Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Bernard thinks he’s a pretty normal guy. A bit of an outsider, maybe even a bit clever, but he’s not particularly special. A classic boring Gotham kid: jaded to the terrifying news reports and somehow never expecting to be related to any shit that goes on, a relative or five with a rap sheet that would make people in other cities turn gray, and a superfan of their local superhero-slash-vigilantes. He’s not someone who thinks he’s lucky or special. Or a rarity. He’s a junior about to begin the horrendously humbling college application cycle, he’s aware of what he is.

But on that still-summery first day of junior year, things still look bright to him, and Bernard spots a tall figure by the edge of the school’s lawn, looking a little lost.

He’s not from here. It’s obvious: the tense posture, white-knuckle grip on a sheet of printer paper—some kind of schedule. No kid at this school prints their fucking schedules, the classrooms change around a billion times the first month of school, and they all knew that since middle school because it had been the exact damn same.  

And, hey, Bernard would like to think he’s a nice guy, and this new kid doesn’t look like a freshman in the slightest, so he’s a bit curious. 

“Hey! New guy, huh?” Bernard ambles over to the kid. He doesn’t bother being much louder than necessary, which isn’t a problem given the way the kid immediately startles at the address directed his way. New-kid turns around, clearly to look for the person talking to him. Bernard raises a hand in a sorta-wave to make it clear that he’s that person.

The moment they make eye contact, suddenly the thing that Bernard’s parents and television and all the internet forums told him about—the one that doesn’t happen to everyone, just the luckiest, and Bernard himself never even expected to count among them—begins to spark under his skin. Everyone who had the luck had sworn that it would be absolutely magical, a jolt of electric shock warming from his fingertips to his chest, and the girl—always a girl—on the end of his line would feel it too. A glowing red string would loop around his finger and hers and tie itself in a little knot right in the center. For both of them to see. 

So he looks up. And… wow. Just… whoa. Bernard’s teenage brain, so used to literature and music and tv about this one singular moment, is stunned. Shiny dark hair that manages to artfully drape itself over unfairly perfect skin, piercing blue eyes that, while anxious, carry a sort of weight to them that makes Bernard want to look at them longer. He’s short, but he’s definitely built. Eyelashes that delicately fan over his cheeks flutter and Bernard thinks, ah, this is it. His lips open, revealing two rows of dental-ad white teeth and Bernard feels so impossibly lucky. His soulmate is completely, heartstoppingly beautiful.

“Huh?” 

And well. Bernard feels obligated to show off a little. Make a good first impression.

“Hold up there,” he says, leaning forwards, cocking a single eyebrow in a way he thinks is sexy enough. Pretty-soulmate-boy stares back. “Transfer student? Foreign exchange? What’s your story?”

“Uh…” And oh fuck, oh fuck, his voice. Bernard had known that maybe he looked a little too closely at the other boys before. And he’d never really put a label on that in his head until now. His parents weren’t exactly open to the idea of homosexuality, even if Bernard was never offended by the idea. It’s a new era and all that shit. But like. Maybe he should reevaluate that if his lungs are doing that over two vocalizations from an obscenely pretty boy. Well… To be fair, this pretty boy is his freaking soulmate. “We just moved back to the city this summer.”

Moved back, he says. Makes sense. Most Gothamites end up linked here, like some kind of curse. Nobody else is quite equipped for this homegrown crazy. Bernard puffs up his chest, feels the new red ring around his finger vibrate with warmth. Holy shit. His soulmate! Bernard’s gotta look cool for him, right? His soulmate is so pretty it’s making his head spin a little. And yeah, maybe soulmates very often end up as just friends, like the founding trio of the Justice League, who have publicly acknowledged that they have a triobond (which isn’t crazy rare, but it definitely is really, really rare, considering that most people don’t ever meet a soulmate at all—and live perfectly comfortable lives with happy and loving relationships without a soulbond). But Bernard sees him and wonders… he hopes it can be more than that.  

So he’s gotta look… cool? Or like, sexy? Right? And knowledgeable! He wants to be worthy of his pretty soulmate’s attention. 

“Well, let’s get a look at you then,” Bernard pontificates, putting a dramatic two fingers to his chin as he leans a bit closer and tries not to grin against the rapid-fire thudding of his heart. Flirting should be okay, right? “See where you fit in.”

Actually, looking at him, Bernard notes that his soulmate is shorter, and he has to lean in to look at his unnaturally pretty face. Really, he’s gonna need to find a dictionary or something because pretty feels a little too weak for the way he’s making Bernard’s nerves fritz out.

“No visible face shrapnel,” Bernard helpfully profiles—fuck, this guy could do it if he wanted to, “so you probably don’t belong in that tattoos and piercings crowd.”

He walks a tight little circle around him, aiming for a sexy languid slink the way Catwoman does to Batman in the few shaky camera videos of them, but probably looking like a weirdo. Is his hair okay? Is his breath okay? Fuck, is he messing this all up?

“Your eyes are clear and you lack the telltale hemp-ish smell that would place you with the ‘heads. You’re packing quite a load of books, but I don’t get a nerd vibe from you. You obviously bathe too often and you don’t walk with a permanent cringe.” And hey! That one wins him a small laugh! “You could be a jock—you look ripped enough—but again, there’s all these books to consider.” Bernard shakes his head with fake-gravity and his soulmate’s smile creeps up a little more, holy fuck. He’s so pretty, Bernard is going to die. “Jocks and books don’t exactly mix,” he lectures. He stops in front of him, thinking. And of course he wouldn’t get an easy sort for a soulmate. Bernard feels like he could fly because… because he’s perfect. “You’re an enigma, grasshopper—“ fuck, he needs to think of a better pet name, stat— “I can’t tell which clique you belong in.”

“Is that important?” His soulmate asks, looking genuinely curious by the profiling Bernard just did and it’s cute. He’s so cute. Wait til he gets to hear the things Bernard saves for the people who are actually interested in the shit he has to say, like his Batman orphan theories. His soulmate would probably be interested in those, right? Maybe he’s got theories of his own. 

“It’s vital,” Bernard shrugs. “A place for everyone and everyone in their place. It’s how the world works.” And something about that seems to strike a chord with his soulmate, given the considering look on his face. But he regroups quickly and grins at Bernard.

“And what group do you belong to?” Oh, his voice is challenging and teasing. Bernard grins proudly.

“None,” he answers simply. A chance to show off—to tell him that they’re the same. “I’m the exception that proves the rule. A nation unto myself, and a roving ambassador between all cliques. Don’t try it yourself. It requires extraordinary finesse.” He grins widely and gets a matching one for his trouble. Oh, this boy is going to be bad for his heart. “In short, I pretty much run things around here. You’re lucky you met me.”

“I can see that,” soulmate-boy rolls his eyes, still amused but clearly getting a little tired of it.

“Let's check out your class schedule.” Bernard takes the initiative this time, snatching the crumpled schedule from his hands, determined to be useful and exciting and whatever it is that will make his soulmate look at him with a smile like that again. “You took Copper for history? Big mistake, son. He grades on the curve. You’ll want to transfer to Weingast. He’s afraid of getting sued again, so he gives across-the-board A’s, never tests and never takes roll,” he offers. A cheat code of sorts, Bernard desperately trying to insert himself into his soulmate’s mind as someone worth talking to. Even as a helpful info NPC for game tips or something just— Just as long as his eyes look up at him like that again. 

“Uhm…I’ll stick with this schedule.” Shot down. Bernard doesn’t let it phase him. Not yet. 

“A rebel, huh? Suit yourself. Name’s Bernard Dowd, by the way. Bernard, got it? Never Bernie. Call me Bernie and I’ll have to punish you.” That’s sorta flirty… right?

“Tim Drake.” And finally! A name! It suits him. Something about it is classic, easy to spell and doodle in notebooks like the teen heartthrob he is. 

“Glad to know you, Timmy,” he tests the name on his tongue, and sees an annoyed look flit across Tim’s face. 

“Tim,” his soulmate stresses. And yeah, Bernard can roll with that. He’ll find a way into nickname status soon. Or if Tim doesn’t like nicknames, they’ll figure something else out. But this is… it’s a little too youthful to think of big words like forever, but this is someone meant to fundamentally alter his life, be in it until the end. And if Bernard is lucky, really lucky, then maybe… maybe there can be love with Tim, because the instant he saw him he wanted with more force than he ever had anything else. 

“See? We’re getting along already. I sense we’re going to be good friends, you and me.” And then his eyes drift to the red thread that will bind them as… as something for the rest of his life. Bernard knows, intellectually, that it could be friendship. But he has said for his whole life that he would want a soulmate for him to love and have all to himself. If he has a soulmate, he wants to fall in love with them. He wants to fall in love with Tim. His eyes trail from the end clasped around his pinky to—

A spike of ice pierces Bernard’s gut.

There’s no knot. There’s no red thread visibly looped around Tim’s pinky finger. Instead, his string trails right into Tim’s chest. And Bernard’s never heard of that. Never heard of the soulmate system screwing up. 

But maybe that’s just what he is. Like he said: Bernard is the exception to prove the rule. 

He pastes on a smile and rambles some bullshit about girls and tries not to focus on the way his heart is breaking, just a little. If Tim notices the split second of grief before Bernard shoves it in a box to think about later, he gracefully doesn’t say a word. The rest of the day is a faint blur, buzzing and uncertain. And the moment Bernard makes it home that day, he buries his face in his pillow and cries for hours. His parents don't say a word about it, because that would require them to pay attention to him, so Bernard is left alone to form a game plan: and that’s just… being a soulmate. Maybe Tim isn’t meant to be Bernard’s, but Bernard is his, and a job description of a soulmate isn’t going to go away. Bernard can do this. 

According to the red ring on his pinky, he doesn’t really have a choice.

And Bernard never really makes it to nicknames, ‘cause Tim doesn’t seem to like them, but he does make it to other things as weeks pass. 

“Wanna skip classes and go somewhere?” Bernard asks, slinking up behind Tim. And Tim never even responds to it. Not even a yelp or an annoyed comment. This guy has a freaking radar for ears, though, so he’s not easy to startle as it is. Maybe he heard a specific squeak of his shoes. Bernard can always tell when Tim’s coming because of the string, but Tim just knows when anyone’s approaching him anyways. Bernard doesn’t get to be special in that regard. But it’s okay. Tim cocks his head.

“Uh,” Tim pauses in thought, then he shrugs lazily. “I mean, as long as I'm not skipping alone then sure.” 

“Where do you wanna go?”

“The arcade?” Tim’s pretty lips twitch into a wry smile. He’s so fucking perfect. 

“You know I’m down for whatever,” Bernard grins. “I still owe you ice cream.”

“Oh, yeah!” Tim laughs brightly and Bernard tries not to wonder what it would take for it to be a date, rather than just friends hanging out. Which is stupid, because it’s better to have what he’s got and hope in silence. He’s lucky just to be meant to be Tim’s friend, to be meant to be something important to him as they change each other’s lives. Or maybe as Tim changes Bernard’s… it’s seriously hard to say, when there’s very little information about unreciprocated soulmates. Getting and seeing the string is already uncommon, but something like this?

Bernard had looked everywhere when he was able to make himself stop crying, from research papers to novels to forums. All he finds are hypothetical studies, because who wants to admit to being lucky failures? Or maybe a failure of luck fits better, because he has the luck and he’s a failure. So lucky as to get a soulmate and he isn’t even meant to have one back. There are a few people on forums, posting AMAs and getting chewed out for lying instead of any genuine questions. And some of it didn’t match what he had, but a few posts did. Bernard doesn’t have the guts to comment on those posts. He doesn’t have the guts to say that he’s in it too and he can’t tell anyone because he doesn't have anyone to tell it to. What, his parents? They don’t care. They’d tell him that he’s better off that way and to drop it. 

Bernard beams at him, stomping down on the cold ache in his chest.

“Race you to the bus stop?” 

“You already know I’m going to win,” Tim raises a perfect eyebrow. But then he grins, a sharp and wicked thing. “Yeah, I’m in.”

It’s so damn hard, pretending to still like Darla, pretending to like literally anyone else, when Tim is right here. Bernard soldiers on. He doesn’t know what else to do. He’s tied to Tim. Tim with his probably real Stephanie. But if Bernard can pretend she’s fake, for just a little while longer, then maybe it can stay that way. He can keep pretending he’s meant to have a spot by Tim’s side, in his life. He can keep pretending that there’s a matching knot around Tim’s finger. He can pretend that the happiness he has now can last forever. 

So he pretends to like Darla and lets Tim call his bluff and embarrass him in the diner. He would let Tim have anything, because it means that Bernard is able to be a moon in his orbit for just a little longer. He wonders if this is how addictions start. 

(Quietly, though, Tim does apologize to him the next day and Bernard had huffed and pouted for a solid minute until Tim offered to buy him a milkshake and he instantly melted at the prospect of spending time together again.)

It’s almost funny. Tim is everything Bernard could have wanted in an other half. He’s got a razor-edge wit, and the kind of mind to at least find his theories amusing—though he has arguments of his own. And he’s sweet. Disgustingly kind to people around him and Bernard feels like a little plant stretching out his leaves towards the sun when he’s able to be in his presence. The one thing he doesn’t have is a matching loop on his finger. And, selfishly, it… really sucks. It sucks a lot. 

Weeks become months and Darla ends up alongside them. Like gravity or the forces that draw the little circles together in the nucleus of an atom, two becomes three. And Bernard doesn’t hate it. He really doesn’t. Is he disgustingly, horrifically jealous that Darla doesn’t get looked at funny for giving this heartthrob jerk cow-eyes? That Tim actually notices when she gets in his space, even if he doesn’t bat an eyelash when Bernard does? 

It could be that he’s comfortable with Bernard, or he trusts him. But that’s beside the point. The point is: yes, Bernard is horrifically jealous and wants to despise her. Perfect, princess Darla. Unfortunately she’s actually really funny, sharp as a tack, and a bitch in the best way, and Bernard actually adores being friends with her. 

“Darla! The queen of the school, in the flesh!” Bernard waves her over in the diner as she makes a face at them and ambles over, sliding next to Tim with a grin. She’s alone, as far as Bernard can tell. She makes herself alone a lot more nowadays, so that she can join them instead.

“What did you order for lunch? And can I have some?” 

“I’m surprised you’re even asking because you steal my food most of the time,” Tim says reasonably, but moves his arm so Darla can steal a french fry. The waitress, Marcie, looks over her shoulder, then turns to face them when she sees who it is. She waves her hand, her pen caught between two fingers, just a tiny bit.

“Darla, hon! The usual?”

“Yup!” She grins widely and waves an arm in a wide arc over her head. “Thanks, Marcie!”

“She puts up with us way too much,” Tim, the chronically anxious sweetheart that he is, mumbles. He fiddles with the paper wrapper from his plastic straw. “We’re all here together a lot. Are we loud, you think?”

“Of course we’re together a lot! I actually happen to like being around you guys,” Darla huffs with what sounds like irritation and no real heat. “Are you telling us you don’t, Tim?!”

“Darla! Of course not,” Tim stammers, mortified. “No, really— I, um…” So Bernard decides to be a good soulmate and step in here to Tim’s defense. 

“Well, yeah! Everyone’s just gonna have to get used to the three of us being together,” he cheerfully taps his glass to Tim’s with a wink. “One day we'll end up in rocking chairs on a porch together, complaining about everything.” 

“That far ahead?” Tim blinks, seeming stunned—shit, was that too much? Did Bernard go too far? But then Tim smiles, a tiny and shy thing. “Okay. But I want mine to be a cool high tech rocking chair.” Darla and Bernard laugh and Darla pokes Tim’s cheek.

“You’re stuck with us now, Tim!” 

And Bernard likes that. The prospect of Tim being stuck with them. Of him being bound right back to Bernard. 

“Yeah, by now if you asked me to help you hide a body, I totally would.” Bernard nods, feeling a little too exposed for saying it but no less genuine—he wants forever. Soulmates are meant for forever. “And I wouldn’t even charge you for it, but I might throw up.”

“Whoa?! Not charging him body removal fees?” Darla’s eyebrows rise and a gleeful smile with too many teeth flashes across her face. “Whoa, that’s a Gothamite expression of adoration right there, Bernie. When’s the wedding?”

“Hm. After I finish burying it, I’ll go to the altar with the dirt in my hair,” he says solemnly, playing along instead of actually thinking about it. But he would. He really would.

“Wha— Bernard!” Tim’s cheeks turn bright pink and Darla cackles like they’re being ridiculous and silly. Him, marrying Tim? The string ringed around his finger throbs with warmth and Bernard aches with longing. 

“I’m serious!” Bernard laughs, throwing his arm over the slippery guy’s shoulder and giving him a noogie. He knows Tim can slip out of the hold but he just tries to shove Bernard’s hand away. 

Because it’s so damn easy, when Tim makes a dumb joke not even five minutes later and Bernard laughs so hard his milkshake nearly comes out his nose and Darla’s does and she whacks him in the arm and they all laugh again. Or when they all sneak out of class to watch movies at a shitty cheap theater and spend the whole time making fun of the characters loudly and the other moviegoers start chiming in with agreements or arguments as they all talk during the movie to Tim’s mischievous delight and Darla’s mortified disgust. 

And Bernard thinks… he thinks okay. Maybe Tim is fundamentally changing his life, because Bernard for the first time feels settled. He’s happier than he’s ever been.

As long as he manages to push down how embarrassingly quickly he's fallen in love with him.

He doesn’t actually know how much Tim learns—or cares to learn—about him, but Bernard comes to know Tim really well. Tim’s mostly a closed book, and he’s an expert in making people overlook him, but Bernard was made to look. He knows that Tim likes to skateboard and play video games. He can play chess like a tactical monster and has crushed the first seat on the school chess team without much real effort; he loves his dad more than anything and desperately wants his attention even if Mr. Drake is angryangryangry all the fucking time; Ms. Winters isn’t his biological mother but Tim so badly wants to love her like he is. And Bernard can tell he feels guilty about that, too, because he misses his mother too. 

“You deserve a whole lot better, you know,” Bernard tells him quietly after his father makes a sharp, mean comment as Tim leads him to his bedroom. He didn't understand what the comment was actually referring to, but Tim had flinched harshly when he said it. Which says a lot considering how rarely-ruffled he is by most shit. This is a guy who head-on told some jocks to divert their beatdown onto him without a single degree of change in his face. 

It shouldn’t change anything. But learning about Tim’s tiny little darknesses and the shape of the cracks in his heart make Bernard selfishly want him. He wants his attention, wants his time, wants Tim to think highly of him. He wants to kiss him and hug him tight to his chest. He wants, he wants, he wants.

Bernard is never gonna say it. He thinks he’s meant to want and get used to wanting. There isn’t a reason for Tim to give a shit about him. He’s not the one with a thread looped around his finger, Bernard is. 

“I… don’t know,” Tim says softly, eyes fixed on something in the distance that Bernard can’t see. He wonders what memory is playing in Tim’s head. “I… I did something that made him… pretty angry, not too long ago.”

“Oh yeah? Does that mean that he gets the right to be like that to you?” Bernard frowns, upset. Tim is kind and good and wonderful and Tim hates seeing him like this. “You’re a good person Tim, but you don’t need to just take it.”

“Am I?”

“I wish you could see yourself the way I see you,” Bernard sighs. “You’re my best friend, Tim, and I know you deserve to be treated with more respect from the people you care about. You know… Tim?”

Bernard cuts off when he realizes that Tim is staring at him, mouth dropped in surprise. He looks… amazed, actually. What did Bernard say? Shit, was he too obvious about his feelings? But Tim’s question catches him completely off-guard. 

“Did… did you just call me your best friend?”

“Yeah,” Bernard grins, feeling a little breathless when Tim smiles back. It’s a huge, gleaming thing, and Bernard rarely sees a smile like that on his face. “I did.”

He wishes so hard that time would stop right here.

And Bernard has known, like all the kids in this stupid fucking city know, that they’re the kind of kids they call “at risk” for nothing more than being here. By virtue of this fucking city, they are dead kids walking. Victims of the most dangerous city in the States, no matter what those lame Blud’ kids claim. And fuck, now is so very much not the time to be thinking about that. It’s not the time to be thinking about any of it. There are gunshots in the air and metal casings on the floor, someone wails and begs for mercy in the distance, and Darla’s hand is locked tightly in his. She’s bleeding, and Bernard is going to throw up. They’re in a tiny room, and it’s so dark and it smells like the time he had gone to the marina, once: iron and salt. Blood. Does he pray? He could, he thinks, if he knew how to. He’s not really religious, it’s hard to be religious in a city like this one where tragedies happen every day and there’s never a higher power to give a shit when you need one. Their higher power is a man with fancy gadgets and a terrifying fighting skill. But there are no gods in Gotham. It doesn’t matter, Bernard can’t make his mouth move to pray anyways. His head is focused on the fingers locked with his. 

Did you know? He nearly tripped on a freshman who was sprawled right there in the hall, red pooling around him. She had looked up at him with foggy eyes and said “I don’t want to die” and then faded right there. 

Darla’s shirt is turning red. Bernard feels his shirt get wet too, absorbing blood. Gunpowder reeks, Bernard learns, and—

In the distance: BANG!

Did you know? That a dying person is so so so so heavy when they’re dragging you down? 

The blood is hot and sticky as it pools in his clothes. Darla whimpers and someone screams and someone else laughs, loud and angry. Bernard is going to throw up. On the end of his bloody red string, stabbing right into Tim’s chest, and they huddle there. Popping sounds and another begging sob and cheerful yelling in the same note. There is no candy-colored red-and-blue casting the walls in some kind of hope, because nobody has come to save them. 

The bigger players have made this jungle into a battleground and the local fauna are just to hide or die. Scenery to dress a tragedy with their corpses: Welcome to Gotham. 

Bernard is going to die here, tucked around Darla’s body, uselessly pressed tight to try and stop the bleeding. She’s cold and he presses himself around her tighter. He can’t breathe, lungs clogged with something. He can’t look at her. She’s dying in his arms and nobody’s coming and Bernard is too much of a fucking coward to look at her face as she dies.

“Stay awake,” he murmurs under his breath to her. Maybe that’s a prayer. Maybe it’s begging. Maybe it’s both. If she responds he doesn’t even know. The bullet, tiny metal, is lodged inside of her too deep to retrieve. Past the point of no return. Bernard isn’t an EMT or a doctor. He cannot save her, and she is going to die. She is going to die and he is going to die and he’ll never have… he’s so young. But what is there to do?

“Where are you going?” A last desperate plea to his beautiful, impossible soulmate. And Tim’s holding a baseball bat, bloodred trail tying them together. And he can’t stop him, can’t make him stay tied down where it’s safe and—

Bernard loses time, eyes glued to that thread. He can’t look at Darla, can’t look at anything but that thread. If it’s there, Tim’s alive. As long as it’s here, he’s okay.

The thread stays in his line of sight. 

But Tim doesn’t come back.

Bang, goes the door. Bang bang. Bernard stares at the thread on his hand. Still there. Right? Right? It’s not blood, he thinks. It buzzes with warmth. Tim lives on. Tim is okay. His impossibly brave, beautiful soulmate is still alive. He doesn’t know when Darla stiffens, when she twitches, or when she had first gone limp against him.

“Sweetie, can you…”

“...hear us… unresponsive…”

“...shock…”

“...rigor mortis… need to break the fingers…”

“...seperate them…”

Bernard flinches, coiling around Darla’s bloody corpse with a strange and animal howl. No, no, no, they can’t touch her. Can’t take her. They can’t hurt her any more. He won’t let them.

“NO!”

A large hand yanks his shoulder and presses him down. Bernard thrashes to the beat of the sickening krr-ack! as they snap a dead girl’s fingers from his hand. She’s bleeding and dying and dead and oh fuck, Bernard is going to die. Maybe he’s already dead. Someone says something to him, wraps something around him, pushing him and forcing his steps as he stumbles into night air. His ears are ringing.

The smoggy sky washes out all the stars.

He’s going to die.

The red ring on his finger is still there, tied as secure as the sunrise. So even if he dies, Tim is alive. Good. Good, Bernard thinks hysterically, a laugh tearing out of his throat. He’ll never get to tell him. But he was never going to, anyway. 

“Where is he,” he manages to gasp and beg the first person he sees. And the next, and the one after that too. “Where is Tim?”

And none of them have any answers for him.

Chapter Text

Bernard’s parents leave him alone as soon as he gets home, giving him space. Of course they do, because they don’t know what to do with him anyways. Usually he would be angry about it but right now Bernard kind of appreciates it. On drunken wobbling feet he staggers into the bathroom. He doesn’t turn the light on or look into the mirror. He’s afraid of what he’s going to see. 

Afraid. Was Darla afraid? Somehow he can’t get his brain to remember if she was. His hands are still sticky with her dried blood. Oh, fuck, her blood is still on his hands. Crusted underneath his fingernails like dirt. Grave dirt. They’re gonna bury her. Because she’s dead.

He twists the faucet and pushes down on the pump of the soap. Pushes harder, and harder, and harder. He throws the bottle across the room with the force of his hand. It hits the wall with a clatter. Sticky soap pools like blood. Blood. Oh fuck. He’s going to puke. 

Fssssh goes the water splattering against the sink and swirling into the gaping hole of the drain. The bottle doesn’t move. Bernard stares at it. Then he turns around. He doesn’t want to see it lying there. Pathetic as Bernard himself is.

Bernard scrubs them until it’s his blood covering the red line around his finger, drowning it out. He scrubs, dragging his nails up his hands, until his skin burns and tears and he doesn’t stop, fingers scratching and scratching and he’s never going to get her blood off of his hands. He hadn’t been able to look her in the eyes. He had loved her, in a different kind of way. And now she’s dead. It has a permanence his young brain cannot fathom. She’s dead.

She wasn’t even old enough to vote. 

He vomits sticky bile into the toilet and it burns sour in his mouth and nose. 

Bernard’s eyes are hot and his throat closes and all he can make are high keening sounds and his eyes burn until it breaks and he’s sobbing. Snot drips down onto his lip and his eyes burn and his hands are raw and bleeding and he bawls. He doesn’t know what else to do. He’s in pain and helpless. Helpless as a baby. Bernard is so fucking useless. 

The red ring is right there. It’s right there on his finger. The news is giving updates in hushed and solemn tones downstairs. They already have a list of confirmed victims who were students. They have identified that freshman who had begged them, who were helpless, instead of a real higher power, as they, a unit of three, hunted for shelter while loud shouts and screams blurred in the background. They have identified that begging wails they had heard from the room. They have identified Darla. So fast. It’s all moving so fucking fast.

Bernard loses time, staring at his hand with bleeding scratches, soaking onto his bedsheets. His own wet and torn skin is under his nails. He hears noise but doesn’t move, hand wrapped around his phone. He hasn’t changed out of his bloody clothes. Darla’s blood is still on his shirt, soaked into the fabric. The red ring is there alive, alive, alive. A beating thrum like a beating heart and Tim is alive. So he wraps his fingers around the cellphone and waits. He waits. Hours pass. The phone buzzes in his hand, group chats and distant relatives and everyone trying to figure out who is alive. Who survived. Bernard watches every single one. Waiting for a single name. A single name, tied to the boy on the end of his string. Who is alive. Who is alive and he could be hurt, he could be anywhere. Bernard presses the call button.

“It’s Tim! Sorry I can’t get to the phone right now, please leave a message at the beep, and I’ll call you back!”

“It’s Tim! Sorry I can’t get to the phone right now, please leave a message at the beep, and—”

“It’s Tim! Sorry I can’t get to the phone right—”

“It’s Tim! Sorry—”

But Tim never calls.

Bernard waits, but Tim just up and fucking disappears. From their school, from the ravaged halls with bullet holes in the plaster and blood stuck between the cracks of the floor and too many missing students. From their lives. And Tim is very much alive, Bernard knows that better than anyone in the world. Tim wasn’t among the injured count. Because every single kid who was numbered as injured is accounted for. It was a well-documented massacre, a well-documented aftermath. But the knowledge forces Bernard to draw the only possible conclusion: Tim’s just… gone. Picked up and left. Faded from his life like a cloud blown away by the wind. 

Bernard shouldn’t blame him for it, but he kinda does. 

School is canceled for the week, maybe the month. Apparently even in Gotham a gang war in your halls is a big deal. Time stretches itself into some shape that’s long and agonizing in those days. Nobody knows what to do with the wide open stretches of daylight, now that school is closed. Some of the kids hold a vigil for Darla. Tim doesn’t even show. Bernard waits in numb silence, but nobody approaches him. They all know that she died in his arms. Some of them saw the two of them taken out together.  

“The number you have dialed…”

Bernard’s parents take the payout from the state and decide to send him off to some other school next year without letting him have a say in the matter, but they agree to let him finish the year at Grieves. And Bernard can’t— he can’t—

The shitty grief counselor the state paid for tells him to focus on the “right now”. But the “right now” sucks too. 

His junior year restarts in halting steps. He goes to his classes with teachers who aren’t focused either, ignores the now empty seats in half-filled classrooms, shuts his brain off and lives like a drone. His red string drifts in front of him, carrot and stick lead bobbing in front and Bernard doesn’t know what to do. Tim just moves on. He never comes back. Did he ever visit Darla’s grave? Will he? Or is the dead girl just as forgotten as the boy he had left wrapped around her in a dark corner?

“... is not in service…”

They talked about it on the news for a few weeks, people from places not Gotham arguing about policy and other garbage that means nothing to the people here. Eventually there was a new tragedy, a new crime, to talk about and use for talking points. And they were all forgotten, reduced to numbers in a report buried in a pile of other reports. The empty spaces are forgotten by the people who don’t have to look at them. They’re all just casualties of this city, in the end.

So Bernard drifts, melts into a cloud of air with nobody to see him, a collection of molecules loosely held together with thread. He erases his feelings and his nightmares and Darla’s ghost by getting high. Agatha lost her girlfriend in the shootout that killed Darla, and fell in with the potheads trying to make the ache go away. She’s willing to sell him decent weed for cheap. And eventually, weed’s not enough anymore. Weed doesn’t make Darla’s ghost stop crying and asking why he didn’t try harder. The ghost of Darla is angry, most days. Sometimes she’s sad. And Bernard doesn’t have answers on the days she’s angry. On those days she asks why he didn’t get her to safety. She asks why he didn’t save her. And Bernard doesn’t have answers for her. 

“Please check number…”

He doesn’t even have answers for her when she asks him where Tim has gone. That one stings too. It aches. 

Bernard hates thinking about Tim. Because, despite being abandoned like an unlovable dog, Bernard is still in love with him. He hates how he’s so pathetically owned because a beautiful boy decided that Bernard was worth looking at and seeing, for once in his life. Because someone had yanked him into the world only to leave him behind when it crumbled. He had changed Bernard’s life, the way soulmates are meant to. He has changed his life by taking it and ripped apart any of the sanity Bernard has left. Bernard should have died in that school building. Maybe he did. Maybe he did die in that shootout and this is his hell.

“...and try again.”

In the news one day, a few months later, Bernard sees that Timothy Drake has officially been taken in by Bruce fucking Wayne. The prince of this hellscape city, elevated above all the drivel. And Bernard is just the peasant sworn to Tim, bound to his service for the time they were together. Because Tim’s moved on, and Bernard alone simply wasn’t enough to make him stay with them. There’s a dead body between them and Bernard isn’t enough. 

Maybe the state of his thread should have made it obvious from the very first time they locked eyes on that school lawn with the yellowing and patchy grass: only Bernard is supposed to hold on, here. To Tim, he might as well have been a time pass. To Tim, knowing or not, Bernard is just someone’s life to irreparably, wretchedly take. And take, and take. Bernard is meant to give but he has no way to do that because Tim is gone and Bernard is simply forgotten, trampled into the footsteps along someone else’s path, Tim’s proverbial roadkill. Not even worth eating. Not even worth burying. Leave it to rot or get taken away by the scavenger animals, entrails spilling out into the dust.

“The number you have dialed…”

And isn’t that the real fuckin’ kicker? Isn’t that just the funniest point of it all? Bernard is losing his fucking mind, cracking into itsy bitsy little pieces, because he’s all alone when that was his original state. Bernard was originally alone as it was. An outsider pretending to be a universally-welcomed guest to ignore the fact that there was no place to return to. And Tim and Darla had taken him and made him into something else and then they put him back on the street to rot. They left him behind, crushed by someone’s tire or foot or car hood. And now he’s rotting and crumbling into dirt for worms and other squiggly things to chew on. For maggots to make a home inside of him. 

Classes come and go and time stumbles around like a drunkard trying to find a bathroom door at the end of a hallway, veering sideways and stumbling backwards. Bernard lets it take him without complaint. There’s nobody to complain to, in the end. Bernard burns the theory boards from his room in the backyard and stares vacantly at his mother when she yells about the smoke. Sometimes he reads about soulmates and gets so angry because why him? What had he done so terribly wrong to be cursed to have such a personal binding to someone? What has he done to have his soul fucking chained to someone who will never love him? Who left him behind with the corpse of their friend without so much as a backward glance? 

It’s not fair, maybe, to be so angry. Maybe Tim’s as broken by it as he is. Maybe Tim still wakes up screaming like he does. But at least Bernard gave enough of a shit to contact him. At least Tim meant enough to Bernard for him to want to see him afterwards. And Tim doesn’t have to have the knowledge of what he is to Bernard. 

“... is not in service…”

Time slogs forward. Bernard goes to his new school, newly seventeen. The other kids don’t talk to him, and he doesn’t talk to them. It’s a nicer school than the one he is used to, upper middle class kids whose criminal parents are all white-collar. The building is somewhat well-kept. It’s missing the graffitied desks, the names and call signs scratched into walls, the grimy and overused gym equipment. Here, it’s comparatively shiny and new, floors waxed enough for his shoes to squeak. All unfamiliar to Bernard in his beat-up sneakers. Grieves had kids with money, but not in numbers like his new school does, where the student parking lot is so much nicer than the teachers’. He stands out, a visibly marked fringe-dweller. Which is fine, since he’d rather spend the time floating on drugs than spend it sober. If his head is stuffed with cotton, his ears can’t hear. He spends most of his time asleep or high enough that he might as well be. 

That’s fine. Bernard doesn’t really like being awake anymore, anyway.

“Please check number…”

And that’s when he meets them, buying the strongest stuff he can possibly get his hands on. It’s a new guy. Bernard’s seen him hanging around the library, selling to the other reckless kids hiding out in here. But he’s been hanging around the library. Sometimes he had thought this guy had been looking at him, but maybe he could just tell that Bernard would approach him and ask what his prices are. Bernard probably could be classed within a group: the people desperate for an escape. 

“Hey,” Bernard says. “What’cha selling?”

“Depends on what you’re buying,” the dealer winks. “I don’t charge that much. I like to spread the love.”

“Spread?” Suspicion ticks up a notch. Bernard’s lived his whole life in this shithole city, he knows what to look out for. Shit, does he know who recently escaped from Arkham? Then again, maybe he doesn’t care. If it kills him, does he really care? No, not really. “This shit laced?”

“Naw,” the dealer laughs. “I… oh.”

“What?” 

“You have a soulmate, I see,” the dealer says, peeking at Bernard’s fingers. Is his dealer high or something? People who don’t have the end wrapped around their own finger can’t see a string unless half of the bond is dying. But maybe Bernard is dying. Maybe he’s dying right here, standing up straight, the molecules of his body detaching and crumbling into dust. 

“What?”

“You’ve got a red string. You must feel very lucky,” the dealer says wryly, shuffling small plastic bags. And Bernard feels familiar anger singe the cotton in his head. He doesn’t have something that precious. What he has is a mistake from the world’s most mysterious and coveted existence. The system’s bug, the glitch. Bernard had been handed despair in the shape of hope.

“No, I don’t. I have a fucking ball and chain. Now are you gonna sell or not,” he snarls. And the dealer smiles at his reaction, wide and broken and Bernard sees his own twisted-up reflection in those shiny white teeth.

“Is that so? Even luckier then. You are special.” And Bernard’s never truly been special. He’s not special among the groups of kids he separated himself from and placed into neat little boxes like some social genius, knowing he just never found his own. He’s not special enough to have a red thread that means anything. He’s not special enough to make his parents give a shit about him or to make the boy he loved stay. He’s not special to be happy or special enough to be unhappy in a way that’s worth it. 

“That so?”

“I can help you, lost lamb,” the dealer grins, handing Bernard a tiny bag of shiny powder crushed real finely. “I’ve been found, and now you have. There’s a place for people like us. Do you want to come with me?”

It’s dramatic as shit, but Bernard doesn’t care anymore. Because there really is nothing else left for him to lose the way things are now.

“...and try again.”

Bernard gives up. It feels so damn good.

“Yeah. Take me there.”

The dealer laughs.

“Bernard? It’s been ages! You— what happened?” Some of Darla’s jock pals from Grieves are in the diner. Bernard doesn’t know why he bothered setting foot in here. 

“Aw, hey guys. I’m alright. Ate shit on a bike,” he lies. He doesn’t want to induct normal people to their cause. The sane don’t need it the way they do. The boys tell him about senior year at Grieves. They treat him like a friend, now that two thirds of them are gone. One third took the money and left, and the other third is dead. Bernard drinks a milkshake and it tastes like gunpowder and blood in his mouth as he listens. He doesn’t talk about seeing them again when they go. He doesn’t give enough of a shit.

Among the Children of Dionysus, there are those who are somewhat like him.  

For the first time he fully understands the axiom he had thrown so carelessly at Tim with a surety on their first meeting. A place for everyone and everyone in their place. This is his place. They are his place.

He finds his friends here. Those driven completely mad by normal people, broken by the world that they did not fit into the tidy confines of. There’s Morticia, whose family could not love her as she became. There’s Candy, rejected by her string despite a matching ring on her finger and a knot in the middle. There’s Pete, who ran away from home because his family saw him as possessed by the devil for his brain forming differently. And in the pain they make physical, they find their freedom. They trade cluttered minds for patchwork scars. They worship with burning-firing synapses and become human again. 

And they talk, too. They talk and it’s not the same. Not the same as those sticky diner tables and ice cream and the living boy he wants to forget and the dead girl he wants to remember but maybe this is better. Because Bernard belongs. He is wanted. They seek him out and they care about him. And that’s still new. The addictive taste that having a soulmate had fed him once, but now he has it all for himself. Bernard doesn’t need Tim anymore either. He will die young but he’d rather die ecstatic. He would rather die a part of something than die alone.

“Tell us about him,” Morticia goads, one day after a service where the acolytes dropped heavy weights on their joints til they cracked and burned. Bernard is waiting for his turn to get fixed so they can break him again. Maybe they can rip him apart and swallow him whole, like they did to Sasha. She had been lucky to have that turn, bound permanently to those who were trusted enough to attend the ritual. Someday it can be Bernard’s turn. Or maybe they will grant him a different worship. But he is young and he is new. Too eager. Too hungry to be wanted. So they tell him to wait for now. His time will come, they promise. And he trusts their promises this far. Maybe because it’s better to have the cloth mother than the wire one. Maybe it’s because he has nowhere else to go.

One day, he hopes they really will do it, grab and tear him apart and reduce him to animal consumption. It will burn and it will bleed and he will have existed for a moment. 

Bernard shakes his head, shaking the reverie out of his ears, and answers her question.

“His name was Tim. And the first thing I thought was that he was beautiful. I saw the string form as soon as I saw him,” Bernard tells her easily, the words practically practiced by now. It hurts but that’s a good thing. Pain is beauty, pain is meaning, pain means you are alive and pain is the reason you are alive. Life begins and ends with someone’s pain. That’s what they tell him and he’s willing to buy it. He’ll buy it again and again if it means he still exists. If it means he’s not a shambling mass of atoms stuck together on the verge of dissolving into nothing. If it means he is something to someone even if that something is food. “I loved him too quickly. Never got to tell him. He forgot me anyway.”

“So… you like guys,” Pete mumbles, refusing to look Bernard in the eyes. Bernard rolls his eyes and sighs. His shoulder burns. 

“Yeah. Is this the awkward part where you ask me if I, as someone who finds guys attractive, think you’re hot?”

“Ew.” Pete looks at him with such utter revulsion that Bernard is almost offended.

“Thank fuck, but also ow,” he grumbles. Pete shrieks, flapping his hands around like a bird.

“I know I’m hot! I don’t need the awkward confirmation that my friends have considered my ass!”

Bernard smirks.

“I mean…”

Pete wails, clapping his hands over his ears.

“No. Stop. Shut the fuck up.”

They all laugh, cackling like hyenas as the doctor re-sets Bernard’s shoulder with a sharp and practiced movement. A priestess approaches them and presses a hand on the tender flesh.

“You have made us proud,” she says. The others clap and cheer for him. Someone lights a joint and they laugh, laughing as someone else gets up on a splinted ankle and goes to find the wine, falling sideways with a howl of pain. He gets back up and returns with mason jars of moonshine. They drink. And they drink like they breathe. 

It would not do to be followers of the god of wine without drunkenness, after all. They are the revived thiasus, so wine appears often when they have parties. They drink and smoke until their heads get light and they’re floating a million miles above this hellscape city that Bernard will never leave with a pulse. Music starts and a mass of writhing bodies, pressed together and indistinguishable in the low light, begin to dance.

And Bernard feels something. Fire on water-numb flesh and he’s alive for once in his life. He’s someone. He’s someone. He is Bernard Dowd and he exists.

“Bernard… damn. Fell off your bike again?”

Bernard tugs on the long sleeves and laughs sheepishly. He doesn’t know why he keeps coming back to the diner, where Darla’s old pals are. Some new form of self-flagellation. But here he is.

“Motorcycle, actually. I’m fixing it up—tire went and popped on the highway—sent me flying. They're gravel marks.”

“Sure. Man, you’ve gotten reckless these days, huh?”

“Yeah,” Bernard shrugs. “I guess.”

The look in their eyes is strange. Like they don’t really believe him.

His finger’s string goes taut one night, like Tim is nearby and close enough for the string to move with him. Bernard feels its tug instantly, because despite his many attempts to just cut the fucking finger off some sort of nostalgia and vain hope have kept it there. His messed up string made him special, so he kept it even if it hurts.

Did Tim come for him? Did he seek Bernard out? Why now? After everything is already broken? Now that Bernard is finally fine without him, used to the missing-limb feeling of his soulmate being so far away? 

“I… what?”

Bernard looks out the window, following the line of red. Following it up, up and up into the sky. To a figure, nestled in the shadows. Shades of red, yellow, and green. A mask and a bo staff. Robin.

With Tim’s thread sinking into his armor-plated chest. 

Bernard used to think he’s smart and by now he knows he’s not. But he’s not stupid either, and he can put the pieces together. Tim is Robin. The Robin that disappeared for the period while there was a blonde Robin, and the one who came back. The Robin with a famously-known red string to Superboy. Everyone knows that about Robin. It’s the evidence to disprove the number of orphans that Bernard originally theorized. A theory that Tim had laughed at. Tim-Robin, with a red string into his chest. Who is on the end of Bernard’s string.

Bernard laughs, the sound hysterical and ripping its way out of his lungs. It dribbles out of his mouth like blood. His blood, Darla’s blood, still stuck under his nails from that day in the nurse’s office. He wheezes, clutching at his knees. Of course, of course, of course!

Of course Tim is special enough to have two soulmates. Of course Bernard is not as special as Superboy, who actually is special enough to have his string with a knot. 

“Why did you even bother?!” Bernard howls at the sky. Why even bother tethering Bernard to Tim? Why attach him to his own fucking ruin? Couldn’t Bernard have been happy, if he had not been tied to Tim? 

“Bernard, if you’re getting involved in gang shit—“

“How dare you,” he snarls. “After junior year! After Darla! How fucking dare you insinuate—!”

“Whoa… man! Calm down! I don’t want to piss you off, but we can’t let you do this to yourself!”

“Yeah! Those injuries don’t look like accidents… if someone is hurting you, you can tell us. We can help you, Bernard.”

“We’re worried about you!”

“Don’t be,” Bernard growls, slamming a hand on the table as he rises to his feet and leaves the diner behind. He shouldn’t have been coming here anyway. 

Darla’s friends don’t follow him. 

He doesn’t go back home that night. Or back to school. He keeps an ear out if anyone’s reported him gone. But nobody ever does. Bernard finds that he’s not surprised.

Bernard spirals. It’s a fast-moving descent, because he was already there. 

For nearly three days, he doesn’t leave his bed, eyes fixed on his hand—swaying red thread. It’s like a fucking ghost in the corner of his vision. Tim’s ghost to match Darla’s. Bernard hates him, he thinks. He hates him and he hates that he still loves him. Even after everything. 

Eventually, an acolyte comes to drag him to a service.

“You’ve been too low. We will bring you back,” he promises. “Pain will grant you clarity.” 

And he goes. It’s a more simple service, with some newer children whose names he has not yet learned. One is sobbing, one is shaking, and one laughs every time the chain lands on her skin. Bernard is numb for most of it. Until it is his turn.

There is a murmur of prayer as the chain clangs and lands heavy on his skin with a carnal slap. They do not need to guide him in this meditation anymore, it’s a soothing exercise by now. He is grateful to have been drawn out.

He looks up, wondering who has been helping him regain himself. And when he sees him his brain short-circuits. He knows him. Blue eyes. Dark hair, flopping over his face  as he lifts his head to examine Bernard. That’s Tim. 

Has Tim come for him now? Like a broken record or a fucking dog, Bernard’s traitorous heart wonders again if Tim’s coming for him. It’s been over a year and a half, and part of him is still waiting. How pathetic.

And would Tim ever do that? After all this time? After he’s destroyed every piece of Bernard’s life by capturing his soul like a goddamn trading card and forgetting about him to go on to his perfect soulmate and superhero double life, while Bernard and Darla (who is dead, dead in his arms and he can never smell the harbor’s rust-and-salt without throwing up anymore) are just footnotes? How dare he intrude upon the life Bernard carved out with the thiasus now? 

He doesn’t want Tim here. But at the same time, he wants him to do something. Do one favor for him, and Bernard would probably forgive him. Because he still loves him, like a fucking dog, flattened into roadkill and waiting for its master. All Tim needs to do is pull the fucking anchor and set him free and Bernard would forgive him. 

“Tim. Tim. Cut it off,” he gasps. “Just cut it off. Let me go. Please. Please, Tim.” 

“Bernard?”

“Untie me, please,” he begs, grabbing at the front of Tim’s shirt. Is that his blood on it? Darla’s? Tim’s? He doesn’t want it to be Tim’s. He doesn’t want to care if it is anymore. “Please, just let me fucking go. I’m so tired. If I was ever your friend, just have mercy on me and get it off of me.”

“What do you need?” And is it Tim talking? That voice sounds wrong. Is it Darla? No. Darla’s dead. Dead in his arms with her blood tacky and cooling on his skin years ago to the tune of begging and screaming and the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. Maybe it’s Superboy, the one who has the privilege of Tim’s red thread returned, with a tidy, lucky knot in the middle. Superboy could do it without any effort, Bernard thinks. But he wants it to be Tim. It’s Tim’s red string, not Superboy’s. Tim can fucking keep it. Bernard’s kept it this long, and it’s not like Tim would care about it as anymore than a threat to his secrets. Lock it up. Burn it. Bury it. Bernard doesn’t care, as long as he doesn’t have to look at it anymore.
“Please, just cut the fucking finger off. You can have it. It’s yours anyway. It was always yours.”

“I— what?”

“I’ll even cut it off myself, just take it away from me,” Bernard bargains, reaching past the chain whip for a knife, tantalizingly at the edge of his reach. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand to see it.”

“You— wait!”

Bernard lifts the knife high above his hand. His wrist and shoulder tremble with the exertion, welts already wearing his muscles thin, but he doesn’t look away from that crimson band at the base of his finger. His arm trembles even as he slams the knife down. He prays to some higher power that it’s enough, but even with the momentum, he’s simply not strong enough to break the bone. His finger screams at him with burning pain. 

Blood streams down his hand, curling around his wrist, sticky and nauseating. It’s more pain than even he can handle yet. He is not ready for the sparagmos, it seems. Then he must grow stronger, because he will not be granted such a privilege if he cannot even handle this. Shaky, half-mad, and terrified that Tim will leave without taking his finger with him, Bernard raises the knife again.

“Stop,” a voice booms. A strong hand grabs his wrist, tight enough to leave a bruise. Tim’s hand? No. Tim’s not here, Bernard realizes. Tim was never here. Tim would never be here because Tim would never come for him. It’s just the dark hair and blue eyes, damn him. Damn Tim and damn Bernard. 

“Bernard, you have good dedication,” a voice croons as the world flashes with gray spots. “But you are not yet ready. My priests, take him away. Perhaps he is more special than we had hoped.”

Chapter Text

By this point in his life, Bernard already knows that he’s destined to be a statistic. A statistic of this city, of the things they call cults, of teenage runaways. But he has no plans of getting out of that any time soon. He’s resigned himself to that fate. He’s been resigned to it since the day his high school became a battlefield and he held a sixteen year old girl as she died in his arms.

Because he doesn’t care anymore. He doesn’t care if he dies. 

That’s not true, actually. He does care; he hopes this will kill him. Because he’s not brave enough to pull the trigger himself. But if he dies here then he can mean something. He will have had a worth to someone. And that’s more than he has ever had to anyone else. 

The priests ban him from participating in any rituals or services until his finger heals, leaving him drifting in the fucking infirmary with its asylum-white walls. They have to strap him to the bed to keep him from trying to leave, and they ban him from seeing anyone but the priests for a while. It’s quiet, in between their visits. Too quiet and Bernard might just be going insane in this fucking room. He’s twitchier, he thinks. He wonders why they would try to have this kind of calm in a cult of madness. In the distance, he can hear parties.

“Please, young man, tell me about your string again,” the high priest, wearing his traditional Chaos Monster mask, commands him. Bernard obeys… to a degree.

“It has no knot in the middle. And my soulmate never saw it, as far as I know. He… never indicated that he did.” And Tim is unintentionally cruel, but not so much so as to pretend the string’s not there. “My string just goes right into the center of his chest. I learned… well I saw it on the news, but he has a requited string that he actually can see,” Bernard answers. He doesn’t tell the priest that Tim is actually Robin and that means that Bruce Wayne might just be Batman. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t, but he cannot make himself betray Tim like that. So instead he betrays the only fucking home he’s ever found. The people he’s relying on. 

His skin feels grimy with the weight of the truth, unsaid in his throat like a cough, but he just can’t do it. Bernard hates himself for that. He hates himself for the part that still has hope and waits with faith that the rest of him doesn’t have. 

That’s the real reason he’s almost excited (or whatever passes for it for him these days) to die. Because then he can finally stop waiting. There will be no hole to fill, no constant hunger. There will be no missing limb or ever present reminder that he was special enough to warrant a string, but not… not lovable or special or worthy enough for a soulmate. He wonders if Tim will see the string when Bernard finally gets to die.

He wonders if Tim would even give a shit. He wants to say no, but he knows Tim. And despite the fact that Bernard had never been worthy the way Superboy or Stephanie or Darla had been, Tim has never not been kind. Has never not been the type to care if he knew someone’s been hurt. Bernard may not get to be important to him, but Tim would care about it regardless.

A bitter, wicked part of himself hopes that Tim thinks about him sometimes after he’s gone. Maybe he’s the kind of person who is only good enough to be loved and remembered when he’s dead. That would be enough for him at this point. 

The high priest hums low, tilting his head and looking almost comical in his mask, and presses on.

“So the end of your string is a public figure, then?”

“I… yeah. Do I need to talk about him?” It comes out tinier—whinier—than it should. He should be presenting a better image to a figure whom he needs the power of, but Bernard is still too shaken up by that flash of Tim’s face in the middle of a ritual. He’s horribly embarrassed by the way he had lost his mind and begged Tim’s specter to take his finger away, like that will resolve anything. There are so many well-documented cases of soulmates who lose fingers or limbs. The string just ties itself around the next-closest thing. The stub or the palm or the wrist. All the way down to the shoulder.

Besides, he can't remove his limbs: he won’t be eligible for rituals if he’s missing any pieces. If he wants them to kill him, then he can’t remove the finger. That’s why he never did it before, even if the thought lurks in the edge of his mind with wild, reckless desire. In his most impulsive moments, he’s reached for something to do it with. He would have packaged it up nice and pretty with his heart like the legends and sent it to Wayne Manor with his name on it. He wonders what the Bat-Waynes would have done with it. Burned it as a biohazard, probably. It probably would have never reached Tim.

“Ah, I see. He broke your heart, I take it?” The high priest puts a gentle hand on his bruised shoulder. It’s more honest kindness than Bernard’s own parents would have given him if he were to tell them, and this guy would probably make a polygraph go off from five feet away. But that says more about his DNA-donors than anything else, really. He doesn’t even wonder what they’re up to anymore. Not when they never even bothered to report him missing when he left. He doesn’t know if he’d have wanted them to, but it means something  that they didn’t. But that’s beside the point.

“Yeah,” Bernard admits. None of the secrets he has to hide are his own, anyway. “He did.”

“Perhaps he was meant to do so,” the high priest muses. “Because that brought you to us.”

Bernard feels a tiny smile form on his lips. It’s a weak one, about as weak as that fucking argument. He wouldn’t need them, and he’s dubious about their purpose and their higher power as it is. Then again, Wonder Woman claims the Greek pantheon exists. But then again, if any higher power did exist, they wouldn’t be looking at this shithole city, no matter who prayed to them or how. 

“I hope so.”

He doesn’t tell the priest in his stupid fucking mask that he doesn’t give a shit about the god they serve anymore. He’s here for the pain and the way it clears his mind and shuts up the constant screaming. He’s here so that one day they will kill him and eat him. Because if they kill him, then at least someone will have wanted him. Even if it's an animal wanting. For food or sex or fur. Better than to just be roadkill.

He feels like roadkill, most of the time these days. Like he had in the after before he found a place here. Learning the truth of Tim has flattened him into the asphalt again, and this time Bernard doesn’t want to lie here having never been wanted. So to be food, at this point, is enough. He hopes the aftertaste lingers, but he sincerely doubts it will. 

Bernard is privately told that he is being elevated in rank when they finally let him out of the infirmary. They call him an acolyte now. 

He doesn’t see Pete or Morticia or Candy or any of his friends outside of wild, raucous parties these days, but that suits him just fine. Being in this role means the ones up higher mean to make him into an animal. Greedy and carnal and truly, honestly, feral. Bernard is going stark raving mad, utterly bonkers, flying all the way off his rocker. And that’s good. It will hurt less, when the time comes. It hurts less to think about Tim when his mind’s not together enough to hold on to things for long. It is easier, he thinks, having fallen to pieces, to just be insane. There’s a perverse comfort in it.  

Red is warmth. People are warmer than you think they are, when they’re alive. Muscles are hard to tear with your own hands. Knives are a waste, but ropes do nicely. A unified effort, as much of their worship is. 

It’s gonna be his turn. It’s gonna be his turn. 

And isn’t it all so astronomically fucked up? Isn’t it messed up that he’s thrilled to have heard it? But rumor has it they’re going to call him to the altar. And those rumors are rarely false. It wasn’t false for Sasha, or for Jorge, or for Peter. And now the name they’re saying is his. 

But it’s good. They shouldn’t keep him, having done what he has done. They have reduced him to an animal, and he has gone merrily along with it. He has eaten, so now he must be eaten. That’s just the cycle, for animals like them. 

But now comes the waiting stage, and somehow it makes him anxious. Part of Bernard is almost scared, but it’s outweighed by the part of him that’s relieved. 

In his waiting time, on a random afternoon, Bernard doesn’t know why his feet take him to Tweedy D’s, but they do. He wasn’t planning on doing anything but taking a last look at the place, but then a bunch of voices start yelling.

“Hey! Bernard Dowd?!”

“Dude, where the fuck have you been?!”

“It’s been months, you asshole!”

“Tyrone almost went to the fucking pigs, Dowd! The pigs! Seriously, what the fuck were you thinking?!”

“Jeez! Promise me you won’t overreact any more,” Bernard rolls his eyes, pulling a seat out with a loud scraping sound and sitting in it. “And I’ll tell you.”

“Overreact? Overreact?! I have half a mind to tie you to that fucking chair, Bernard!” Tyrone growls, slamming his hands on the table. “You scared the shit out of us, you dick! We thought you were fucking dead!”

“Tyrone, you’re smarter than this. That’s not exactly a big deal, in a city like Gotham,” Bernard reminds them mildly. Then something in him softens. There’s gratitude in it, and maybe some kind of loneliness since he’s drifted from his friends among the Children. “But thanks, I guess.”

“Oh, and that response is definitely not fucking concerning at all,” Josh spits sarcastically, upset. He runs a hand through his hair. “Do we need to have you fucking committed somewhere?!”

“You don’t really have that kind of power, I think,” Bernard laughs, feeling lighter than he has in a very long time. “But should I be flattered that you guys think I’m Arkham material? I don’t think I’m particularly dangerous.”

“And I’m sure the parents that never fucking bothered to put up a poster will hold up just fine in front of a judge compared to us,” Tyrone argues. Jimmy puts a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back to his seat.

“It’s Gotham, man. A judge isn’t gonna give a shit,” he points out to the other jocks. Tyrone deflates slightly.

“You… Fine. Don’t scare us like that again, you prick,” he whines, burying his face in his hands. Bernard supposes there will not be much time for any agains, but he doesn’t voice that thought out loud. “I can’t… not again. Just don’t do that, man.”

“Well, I’m… going away soon,” Bernard tells them. And in euphemism, he’s even telling them the truth. “Maybe it’s a good thing that we ran into each other, so I can just tell you now. It’ll be better for me.”

The guys all light up, missing the point. Which is fine. Better that they have a happier image in their minds of what’s about to happen. 

“Hey! That’s great, dude!” Jimmy holds out a fist, and Bernard hesitantly knocks his own against it.

“Yeesh, man,” Josh laughs. “Getting out of our beloved hellhole?”

“Yeah,” he admits. He doesn’t tell them his method of leaving it. It’s… actually kind of sweet, that they bothered to worry about him. He hadn’t realized that anyone would. None of the people who should have did.

“Good for you, man,” Tyrone claps a hand on his shoulder. “And… hey. Our emails are the same as they were in high school. Hit us up sometime, alright?”

“Sure,” Bernard lies. And they look so happy for him that Bernard doesn’t have the heart to tell them that he’s going to die. “Oh, and one more thing?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m gay,” he tells them. Someone should know, if they ever realize that he’s died. If anyone bothers to talk about him after the matter’s settled. It feels so fucking good to tell the truth, finally. If they get angry about or hit him for it, he won’t even care… much. 

“Man, I knew it! I knew your crush on…” Jimmy’s energy dies instantly as he trails off, avoiding her name.

“You can say it,” Bernard says gently, as kindly as he can muster. “Darla.”

“I… yeah,” Jimmy repeats, quieter. “Darla. I always knew it didn’t make sense.”

“My crush on Darla was mostly me lying to myself.” And it really was, looking back. He had been desperate to like a girl, and he hadn’t even realized. And he does love her as he’s come to know her, but not that kind of love. 

Bernard reflects for a beat. She’s going to be sixteen forever and he won’t go past eighteen himself. What a short life, and what a crazy ending to it. But that’s fine with him. He doesn’t have much more life in him anymore, not enough for a few more years. The tank’s empty: he’s simply too tired to go much further, at this point.

“You know, I kinda thought so, even back then,” Tyrone muses. “Your eyes always seemed to follow Tim—” and Bernard flinches hard when he hears that name. Tyrone instantly stops, freezing. “I… Sorry, man.”

“It’s alright,” Bernard lies. “You know… he never talked to me again after that day. I called him a million times, but he just disconnected his number.”

“That fucking sucks, dude. I’m sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he shrugs. “It’s all gonna be in the rearview soon.”

“I guess so,” Jimmy says awkwardly.

The guys don’t mention his name again for the rest of the time he’s there. They talk about things that feel so small in the face of what’s to come. Girls, college admissions, sports and video games. Things he’s left behind ages ago. 

Bernard eats a burger at the diner. The pink flesh sticks in his teeth. It’s warm, but too dry. Too far off from what it should be: too crumbly and dry, not the right type of salty, too oily but not enough fat in the meat. 

He’s familiar, by now, with what he will taste like. 

Soon.

They throw another party, loud and raucous, on the night Bernard is supposed to die. And he will die tonight, he knows with terrifying certainty. Did Darla feel that too, in the dark school to the tune of someone else’s screaming? 

Bernard allows his traitorous heart a minute flash of fear. He doesn’t know what comes after this, but as long as he’s not here, he doesn’t care.

In a room with hazy clouds of smoke, cigarettes and vapes and joints blending into a nauseating fog, Bernard drinks enough alcohol to make his head spin while he waits. It’s the waiting, he thinks, that’s the worst part of it. 

When they lead him to the room where they will pull his flesh apart and eat him, the table in the middle is wood, rather than stone. It’s always been stone. 

“Where are the ropes?” Bernard looks around the room. He knows how the sparagmoi are supposed to go by now. There are too few people in this room. “How will you manage to eat all of me?” He doesn’t want any part of himself left behind.

“Your vessel is to remain mostly intact,” a priest tells him. It’s the one with the blue eyes and dark hair. The one that Bernard had mistaken for Tim, that day. “You will not be torn. We have another use for you.”
He doesn’t understand. 

“You were supposed to eat me,” Bernard says slowly, maniacal despair welling in his chest. “You have to eat me: that’s the cycle. I ate and now it’s supposed to be my turn.” Animals eat animals eat animals. Consumption, fat and flesh in your teeth, Bernard has gone along with it all for this. He wants to die and to be wanted for the spark-second it takes to swallow him. 

“Do not fear, young lamb,” the Chaos Monster behind the table promises. “You will have what you need. Come, take your place.”

Bernard doesn’t know what else to do: he obeys. He lets the Tim-faced priest tie leather straps around his torso and his pelvis. He lets them immobilize him. Food snared for slaughter. Better to die in the snare that means you’re wanted than the street that means you’re in the way.

Someone ties a blindfold around his face. 

There is chanting, low and slow at first. Then it picks up in pace, sounds Bernard hears but doesn’t see through blindfolded eyes. He wonders if it’s some kind of strange kind of mercy on their part, to hide the knife from his eyes. It’s a kindness they hadn’t needed, but Bernard supposes he doesn’t care. It will all be over soon.

The chanting picks up, turns to singing, faster and faster.

He feels it in his left shoulder. Then his right. Burning, stabbing down. Ritual stabbing, pinning him like a butterfly to the wooden table. Then his thigh. Not quite by the place that will bleed him out, but close to it. 

The room fills with the smell of rust-and-saltwater. Bernard’s breath catches at the memory. They say, you know, that scent is the strongest evoker of memory. The blood pooling damp in his clothes. The smell. The fucking smell. Before, Bernard hadn’t thought as hard about it. Because he was mobile, doing—eating. But now all he can do is smell and feel and he’s back there. 

The blindfold is a grayish white. The same white as those walls. He’s back in the nurse’s office. Where’s Darla? She’s not in his arms. He can’t just let her go off on her own.

“Darla,” he gasps. “Darla, you can’t go. Darla, please. You can’t—”

“Shhh,” a voice soothes. Paramedics? “She’s just a bit ahead of you. You will join her soon.”

“You, hey! Stop right there!” And Bernard does know that voice. That’s Tim. But no, it can’t be Tim. Tim left him behind in that room and Darla’s been dead for two years. He must be hallucinating like he had been on that day he had begged Tim’s image for useless mercy.

“Let him go!”

“He will disrupt the ritual! Get him!”

There is noise, but Bernard can’t move or see. And that’s fine. Why is it so slow? Must they choose to bleed him dry, like this? He’s freezing. Why is it so cold in here?

Bernard gasps, tasting iron. 

The blindfold is tugged off of his face. Bernard blinks at the newly-harsh light of the once-dim room. And finds his eyes met by white lenses. Red and yellow and green. A giant R. 

Robin.

Tim.

“Y— You’re—? Bernard Dowd? What are you doing here?”

Why is he…? Oh. He doesn’t know Bernard knows. Because he doesn’t know about the string. Of fucking course. But that red thread hangs between them, plunging into Tim-Robin’s chest like a taunt. 

“Of course the last face I see is yours,” he murmurs. He doesn’t know if what he’s seeing is real or a hallucination. But either way, he’s too tired to yell at it. 

“You… Bernard… what are you talking about?”

“Don’t worry ‘bout it, grasshopper,” Bernard smiles, thinking almost fondly of that stupid, excited teenage boy on the edge of a school that’s better left to memory and regret. There’s a caught breath, he thinks, but he’s not completely sure. “And hey, if I was gonna have someone who changed my life ‘nough t’ warr’nt it… it wouldn’ be anyone els’…” His eyes are getting heavy. His nose is cold and itchy, and so are his fingers, his body temperature dropping like a rock and his limbs are underwater for all Bernard can move them. His stab wounds are cold and hot at the same time and Tim-Robin is talking and Bernard should be listening, should cleave himself to the last words of his soulmate, maybe the only human on this wretched space rock that will remotely miss him, but he can’t. 

“Bernard, you’re going to be okay— O, I need medical evac stat, where are the paramedics?! No— just stay with me— keep your eyes open, come on—“

“Can’t,” Bernard laughs. His head is light and the world’s gone a fuzzy sort of gray. “Can’t stay. N’ wi’ you. R’d thr’d’s o’ly a knot ‘n… my finger.”

“What?! Bernard—O, I need, please, please I—”

“Don’t cry,” Bernard tells him, pressing his cold hand to Tim’s soft cheek, right in range beside him like this is a fucking gurney or something. It’s still soft because, in the end, aren’t they all so young? They’ve always been too young. “‘ll t’ll D’rla th’ y’ say ‘hi’.”

And the world fades to a buzzy sort of black. And Bernard knows no more. If he really had any more shreds of attention, maybe he hears a low, animal cry. 

(Tim holds the limp, cooling body to his chest and breaks into teensy-tiny shards like a fancy porcelain jug falling out of a cabinet, falling with a quick and breathless swoop and shattering into splinters. 

Some people he had forgotten about had flagged him down—sought him out specifically—and asked him to find Bernard. They had been Darla’s friends, first and foremost. But Darla has been gone for a long time. And Tim has been away for just as long. He hadn’t known what Bernard had gotten into. But Jimmy and Josh and Tyrone had said Bernard told them that he was leaving and they only just realized that he might not have meant that he’s moving away. 

His mouth unhinges and all that escapes are ugly, shaking sobs. 

In blood-bright color, he can see it: a gleaming, robin-red thread linking Bernard’s cold finger to his own chest, flickering and steadily dimming and visible to everyone the way all red threads are in the moments as someone is dying and Tim can’t move him from here without ripping him further apart, without tearing his wounds open further. The knives have him tacked firmly to the wooden table. One through each shoulder and thigh. Bernard is already dead, Tim knows. He knows it by the too-large and congealing pool at his feet. By the bright red line that appears only when the time has come. Has Bernard known? All this time? 

Since the day they’d met? It’s tied neatly around his finger. But not Tim’s. There’s no knot, not like Kon’s thread, swaying at the edge of his vision like a promise. 

And he had sworn he wouldn’t feel this… this useless. Not since Grieves. Not since Darla. Not since Steph. His dad. But here is Bernard, and Tim had left that behind too. He had left him with Darla’s corpse and not a second glance behind him. Tim had left Bernard to be destroyed without him and it’s his own fault and—

Footsteps behind him and Tim can’t move. Light, almost dancerlike, but not so light as to be Cass’: Nightwing is approaching. Tim can’t move, chest frozen and air burning in the stillness. Blood is sticky and it smells the same as it always does but Tim is gagging, he’s going to throw up.

“Ti— Robin! O sent me— there are paramedics are on their way. What ha… oh. Oh, no.”)