal control with the sudden influx of wild animals, and Damian is fidgeting in a way that suggests he has only been kept from joining them by the threat of Dionysus hanging over like a cloud.

“We need to call Constantine,” Bruce says, in a low voice.

They don’t.  They don’t.  Tim opens his mouth to say something, to stop Constantine from descending on them and melting Bernard’s brain like hot butter, but Damian beats him to it.

“We,” Damian says imperiously, “Are not calling Constantine.”

There’s a brief pause as everyone takes this in.  Steph looks at him with morbid curiosity.   Conner, who doesn’t keep up with Gotham vigilante politics because he thinks they’re stupid, looks blank.  Dick, Bruce, and Babs just look tired.  

 “I didn’t know you didn’t like him,” Jason says, intrigued.

“My personal opinion has nothing to do with it,” Damian replies.  “He’s sleeping with the fish.”

“He’s dead?” Dick says, a little horrified.

“Sleeping with the fishes,” Jason corrects, because Damian hates speaking inprecisely and remains brutal with himself even though English is like his third or fourth language.

“Fish singular,” Damian repeats.  When everyone continues to stare at him blankly, he huffs, unimpressed.  “King Shark.”

A beat.  Tim gets it first.  “Constantine is fucking King Shark?”

“Language,” Bruce says, but it's lost over Steph howling with laughter and Jason wheezing into the desk.

“Wait, how do you know that?” Dick asks, now a lot horrified.  He whirls on Bruce.  “How does he know that?”

“Dick-”

“I’m not deaf or a fool, Richard!”

“People talk all kinds of shit in Gotham,” Jason manages.  “What I want to know is how you know that and the old paranoid bat doesn’t-”

“What I want to know is how it works,” Steph gasps out.  She gestures wildly with one hand.  “Like, what are the physics behind that??”

“This is not a constructive avenue of discussion,” Bruce says, trying to rally.  He’s pinching his nose, so he already knows he’s not going to succeed.

“He cannot be trusted!” Damian is saying, loudly.  “If his loyalty lies with King Shark-”

“King Shark probably wants Dionysus taken down too, baby bat-”

“Are they dating dating or is this a fling?  Cause neither of them really strikes me as a long distance person-”

“Okay, sex doesn’t neccessarily mean loyalty-”

This isn’t finding Bernard.  Tim bites his tongue.  It’s pulled some of the tension from the room, and everyone needs that, and they’re never all in the ‘cave at the same time.  It’s good for them, for all of them.

Bernard’s laughter haunts the corners of his mind.  He tries to focus.

Babs is tapping on her computer.  Tim scooches his chair closer to her, and she turns her laptop a little so he can see.  She has a live map tracking emergency calls, with different colors for different crimes.  It’s Gotham, so the map is alive with activity, but there’s no pattern to suggest Not-Bernard has emerged again, and nothing to suggest any kind of concentrated mania.

“We will not ask Constantine about his private affairs while he is here,” Bruce is saying in the background.  “Do we understand?”

“I literally wasn’t going to.”

“Yes, yes, Father, we will not alienate him without cause.”

“No.”

“Go to hell, old man.”

“Jaylad, I will call Alfred.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Bruce, c’mon, he never takes his vacation days-”

“I’m guessing around the theater district again,” Babs says softly.  She glances at him.  “What do you think?”

It’s a distraction.  With his family arguing in the background and Conner hovering over him, Tim is way too happy to take it.  He pours over the map with Babs, and then the readings the magical analyzer is bringing back- basically useless, but they make him feel better to check- and then the reports trickling in from animal control and GCPD as they slowly secure the escaped zoo animals.  There are reports here and there of drunken disorder, but nothing on the level of that first encounter they had with Dionysus.

After several minutes of squabbling, Bruce gives up entirely and settles beside Tim.  The shadows under his eyes are ugly.  Tim doesn’t want to know what his face looks like right now.

“How’s your arm?” he rumbles.  Behind him, Tim senses more than sees Conner flinch.

“Fine,” he says, blandly.

Bruce grunts, because that’s his main method of communication.  A decade of dedication to Batman means Tim can translate Bruce thinks he’s full of shit, but he’s letting it slide for now.  Tim hates that he’s grateful for it.  Instead of thinking about that he starts to report, from the very start; the cult and seeing Bernard again, his kidnapping, the trail, the ritual.

Bruce listens to all of it without comment.  When Tim finishes, he doesn’t move for a minute.  Then he gently squeezes his uninjured shoulder.

“We’ll figure this out,” Bruce says.

There was a time when Tim would hear that and believe him instantly.  Even now, his shoulders lose their tension and some of the tightness fades out of his stomach and throat.  But his brain is a churning ball of ice and after everything, Bruce is a hard man to trust.

“I know,” he says, instead of any of that.  He exhales out through his nose.  “So I’m back in Red Robin gear?”

Bruce is quiet, his mouth pressed into a thin line.

“No,” he says after a moment.

Tim studies his face, sees the conclusion on Bruce’s face, as final as the end of a blade.

“No,” he says, instantly.  “Bruce, I have to be there.  I have to.”

“Tim,” Bruce says, gently, and Tim staggers to a stand.  Conner makes a noise and tries to catch him and Tim elbows him away.  It’s like elbowing concrete.

“He likes me!” Tim is distantly aware that he’s started shouting.  “He’s already unstable, I can keep him distracted, I can stop him from hurting himself-”

The rest of the family have stopped arguing and have turned to watch him.  Their eyes stab into him like if they look hard enough they can peel him open and see what’s wrong with him, where he broke down, where he went wrong.  He knows where he went wrong; somewhere between Conner and Bart’s death, sometime before he stumbled down into the ‘cave with six folders of evidence that Bruce was alive and was met with Damian’s smug face wearing his mask, sometime before Dick looked at him and said Arkham, sometime after Jason’s knife slid through his chest, and now everyone keeps asking him what he wants like they’re actually going to give him a choice, like they won’t hunt him down and cut his line and throat and throw him in a box as soon as he disappoints, like they won’t yank the choice away from him like Bruce is doing right now.

“Tim,” Bruce says, again, infuriatingly calm.

“He gave me his death!” Tim’s chest burns, the anger collapsing into horror.  He feels physically sick.  His face is wet.  “He gave me the knife.”

Bruce is still and quiet, his face stony.  He’s not considering Tim’s argument, he’s not hearing Tim.  He’s made up his mind, and Tim does not get to change it.

“You’re injured,” Bruce says, never mind that Batman’s gone out with broken arms and legs, nevermind Tim’s done more while dragging his shattered body over the rooftops.  “And you’re not thinking clearly.”

Tim isn’t.  Bruce never does; Dick barely keeps a lid on his anger, Jason is ruled by the green fog in his brain, Damian is a child, and yet Tim has to think clearly, Tim has to be perfect, Tim cannot make mistakes.

“He’s my friend,” he says, desperately, instead of any of this.

“I know,” Bruce says, softly.  And then, “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

Tim doesn’t want Bruce’s apologies.  He doesn’t even really want his permission.  He just wants him to stop taking everything away.

Conner’s hands touch his shoulder, gentle.  Babs takes his hand and gives it a brief squeeze.  Damian says nothing, which is as close to comforting as he seems capable of doing; Jason remains still and silent in the background.  Steph slides to his side and starts pulling him up out of the chair, and he goes, his insides churning with rage and horror and bitter, bitter frustration.

“C’mon, baby bird,” Dick says, gentle, and takes Tim’s hand.  He squeezes it like Tim’s a child.  “Let’s get you into the showers.”

He follows Tim to the locker room, makes sure he gets into the showers and then sits outside, like Tim could slip and fall, like Tim needs supervision.  Tim’s eyes ache with tears and rage and the burning, burning helplessness in his gut, and Dick doesn’t say anything when he cries softly beneath the cover of the water.  Instead, he is painfully gentle, toweling Tim’s hair dry, helping Tim slip a loose shirt on when it becomes clear he can’t raise his arm above head height, bringing him water and a half-decent sandwich and sitting there until Tim chokes down a quarter of it.  

“I won’t let them do anything to him,” he says, gently.  “You know that right?”

Dick was the one who let Spoiler get involved.  He’s the one who called in Jason; probably the one who called Bruce and Damian out of space.  He greenlit the plan that ended with the knife in Tim’s hand.

If he says any of that, Dick will want to talk about it.  Tim just wants him to go away.  

“I know,” he lies.

---

The night is cold.  Bernard’s curtains are closed.

Tim’s side hurts.  He doesn’t remember how or why; in the haze of fighting he thinks he can pick out the individual memory of someone swinging a tire iron into his ribs.  His mouth is dry.  His feet are bloody; he’s lost one of his shoes.  He’s not in his suit.  He barely remembers the trek from the Manor, barely remembers Alfred’s gentle hands stitching him back together, barely remembers Bruce asking him to stay and rest, to heal where they could keep an eye on him.

He couldn’t be there.  Something drove him out, and something drives him on, slipping over the fence into the backyard, scaling the wall to the second story.  Sometimes there’s just bad nights, Dick had said, once, when Tim was first starting.  He didn’t get it then.  He feels strange and far away, his head a mile above his body, and he gets it now.

Tim perches outside Bernard’s window.  Sits there, wavering, for a long moment, trying to drag his thoughts through mud.  Knocks on the window.

Nothing for a while.  Tim knocks again.  Maybe twice.  It’s hard to keep track, time keeps slipping away.

The curtains shift open.  Bernard’s face goes from confusion to shock, and then horror, and then the window is opening and hands are on him.

“Tim, holy shit,” Bernard is saying, warm and loud and here.   Tim is helpless to resist as Bernard pulls him into the warmth of the house.  “Tim, jesus-”

The house feels feverishly hot, like stepping into a sauna.  Bernard’s arms around him burn.  Tim blinks, bewildered, his head dragging through molasses.  There’s a lag between his brain and his body, like faulty wiring, and Bernard’s arms are warm, warm, warm.

“You’re freezing, shit,” Bernard is saying.  “Did you walk here??  It’s sleeting outside!”

He must have walked here.  He’s wearing his pajama pants, which don’t have any pockets, and he can’t feel his wallet or his phone, so.  He walked.  It’s a good thing he remembered his shoes, even if one of them is gone.

“S’not that bad,” Tim mumbles, instead of any of this.

“Jesus fucking christ, Tim.  Okay, okay-”

Bernard’s arms haul him upward with a grunt.  It’s not the effortless carry that Bruce or Dick do; it’s more of a half-drag over the carpet, so weirdly and unbearably human that it touches some broken creature in Tim’s chest, makes him press helplessly into the hold, clutching Bernard’s shirt with white knuckled hands as he settles him on the bed.

“Just a minute,” Bernard is saying, softly.  “It’s okay, Tim, I’ll be right back-”

He pulls away.  A faint noise comes out of Tim’s throat, but Bernard’s already gone, leaving Tim in the feverishly warm room.  He’s damp with sweat; no, he’s damp from the rain outside and now it’s warming up, sticking uncomfortably to his skin.  It feels far away.

“Shit, dude, you’re bleeding,” Bernard says.  Tim blinks.  Bernard is kneeling in front of him, inspecting his one bare foot.  He has a small first aid kit open next to him, and he looks pale, his freckles stark on his face.  “Okay.  Okay.  Let’s get you changed, first, okay?”

Bernard puts dry clothes on the bed, and then coaxes him into shucking off his jacket while he unties his shoe with quick fingers, peeling off his damp sock.  Tim comes back to himself enough to mumble that he can change by himself, and Bernard turns around to give him some semblance of privacy while he slowly peels off his soaked clothes and changes into the dry things.  Bernard is taller than him and the long pajama pants come rolling over his feet, catching on his heel, and he spends an inordinate amount of time staring at that, his brain grinding in place, until he realizes he’ll get blood on the hem, and then he rolls the legs up, careful, to his ankles.

Then Bernard is wrapping a blanket around his shoulders, careful, and kneeling in front of him, taking Tim’s foot into his lap, and he has a damp washcloth and a bowl and the open first aid kit.  His hands are warm and sure, and he cleans the bloody heel, gentle, and it hurts but the pain is far away, like there’s fog between him and it, and Tim blinks and time passes and Bernard is rolling gauze over it and pinning it in place.

“You’re still really cold,” Bernard is saying, and he’s standing now.  His eyes are clear and blue, like sections of open sky, and he’s holding Tim’s hands.  He starts to let go.  “I have an electric blanket here, somewhere, hold on-”

Tim makes a noise in the back of his throat.  Catches Bernard’s shirt.

Bernard turns back, his hands settling on Tim’s forearms.  His face is freckled and his eyes are blue, catch the barest edge of the low light, and glow like fire, like sunrise.

“Tim?” he asks, worried.

Tim’s mouth works and nothing comes out.  His hands know what he needs, they pull Bernard forward, clumsy, and Bernard comes forward, obedient, until they fall back into the bed, Bernard’s arms bracketing Tim in, warm and close.

Tim’s voice finds its way out.  “Stay.”

Bernard’s ears are pink.  His eyes are electric blue, and Tim has a front-row seat to see the furrow between his eyebrows, the slow blink, the way his eyelashes flutter like gold thread against his cheekbone.

“Okay,” Bernard breathes, and it’s just a puff of air against Tim’s face, warm and alive.  Bernard closes his eyes, briefly, and opens them again.  “Okay.”

He lays beside Tim, half on top of him, and holds him close.  His weight is warm and real and it starts to pull Tim back into his body, enough that his hands feel real, and he closes his arms around Bernard’s back, holds him close, listens to his heartbeat.  He is coming back into himself, and he’s exhausted, and he hadn’t realized it, but now it pulls at his eyelids, tugs at his brain, pulling him under.

Bernard shifts, the blanket settles over both of them.  Tim makes a soft noise.

“I got you,” Bernard is murmuring, his voice low and sweet.  “I got you.  Go to sleep.”

He goes to sleep.

---

Someone is tapping on Tim’s window.

He raises his head, bleary, from his laptop where he’s been blowing through Babs’ halfhearted attempts to keep him out of the comms.  It’s seven, and dark, his face illuminated by the screen.  Constantine arrived at the Manor an hour ago, courtesy of the Batplane, and the garage opened ten minutes ago, which means they decided they didn’t need Tim and left him back at the Manor while they went out.

Everyone who would knock on Tim’s window is out in Gotham proper.  In the unreal, liminal space of the dark room, the conclusion rises to the surface, slow as syrup.

He gets to his feet.  Opens the curtains.

Not-Bernard blinks at him , his face pale and freckled in the moonlight.  The greenery coils over his forehead, a vivid crown.  His nose is one huge bruise, his throat is striped purple and blue, even in shadow.  The dried blood down his front is inky in the dark; his mouth and chin are red and his teeth are stained.

Tim isn’t in uniform.  He’s just Tim, right now, not Robin or Red Robin or anybody.  He should be scared, he should be wondering if Maybe-Dionysus knows who he is and how he found out.  Why else would he be here?

Tim just feels numb.  He opens the window, disables the alarm.  Folds his hands on the windowsill.

“Hi,” he says, blandly.

Not-Bernard is shaking.  His hands are folded, rubbing his arms, like he’s cold, or in pain.  The lack of one ritual object must be hurting him, or weakening him.

He looks at Tim.  His eyes are blue, blue, blue.

“Tim,” he says in a tiny voice.

Tim’s stomach drops out of the world.  He can’t breathe.  He’s frozen at the windowsill, and now the fear is here, sudden and heady and overwhelming.

“Bernard?” he croaks.

Bernard shakes in response, ducking his head, and it is Bernard, cold and miserable and pained and floating three stories up, at Tim’s window, still somehow human and real and here-

Tim grabs him, pulls him in through the window.  Bernard’s skin is freezing, his breath shudders in and out, pained.  He leaks blood from his nose and mouth onto the floorboards, plut.  Plut.  Plut.

“Bernard,” Tim’s mouth is saying.  “Oh god, Bernard-”

“Tim,” Bernard replies, and his hands come up, dig into Tim’s arms, cold and painful and anchoring.

How is he here?  How is he running his body- did Dionysus leave?  Why can Bernard still fly, why is the greenery still there, what does he need, oh god is he dying, he’s bleeding, he needs a hospital, he needs a magician, he needs-

“Tim-” Bernard is saying, his grip tight around Tim’s arms.  Tim’s hands come up and catch his elbows, supporting him, gentle, gentle.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Tim is saying.  “You’re okay, we’ll get you help, I promise, Berns-”

“No,” Bernard is nonsensical, voice high and pained and terrified, a cornered animal.  “No, no, Tim,”

“You’ll be okay,” Tim says.  “I’m going to call Batman, he’ll fix everything, alright?”

Bernard wheezes.  But Tim starts to pull away, to go for the phone, to call Bruce and tell him to get his ass back here, but Bernard lunges and grips his shirt.

“No!” he says, desperate.  “Please don’t- don’t leave me, please, Tim, I’m sorry-”

Tim’s breath rattles to a stop.

It’s everything Tim has ever wanted to say to his parents, everything he’s ever said to Bruce, to Dick, as they left him behind; it’s everything the tiny, miserable creature in his chest has cried out in longing of.  He comes back, instantly.  He can’t leave Bernard, not like that, he can’t be to Bernard who so many people in his life have been to him.

“I’m here,” Tim’s voice cracks as Bernard dips his head, his forehead knocking against Tim’s collarbone.  “I won’t leave.  I’m sorry, I’ll stay.”

Bernard sobs, and something in Tim’s chest breaks.

He curls around him, winds his arms around his shoulders.  Pulls him close.  Buries his nose in Bernard’s hair, smell blood and filth and faint shampoo, keeps him tucked close to his chest and neck, where he can feel his pulse through the thin skin there, so Bernard can listen to his heart.  There is blood on his shirt and he doesn’t care; Bernard crying into his chest, and he holds him, he just holds him.

“I’m sorry,” Bernard is saying.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”

“It’s okay,” Tim murmurs into his hair.  “It’s okay, don’t be sorry.  You’re okay.  It’s okay.”

“No, I-” Bernard’s breath hitches, and he squeezes Tim, hard.  Tim’s ribs protest and his arm shrieks and does not make a sound.  Bernard lets go, leans back; his eyes are red-rimmed and his face is bruised but his pupils are human and blue, flickering.

“I have to,” Bernard says, “I’m sorry, Tim, I- I gotta give you something.”

Tim’s heart drops into his belly, he squeezes Bernard’s hands.  “Berns-”

“No, no, listen, I don’t have a lot of- I’m running out of time,” Bernard says.  His eyes are wild, Tim’s stomach swims in horror.  “I- I have- fuck.  This is such a long story.  I’m possessed, right?”

“I-” Tim isn’t supposed to know.  Robin knows, but Tim does not.  “Berns, we’ll get you help, I promise-”

“Nno,” Bernard says, voice slurring momentarily, and he pinches his eyes shut.  Tim’s breath catches, but he opens them again.  “No, I- there’s- I have to, just listen.”

Tim’s stomach is churning; there’s a lump in his throat.  Bernard’s hands squeeze his, desperate.

“Okay,” Tim says.  “Okay.  I’m listening.”

Bernard exhales, and he looks so instantly relieved, his shoulders slumping.

“Listen,” he says.  “Dionysus- the other guy- he gave something to Robin.  You just have to- have to hold onto this until Robin comes, okay?  It won’t be long, Robin’ll fix it, you just have to- hold onto it- okay?”

Tim’s mouth is dry.  “Hold on to- to what?”

Bernard breathes out, lets go.  He curls into himself, his palms close to his chest, and for a horrifying second Tim thinks he’s going to faint, but he straightens, slowly uncurling, something clutched in his hands, held carefully, like something precious.

No.  No, no, no.

The heart pulses, slow, in Bernard’s cupped hands.  It is dark and purple-red, its veins delicate and lacy.

“I’m sorry,” Bernard whispers into that space between them.  “Dionysus wanted to choose, but- it’s mine.  He picked our death and he’s getting my body but this- this is mine, and I wanted to choose.”

Tim can’t take this, he can’t.  But Bernard’s breath hitches on a sob, and he says-

“I wanted to choose.”

Tim knows that.  He wants to have a choice even if he can never decide; he wants to choose what he does with his life and his future even if he can’t figure out what he wants; he wants people to stop making choices for him.

His heart is racing, his breath is strangled.  Bernard slides the heart into his hands, and it is warm, and pulsing, like a bird, something heavy and alive and fragile.

It pulses in his cupped hands, and he can feel his own heart beating against his chest, in echo.

“Just until Robin comes,” Bernard whispers.  “You only have to- have to hold on til then.  Please.”

“What if I hurt you?” comes out of Tim’s mouth, small and scared.

Bernard gives him a look, something unbearably fond and a little exasperated.  “You won’t, dumbass,” he says, and it’s such a Bernard response that Tim almost laughs, the fear in his chest cracking open, and then Bernard is leaning forward so their foreheads are pressed together.

“It’s not how I wanted to give it to you,” he says, softly.  “Not so literally, y’know?”

There is an obvious conclusion there, something that is creeping up on Tim slowly, slowly, but the heart is pulsing in his hands and his chest is expanding with something vast and overpowering.

“Don’t think this was on anyone’s bucket list,” he murmurs back, and Bernard laughs, something sawing out of him.  Looks down.  Looks back up again.

“Hey,” he murmurs.  “Tim, if I- if I don’t make it out.”

“You’ll make it out-” Tim says, instantly.

“Just-” Bernard’s hand comes around, flutters down.  Cups the back of Tim’s neck.  His hand is warm, warm, warm.  “Just… you changed my life, y’know?  Made me realize who I am.  Who I want to be.”

“Berns,” Tim says, softly, and then Bernard leans down and presses a kiss, damp and bloody and boyish, to Tim’s cheek.  His mouth is soft.  Tim’s brain shudders to a stop.

“I wish we could have finished our date,” Bernard says, softly.

Oh.

Something shudders open in Tim’s chest, something like sunrise, bright and alive.  It feels like the world falling into place, the pieces suddenly making sense, the broken and corrupted part of his head he’s been struggling with for months now shaking itself back into something solid.  Bernard likes him.  Like likes him, which makes him feel like a high schooler again.  Something in his chest is opening up and coming free, like a river breaking up winter ice, washing away the sickness that had begun to grow and fester there.

Bernard likes him.  Bernard put his heart in his hands.

Tim blinks and opens his mouth, but Bernard is gone.  The room is empty except for Tim, and the pulsing heart in his fingers, and the golden realization hanging over him, impossibly vast and incredibly close.

His heart thrums in his chest.  Bernard’s heart thrums in time.  He knows what he wants to do.

---

Steph and Conner are downstairs, which is not who Tim expected.

“They left you guys to babysit me?” he asks, suspicious, already moving towards the kitchen counter.

“Yeah.”  Conner is drinking something hot; it looks like tea.

“Y-up.” Steph hasn’t even bothered to change out of her suit.  If Alfred found out he’d throw a fit, but he’s still in England, so.  She’s texting someone- Cass, probably- with her feet kicked up on the table.  “It’s like they don’t know us.”

Tim’s best guess is that Dick insisted on coming so he could feel like he’s fulfilling his promise to not let Bruce do anything.  Babs is in the ‘cave on comms, and neither Damian nor Jason can babysit Tim for obvious reasons.  They’re probably banking on Conner being too worried to actually let him leave the Manor.

Joke’s on them.  Conner worries about Tim, worries a lot, but he's so entangled in his fear of becoming Luthor that he never actually stops Tim from doing anything.  Tim doesn’t know how much of that is healthy, but he’ll take what he can get.

“Great,” he says, climbing onto the counter and reaching into the top cabinet, pressing at its ceiling.  He’s sure Alfred knows where it is and just humors Tim, but the rest of the family should have no clue.  Sure enough, when he reaches into the hidden compartment there, his fingers meet kevlar.  “So we can’t leave through the cave?”

“Tim, you’re pretty hurt,” Conner says, but it's a token protest.

“Naw, Babs is entrenched there,” Steph says, because she’s the greatest.

“Old fashioned way, then,” Tim says, pulling out the suit.  It’s an extra one, but only a little bit outdated, back when he was first putting Red Robin together.  It’ll work.  “Conner, do you think you could fly both of us?”

Conner makes a face, but he sighs and concedes, “Yeah, probably.”

“Perfect.”  That only leaves where they’re going.  “Did they tell you where they think he is?”

“No.” Steph makes a face.  “Bruce thinks we’ll stay put, but Babs was definitely onto us.”

That’s not entirely an obstacle.  Tim could probably get into Babs laptop tonight if he really worked at it.  But it’s not quick, and she’d be expecting it.

“If you were Dionysus in Gotham, where would you hide?” he asks.

Steph and Conner look at each other, thinking.  Steph shrugs.

“Denny’s parking lot?” she says.

---

They don’t find him at a Denny’s parking lot.  They find him at a Waffle House.

“Oh shit,” Conner says, hovering sixty feet over the city proper.  Steph clings to his back like a monkey, leaving his arms free to hold Tim without jarring his injuries.  “Lightshow, check it out.”

Down the street, something brilliant and dusty gold is lighting up the sky.  Flashes of pink travel through it, and yellow of Constantine’s magic interweaves with it, tiny, delicate threads of runes and circles.  The buildings are marbled with greenery and ivy.  A silhouette of a vigilante does a flip through the sky, backlit by the gold and chased by darting plants, and oh yeah that is definitely Nightwing.  Perfect.

It looks like Dionysus’s magic is winning.  The runes come and encircle it, and it expands, drowning them out and forcing them down, and in the street there is howling and laughter, manic and joyful.  Even at this distance he can hear the music, and he watches Nightwing and Robin leap through the light like moths over flame, ducking and weaving.

Whatever theories they had about the ritual items taking away his power were clearly bogus.  The music pounds in his chest, heady, and Tim takes a deep breath.

“Drop us here,” he instructs, and Conner swoops down.  “Stay out of range.”

“Got it, Rob.”  He squeezes Tim one last time, and then his muscles shift in a way Tim recognizes immediately.  “Give ‘em hell.”

He throws Tim, catapulting him through the air, and Tim unfurls, graceful, firing off his grapple at the height of his arc.  Behind him he can hear Steph following, launching herself off Conner’s back.

The center of the golden fire is a broken open Waffle House, the roof in ruin, the sign broken and its letters scattered across the ground.  Despite absolutely being disconnected from electricity, the letters glow electric yellow and gold, magnified a hundred times brighter than they should, a spotlight against Gotham’s pitch black sky.

In the middle of the light is a silhouette, wreathed in greenery and flame, floating above the buildings, watching Nightwing and Robin with interest.  The plants chase after them with inhuman speed, and Bernard’s face is barely recognizable, his eyes dark pits in his face.  Below them, Batman is wrestling with thick greenery at the base, keeping it off of Constantine, who's thrown off his trenchcoat and rolled up his sleeves and is cursing up a storm, glowing electric yellow from his own magic circles beneath and around him.

Red Hood is struggling with a man, big and quick enough to be a problem.  Tim decides his entrance on a whim, redirecting his body and swinging close.

Jason curses, loudly, when he hurtles into the guy’s side.  He roars, pained, but goes over, momentarily stunned, long enough for Jason to shoot him.  He wavers, almost gets to his feet, before his eyes roll back and he slumps over, unconscious.

“Goddamnit, Replacement, warn a guy,” Red Hood complains, and then there’s shouting over his comms Tim can hear from here.

Then Oracle is speaking in his ear.  “You shit,” she says, but she sounds more resigned than mad.  “Patching you two in, don’t fuck around with that arm.”

“Yes ma’am,” Tim replies, dryly.

“Don’t fuck with Tim’s arm, got it,” Steph says as she lands beside him.

“I will stream the bee movie to this line, I swear to god-”

“I feel like that’s a war crime-”

Tim is already moving again, swinging around the blaze of light.  The music is roaring in his ears now, something he can feel in his chest and barely hear the comms over.

“Red Robin,” Batman rumbles, disapproving.

“Batman,” Tim replies, because he can.

“Spoiler,” Steph says, because she doesn’t like being left out.

“Red, your injuries-” Dick says, and then Damian is adding, “Tch, typical,” which is not something he needed to say at all, and then Constantine’s voice growls over the comms, “Can we save the family spat two goddamn minutes, thank you.”

“Situation’s changed,” Tim says, as airily as he can manage.

“Just tell me you didn’t bring Superboy,” Jason complains.

“Superboy’s staying back,” Steph replies, as Tim lands.  He aims the grapple again, but something draws his attention, and he just ducks a huge vine swinging overhead.  It forces him forward, and he has to scramble onto a fire escape, and then the light is around him, shooting pink and gold sparks, and it doesn’t burn but the music pounds in the back of Tim’s head.

Dionysus descends, hovering a bare ten feet away, looking at him from out of Bernard’s face.  His expression is open and wondering, intrigued, his eyes purple-black and leaking tar.

“You’re new,” he says, interested.

Tim pulls himself up and offers his best, charming smile.

“I’m really not,” he says.

Dionysus’s eyes light up, literally; they glow from the inside with points of sunlight.  He comes closer, the music louder and stronger, yet somehow it doesn’t seem to drown everything else out like it has before.

“Mortal,” he breathes.

“Miss me?” Tim says, smiling, careful to not telegraph his movements, and then he shoots his staff out to crack it across Dionysus’s leg.

Dionysus doesn’t yelp or scream, instead he laughs, manic and high, but the force of it spins him just a little and that’s all Tim needs.  He throws himself over the edge of the fire escape, fumbling with his grapple, hurtles away.

“Red!” half a dozen voices are saying, and then Batman is snapping out, “Report!”

“Uninjured,” Tim says, automatically, and his chest is full of light and he feels like laughing.  “Got his attention, though.”

“Oh, great.”

“Nice going, Replacement.”

“What’s the plan?” Tim replies, instead of half a dozen snotty one-liners.

“The plan is find his goddamn heart,” Constantine growls over the line, “Fucking bastard’s playing good at hiding it-”

“Got it,” Tim replies.

A beat.  The light blazes gold, pink, purple, the air smells like wine and honey and seawater.  Then the comms burst into chatter again, largely Damian going “Why did you not say so at the Manor?” and Jason going “Oh, gross,” and then Dick shouts “Down!”

Tim throws himself down, and he can see half a dozen shadows doing the same.  The light flares impossibly bright, sparking, and Damian makes a sharp, high sound.

“Robin!  Robin, report-”

“I got him,” Red Hood growls over the line.  “Fucking hell.”

“Hey!” Constantine barks.  “Did he give you the heart?  Willingly?”

“Yes,” Tim says, already looking for Damian and Jason, staying low to the roof.

“Thank christ, this might actually work-”

“We’ve got company over here,” Spoiler says, followed by a short grunt.

Tim scrambles to his feet, looks over the side of the building.  In the streets below, people are starting to swarm, drunken, laughing.  Some of them are singing, raising their hands, others are starting to push each other, sparks of a fight ready to catch and blaze up.

“Nightwing, Spoiler, crowd control,” Batman growls over the comms.  “Robin-”

“He’s Dionysus crazy,” Red Hood replies, terse.  “I’ve got him- fuck, ow, you slippery little shit-”

“Two of us can’t do this forever-”

“I need three minutes, max-”

“I’m coming, hold on-”

“I have Dionysus,” Tim says, and he hurtles towards Constantine before Bruce can start lecturing him.  “B, if you take crowd control-”

Batman’s silence stretches uncomfortably long, judgement packed into every moment of it.  But then he rumbles, “Be careful,” and Tim won’t ever have a better opening.

He lands next to Constantine, who is kneeling and frantically drawing on the ground with shimmering chalk.  He doesn’t even look at Tim, just scribbles runes in cramped handwriting, speaking rapidfire.

“When all the light goes woosh, jam the heart in his chest and stab him,” he raps out.

“We don’t kill,” Tim says, immediately, grip white-knuckled on his staff.  “Figure something else out-”

“Dowd won’t die,” Constantine replies, short.  “Probably.”

“Probably?”

A chunk of concrete the size of a car comes hurtling through the air; Tim dives to the side, but Constantine throws his hands out; the yellow magic flares into a bright half-dome, shielding him.  It cracks alarmingly under the concrete’s weight, but holds long enough for it to roll off to the side, harmless.

“Mortal!” Dionysus calls.  He’s approaching quickly; Tim needs to draw him away from Constantine.

“Three minutes,” Constantine says.  “Catch!”

He throws something through the air, glittering; Tim catches it one-handed and it feels-

It feels-

The knife fits in his hand as naturally as breathing.  The blade flicks, steel and quicksilver, light and fast, and in its pouch in his belt the heart beats against his hipbone, joyful, trembling.  Tim’s chest is filled with light, he is unstoppable and beautiful, and in his hands are the vulnerabilities of something as vast and powerful as the sky and someone as kind and warm as an open window.

He shoots the grapple and hurtles up, the pitch black of the sky above and the starry expanse of Gotham beneath him.  He lands on a gargoyle perched over the streets, lit from below like smoke over wildfire, and stands on its stony back, balanced like a dancer.

“Dionysus!” he shouts.

Fifty feet away, forty feet, thirty feet away, Dionysus rises, blood spilling out his mouth, open and giddy, eyes wide and purple-black.  The greenery in his hair is a leafy crown, the golden light spills dusty and gorgeous across his shoulders, the body bruised and broken and moving utterly without care for pain.

“Mortal!” he calls back, manic and joyful.  

Tim is grinning, on the edge of laughter, but it’s not the violent, savage joy from before, even though the panpipes call and the drums howl.  This is something different, something lighter, and he pulls Bernard’s heart from his belt, gentle, gentle, and opens his hand, letting go of the knife.

The heart floats up into the air.  The knife hovers by his side where he drops it, weightless.  He is bracketed on either side; his hands are free, and life and death are free to follow.

Dionysus comes to a slow stop, his eyes very wide, his mouth open.

“Oh,” he breathes.  And then, “Does he know?”

Tim should deny, he should ask what Dionysus means, he should lie.  He doesn’t want to.

“I’ve never told him,” Tim says, honestly.

Dionysus’s forehead wrinkles, a little pinch between his eyebrows, but he smiles, gentle and small, head tilting.

“That's a pity,” Dionysus says, and he sounds like he actually means it.  “I think he would like to have known… poor bastard.”

That answers whether or not Bernard is aware.  Tim tucks that thought out of the way; he’ll get Bernard out, he will.

“I’m sure he’ll have plenty of chances to find out,” Tim replies, even, and offers his most winning smile.  “Dance with me?”

Dionysus beams, his face lighting up like the sun, as Tim flicks his bo staff out to its full length.  The vines beneath them are growing, snaking upwards, and the crowd is starting to roar.

“Until the end of time,” Dionysus vows, like a promise, like a prayer, and opens his arms as Tim darts forward to meet him.

---

It feels like an eternity.  It feels like no time at all.

It really is more dancing than fighting.  They spin over the lights of the broken Waffle House, Tim darting across the vines and spinning out of their grip before they can catch him, Dionysus laughing and following after, ducking blow after blow that Tim telegraphs for him to duck, fluid and beautiful.  It feels like playing at the park, like being fifteen (sixteen, seventeen) again, running after Bernard and Darla at the mall, listening to them laughing and shoving each other and him; it feels like being Robin back when it was fresh and new, playing rooftop tag with Dick and Bruce, reveling in their attention, loved at last.

He doesn’t know who he is or who he’s supposed to be; he doesn’t know who he wants to be.  The future stretches ahead of him, empty, and it used to scare him, it used to feel mindnumbing, that he would tumble into a desolate life, shoehorned into someone he hates being.  Now it doesn’t; it’s empty but there is space to plant things, things like this, like Bernard, like games played late at night and trips to the mall and the arcade and running, late at night, over the rooftops with his family, planting the seeds of trust in the ground so he might one day feel at ease with them again.  He doesn’t know everything he wants, but maybe this is good enough, this laughter and dancing over light with a god in his friend’s body, maybe this can be a start.

The light flares bright pink, then electric yellow, then gold again, rippling upward in a great cacophony of sound.  Dionysus stumbles in midair, starts to drift downward.  It’s time.

Tim leaps, lands on the ruin of the roof as Dionysus drifts to lay beside.  Around them, the vines are starting to shrivel, the music is pounding louder, a thunder of drums.  Dionysus looks up at him, wide-eyed, the crown vivid green in his hair.

Tim smiles at him, and he’s surprised that he means it, and he pushes Dionysus’s shoulders until he is laying back, starry-eyed and open-mouthed, raking his purple wine eyes over Tim’s face.

“I’m sorry,” Tim tells him, softly.  “I know you thought I’d never use it.”

Dionysus shudders, in awe, staring up at him in open adoration.

“Oh, oh mortal,” he says, in the same tone that someone might say oh lover.   “I am so glad to have been wrong.  Tear me apart, flay my skin, crack open my ribs.  I am yours, gorgeous, broken, savage mortal, yours for this life and death, and I will treasure it forever.”

Bernard’s heart pulses in his hand, delicate, sweet, and Dionysus lays back, his arms open, his eyes dark and adoring.  Tim ducks his head, squeezes the god’s shoulders, where his skin is fever-hot and burning, the open affection and trust touches that starving thing in him, makes him feel beautiful in his brokenness, lovely in his humanity.

“I do like Bernard,” Dionysus says, earnest, hopeful.  “You will tell him one day who you are one day, won’t you, mortal?”

Tim breathes out.  The light shimmers, unreal, the music is reaching a crescendo.

“Yes,” he promises.  Then, shyly, “I like him too.”

He presses the heart to the bloody wound.  It opens easily, adoring, the heart slipping inside like something sliding home; Dionysus sighs, satisfied, eyelashes fluttering as he gazes up into his face, and Tim brings the knife down.

---

A sunburst of light.

Tim blinks awake.  He is laid on the roof, looking up at the sky.  Around him, the plants are drying up, starting to fall away from the buildings; he can hear shouting and city noise and people calling over the comms and the start of rain, drumming around him and no music, no music at all.

A hitch of breath.  He turns his head, instantly.  “Bernard?”

The plants have fallen away from his head.  His nose is broken and swollen, his throat is striped with bruises, but the wound on his chest is closed and pink, like it was months old.  When he opens his eyes, bleary, they are blue, blue, blue.

“T’m?” he asks, fumbling, blinking.  Then he turns his head a little, says, “R’bin.  Rred. R’d R’bin?”

“Yeah,” Tim says, to all those names, and he takes Bernard’s hand.  Squeezes.  “Yeah, it’s me.”

Bernard squeezes back, with cold fingers, his eyes starry, and he closes them with a laugh, choked and surprised.  The roof is freezing against Tim’s back and must be worse against Bernard’s, but he sounds so happy, so relieved.

“M’alive,” he says, wondering.

“Yeah,” Tim breathes, “Yeah, you are.”

---

Tim doesn’t want to stay for clean-up.  He wants to follow the ambulance that took Bernard, or bolt home and get changed so he can hurry to the hospital.  He helps civilians out from under greenery and branches, directs a harried business owner to a WE owned charity that should help him rebuild his ruined storefront, patches bruises and calms fights.

“You’ll want to keep an eye on him,” Constantine is saying to Batman, when Tim finally escapes onto the roof.  Spoiler is gently nudging Robin with her foot while he stands, scowling, his little arms crossed.  Nightwing is still down in the crowd, helping people get situated; Red Hood is nowhere to be seen, which is normal for him.  “Getting possessed once makes it easier for something to possess him again.  Like an empty house.  Something might try to squat.”

“We’ll keep an eye out,” Bruce rumbles.

“He’ll probably be fine if he doesn’t go looking for trouble,” Constantine says.  “Call me if he fucks up, I’ll teach him a few tricks, how not to make a deal with Satan, all that.”

Tim thinks back to Bernard’s batshit conspiracy theories.  “We’ll probably be calling you.”

“Great,” Constantine says, sardonic.  “Lookin’ forward to it.”

He gives a sarcastic, two-fingered salute, and starts climbing down the fire escape.  Bruce sighs a rumbling sigh and turns to face Tim.

He tenses.  Waits for the inevitable decision Batman will make, that Bernard is dangerous, that he needs to leave Gotham or he needs to severe supervision.  Plenty of people in Gotham are dangerous; Gotham is Bernard’s home, Bruce doesn’t have the right to kick him out.

Bruce gently settles his hand on Tim’s shoulder, gives it a brief squeeze.

“We’ll help him,” he promises, gravelly.

Tim stares up at him, trying not to let his surprise show.  He doesn’t know if he believes him, he doesn’t know if he trusts him, but he wants to, he wants to.

He relaxes, slowly, his grip on his staff loosening.

“Okay,” he says.

---

The hospital does let Tim in, eventually.

It helps that he keeps a low profile so they won’t have to worry about the press, and he drops Leslie’s name a couple of times, and Wayne money really does do a lot.  He’s ushered into a little room that smells like antiseptic and cleaner, and the nurse even brings him a glass of water before leaving him.

Bernard is asleep, dressed in a thin hospital gown and cleaned of blood.  A huge pad of splints and bandaging covers his nose, and one leg is in a cast.  The rest of his injuries are largely internal, but five minutes of prodding in the hospital servers showed they think he’ll recover without any lasting consequences.

The light falls across his hair.  It’s gold, but just human gold, blonde in the sunlight, nothing godly or otherworldly.  It’s beautiful.

Tim sits next to him.  After a moment, takes his hand.  Bernard’s skin is warm but not feverish, and he sighs in his sleep, low, and his fingers curl back around Tim’s, slowly.  His eyelids start to flutter.

“Bernard?” Tim asks.  His chest hurts, hopeful.

Bernard’s eyes blink open, slowly, hazy.  That’s to be expected.  He’s on a lot of painkillers.  He tilts his head, meets Tim’s eyes.  His face breaks out into a smile, slow, beaming.

“Timm,” he slurs.  “Hey.”

“Hey.”  Tim is smiling, hard, he can’t stop himself.  “How’re you feeling?”

“Mm.  Good.  Llm.  Loopy.  Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”  Bernard smiles harder, his fingers moving around Tim’s.  Then his eyes widen and he looks down at their joined hands, and his mouth falls open, comical.  “Look!!”

He jerks Tim’s hand up so he can wave them between them, excited.  “Diid I.  I tol’ you! I tol’ you!”

Tim smiles harder.  “You did!”

“I did!” Bernard beams, his cheeks pink.  His heartrate monitor next to them has increased its beeping, which is hysterical and oddly sweet.  Then he flushes red and covers his face with his free hand; Tim lunges to keep him from accidentally jarring the IV out of his elbow.  “Oohhh noooo.”

“What?” Tim asks, when he’s sure Bernard won’t pull his IV out.  His throat tightens, concern welling up.  “What’s wrong, Berns?”

“I g’ve you m’heart,” Bernard moans.  “That’ss so ‘mbarrassing.”

The laughter bubbles out of Tim, wild and unexpected, he squeezes Bernard’s hand, and Bernard’s face is red and his freckles stand out against it and he’s so fucking adorable, peeking through his fingers at Tim with one bright blue eye.  Of course Bernard would be worried about that, instead of literally anything else from the past couple of days, he’s Bernard.

Tim wheezes, and Bernard’s mouth is half-open, looking at him with open adoration.  Tim’s ears flush, and he wipes the corners of his eyes.

“Y’r laugh’s so pretty,” he says earnestly, and Tim’s cheeks are warm.

“Thanks,” he says, and then, before he can second-guess himself, “Yours is pretty too.”

“Really?” Bernard asks, flabbergasted.  “Y’think m’pretty?”

He does.  He thinks he has for a while.  He squeezes Bernard’s hand.

“Yeah,” he says, and then because he wants to be honest, “I dunno what it means, not yet.  But I’d like to find out.”

Bernard inhales, and squares his shoulders like a soldier going to war.

“I can work w’that,” he says, solemn.  Then he squeezes Tim’s hand back, and lifts it between them like a promise.  “Timmm Drake.  Do y’wanna go on a date with me?”

He does.  He thinks he really does.

“Ask me when you’re really awake,” he says, fondly.  “But I think I’d really like that.”