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"You . . . think I should move into your dad's ancestral manor," Bernard said faintly.
Somewhere in the middle of this Tim had produced a fluffy blanket -- it was Nightwing blue -- and a washcloth, which he motioned for Bernard to wrap around the bag of frozen peas he was holding. "I mean," he said. He wore a small frown. "It's not that I think you should , there's a reason I haven't moved back into the ancestral manor, you know. But it's an option. It's not like anyone's using it right now."
Having the full intensity of Tim Drake's focus turned on you was a frightening thing. Bernard had turned up on the deck of Tim's houseboat in the middle of the night and Tim, after one sharp moment of shock, had fetched him the frozen peas and started running through everything from the possibility of pressing charges -- which, not likely -- to the locations of Gotham's various youth shelters. They had never actually talked about the superhero stuff, but Bernard had the distinct impression he was being Robin-ed.
Some of his trepidation must have shown on his face, because Tim took that moment to slide in next to Bernard on the bed, bumping hips lightly, and place a hand gently over Bernard's free hand. "Hey," he said. "It's gonna be okay." More quietly: "I wouldn't tell anyone if you didn't want them to know. We can figure this out ourselves."
Which was -- okay, fine, it was part of the problem; it was stupid to care about looking cool in this situation, but everything about this scenario was distinctly uncool. Thinking about people looking at him and knowing was -- worse. "What, you don't think your dad would want to know why your boyfriend is living in his ancestral manor?"
He said it lightly, but Tim's brow furrowed as though it was a serious question. "Well." He hesitated. "He might guess -- he's not actually as clueless as the tabloids like to say, you know -- but no, actually. I think if I told him you needed somewhere to stay for a bit he might just offer it."
It was also probably stupid to resent the fact that your boyfriend had been adopted by a nice, incredibly supportive former-billionaire who, in all likelihood, was still icher than Bernard's parents had ever been. It wasn't like he wanted them both to be boned.
(A memory: sitting in the windowsill of his childhood bedroom, a momentary escape from what had at that time been the most awkward Christmas on record, Tim on the phone. It was. A pause. He said . . . that I didn't need to worry about him so much. And that he wanted me to be happy.
The window had been cold; drops of condensation had begun to bead up around Bernard's forehead, where it rested against the glass.)
"Still not exactly the way I wanted to meet the parents," he said, instead of voicing any of that. Trying to make it a joke. It was stupid to be resentful, especially because it wasn't like Tim was just lucky. Not when his family life was clearly more complicated than he let Bernard see -- he was pretty sure, at this point, that Bruce Wayne was Batman -- and not when. When, well --
Tim smiled -- trying to joke back, clearly -- but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "Technically, you've already met the parents."
Yeah. That.
Bernard had never known Janet Drake, who had died in a terrorist attack nearly two years before he and Tim had met -- and wasn't that a hell of a sentence by itself -- but he'd been an irregular dinner guest of Jack and his second wife, Dana. Jack had seemed to like him, which, given how Bernard had been at age sixteen, maybe didn't say great things about his judgment; Bernard had a vague impression of him as a man's man, the kind of guy his dad would have enjoyed sitting down and having a beer with.
And -- Tim never talked about them anymore, not in all the time they'd been dating. They talked about Tim's siblings, all the various Waynes-by-adoption-or-custom, and his new dad; they talked about Louis Grieves and the gang war; Tim had told him, haltingly, about the long months when he'd thought that Stephanie was dead. They talked about Darla, even, even though it still hurt to think about her and, sometimes, Bernard thought he could spy the lurking edge of something like guilt on Tim's face. They didn't avoid the hard stuff.
But they never talked about Jack and Dana, the same way Bernard had never talked -- and Tim had never pushed him to talk -- about his parents. Which could be for any number of reasons, of course. But he had a feeling.
"Guess so," he said.
Tim's life was complicated, too, in a way Bernard hadn't been in a position to appreciate when they were in school together, a way he was only now beginning to glimpse the outline of.
Everything seemed more complicated these days. Bernard didn't miss the loudmouthed teenager he'd been, the one who'd needed everyone around him to know how cool and worldly he was. (What a joke.) But he missed the simplicity, sometimes.
"I bet you thought I was cooler in high school," he added, after a moment.
Tim huffed softly against his shoulder. "Bernard," he said, with an aching gentleness Bernard couldn't begin to read. "I thought you were absolutely insufferable in high school."
Yeah. That checked. Tim had always been smarter than him.
There was an arm snaking its way around his shoulders, and Bernard let himself lean into it. Tim was wiry but strong, which he supposed was another one of those Robin things.
"I--" Tim hesitated. Bernard could feel soft breaths against the top of his head. "I'm really sorry," he said finally. "About your parents."
There was a careful invitation in it: we don't have to talk about this, if you don't want. But we can.
Sometimes Bernard wondered how long it could possibly last, this Tim-and-Bernard bubble they'd built for themselves out of absences and careful elisions. It was becoming clear to him that the two of them lived in different worlds, and had only contrived to meet in the middle by chance. But other times --
Other times, Bernard thought that -- despite everything -- he was lucky too.
I want you to know you could know me , he thought, which was a line from a children's cartoon, but whatever. "Yeah, well," he said. "Their loss, I guess."