Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Bernard wakes up with a mouthful of spit.

He feels like he’s been hit with a truck.  He blinks blearily, his eyes sticky and crusted, his saliva thick in his mouth.  Flashes of a dream or a memory are stuck in his head, an impression of danger.

He coughs.  Blinks at the ceiling.  It’s not the shitty popcorn ceiling of his apartment.

Wait.

He shoves himself up.  The mattress beneath his hands creaks, a shitty twin where his feet hang over the edge that he knows like a bad memory, the brown duvet and mismatched sheets and blue carpet (he fought hard for that blue carpet) and TV and posters stuck edge to edge across the walls and the pinboard with its tangled knots of red string like a conspiracy theory in a bad movie.

He’s in his childhood bedroom.  

Bernard stares, wild-eyed, his fingers curled into greasy sheets, and there’s a half empty can of soda on the bedside table and paper scattered across the floor like he never left, like his parents hadn’t torn anything out in the three years since he’s set foot in this house- oh god, did his dad snap?  Did they never clean this room?  Did they kidnap him and stick him back inside like Silence of the Lambs, holy shit Tim was never gonna let him leave his apartment again-

A sharp knock on his door.  Bernard jerks back so hard he gets whiplash.

His mom opens the door without waiting for an answer- oh yeah, classic Mom- and only gives him a cursory glance before looking around the room, wrinkling her nose.  It’s such nostalgia sucker-punch that for a minute Bernard’s embarrassed before he remembers, wait, I’ve definitely been kidnapped, the mess is not my fault this time Mom.

“Have you seen your father?” she asks, paying no mind to the mental breakdown Bernard is having.  “He said he’d get groceries before work.”

Why would Dad even be in his room??  Bernard works his mouth, flabbergasted.

“No?” he squeaks.

His mom gives him a funny look, but then rolls her eyes.  “Bastard,” she murmurs, and it’s been so long that Bernard’s actually talked with her that it takes him a minute to realize she means his dad.  “Get up, you’ll be late for school.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer, just slams the door behind her.  Bernard stares at the Wonder Woman poster glued to the back of the door, mouth agape.

He has to get out of here.  He has no idea what’s happening but nope, nope, one cult was enough, thank you, he doesn’t need to get kidnapped by aliens or wizards dedicated to modeling his childhood.

His phone is next to the bed.  It’s the phone he had in highschool, with an otter charm on it.  He picks it up without thinking about it, and then grabs the half unzipped backpack by the desk (it’s his backpack from high school shitty patches and all what is happening) and empties it on the floor, narrowly dodging crushing his toes with a textbook.  He shoves some clothes in it, haphazard, decides he trusts exactly none of the secret snack stash that is still in his closet what the fuck what the FUCK and shoves his shoes on his feet.

The window is unlocked.  He books it.

Outside the air is cold and sharp.  He makes the drop from roof to gutter pipe to shrubbery, and bolts out of his backyard, and doesn’t bother stopping for a long time.

The cars on this street are all the same.  The sky is grey and overcast, not Gotham’s usual smoggy skyline but something cleaner, with the promise of rain.  He passes by the park which he could have sworn was renovated after a vigilante-rogue fight trashed it, and a flower shop that closed ages ago.

The obvious conclusion is poking at the back of his brain.  Tim keeps telling him he’s off his rocker with his theories, so he tells his brain to shut up.

Okay.  Okay.

There are a few different things that could be happening.  Bernard walks, aimlessly, trying to get his thoughts in order.

One, his parents finally snapped and kidnapped him back to their house.  This is the most normal explanation and therefore Tim would say the most likely, but too much doesn’t fit.  The perfect rendition of his room.  His mom’s spot-on exasperation and exhaustion.  His phone with the otter charm on it.  His parents aren’t that good at lying, and also if they were going to kidnap him they would have probably nailed the window shut, or something.

Also, his dad was pretty clear when he kicked him out of the house.  The last time they talked, he brought up conversion camps.  Bernard had hung up.

Two; he’s been kidnapped by someone with the magic or technology to recreate his entire childhood from scratch.  Less normal, but this is Gotham.  Bernard can think of a few people able to do that off the top of his head.

Three; time travel.

Bernard slows down.  The small (okay, moderately sized) portion of his brain dedicated to thinking about how they live in a world with Superman and actual aliens that have come and made contact and anything is possible including mothman, Tim, is jumping up and down with excitement at the idea of going back in time.  The rest of him is gonna be sick at the idea of going back in time.

He sniffles, shuffles over to a bench in the park that shouldn’t even be here.  The grass is awfully crisp, the air awfully sharp, everything feels awfully real, which is a strike against weird alien or wizard re-enactment.  Or maybe not.  Maybe magic’s just that good.  But the bench is just cold enough it feels wet when he sits down, which he feels like is one of those innocuous details about real life that no one thinks about.

Also, why would aliens or wizards put him in a fake bubble of his own life?  He hasn’t done a lot of digging into Gotham’s underbelly since the cult- correction, he hasn’t done any, and opening his laptop makes his stomach turn, which is making college applications difficult- and even if he had, he can’t think of how shoving his head into a memory of high school would be useful.

Okay.  What is the last thing he remembers?

Bernard scratches under his ears, his blunt fingernails chewed down almost to the quick- oh yeah this is high school, he was shit at taking care of his hands, he remembers that- and tries to think.

… something dangerous.  Flashes of black sky and neon lights.  Adrenaline.  Bernard squints, his forehead screwing up.  He’d been… he’d been walking home, from another date with Tim that had gone mostly well except for when Tim had to ditch, again, for some emergency at work… there had been screaming, and the people around him had ran away because, y’know, Gotham, and he had ran towards it because he’s an idiot but also what if he could help?  And…

A shadow, running, wild-eyed.  Sparks and lightning.  A flash of red and yellow and green.

Robin looking at him, eyes unreadable behind the flat white lens of his mask but the rest of his face alarmed, mouth open to shout.

Oh, fuck.

Okay, Bernard thinks hysterically.  Oh- kay.  So.  So.

So something happened, with a rogue Bernard didn’t really see and probably wouldn’t recognize anyway, and Robin, and him.  So he’s stuck here, which means the rogue probably did something- Bernard doesn’t think Robin has magic, not really, the theories behind that are bogus- so the rogue did something to Bernard, and now Bernard is here.

Which means… he’s hypnotized so he’s remembering high school, and this’ll stop as soon as Robin kicks the other guy’s ass, and Bernard will be fine.  Or, he’s back in time, and nothing is fine.

Great.  Great, great, great, great.

He’s shivering.  He ran away from home without a coat, he’s an idiot.  He can’t go home, his mom will kill him.  It could be hypnosis and not time travel, and he could wake up any minute now, and then it won’t matter.

His hands are shaking.  He stuffs them into his pants pocket, comes out with his phone.  Stares at it.

He opens it.  The password is the same, and so is the background, one of the artsy photos of Gotham skyline Tim took.  It's Tuesday, four years ago, cloudy with a chance of rain. Opens his contacts.

Darling Darla is at the top.  Bernard stares at that, frozen,  before deciding no way in hell and scrolling down to Tim-man.

It only rings twice before being picked up.

“Bernard?” Tim’s voice says, tired, and Bernard’s heart melts in his chest.  It’s Tim, voice a little higher, cadence a little different, but it’s Tim, it’s still Tim.  Tim yawns, his words half-muffled.  “What’s up?”

There’s a lump in Bernard’s throat the size of Half-Dome.  He bites back his instinctive hey babe, because this Tim sounds so young, so different, this Tim is a sixteen year old in high school who doesn’t even know he likes guys and fuck right he has a girlfriend named Stephanie, who Bernard’s met before and actually likes, goddamnit.

“Berns?” Tim says, concerned, and Bernard’s been quiet too long.  Fuck.

“Hey, Timberella,” he says, and his voice comes out all high and weird.  Fuck.  He cannot do puberty twice, he will actually die.  “What’s shakin, bacon?”

“School,” Tim replies, in a low grumble.  He sounds relieved, and Bernard’s heart is twisting in his chest, and this hurts.  “Where are you? I can’t see you.”

Bernard’s brain does a couple of flips, because he’s definitely not going to school today, no way in hell.

“Uh, sick,” he says, and it sounds so awkward and unconvincing to his own ears that he winces.

“... right,” Tim drawls.  “Want me to pick up your homework?”

“I- yeah.  Mhm.  That’d be great, Timmers.”

“Sure.” A pause.  “Y’know, Mr. Miller will just make you take the test later.”

It takes Bernard a moment to remember who Mr. Miller even is.  Right, the bastard physics teacher.  He made people sit at the front if they sneezed too loud.

“He can’t make me do it,” Bernard jumps on the excuse, whining into the phone.  God, how is this easier then anything else he’s done today?  “I have rights.”

“Sure, Berns.” Tim sounds amused, like he’s smiling with just the corner of his mouth, and Bernard wants to kiss him so bad.

He must make some kind of sound, because Tim says, “Y’alright?”

“Good! Good,” Bernard says, hastily.  “Just, y’know, sick.  Hey, uh, quick question?”

“Yeah?”

This is mean, but Bernard is desperate, he just wants this to be his Tim.  It’s not, but he has to check, he has to.

“What’s your last name?” Bernard’s okay at lying to Tim, but not great.  He’s such a perceptive bastard, and Bernard doesn’t really feel the need to lie to him anyway.  But it’s over the phone, and Tim can’t see his face, and maybe he’ll get the feeling that something’s not quite right, but not exactly what Bernard’s doing.  “I forgot.  It’s Wayne, right?”

“What?” Tim’s voice cracks, sputtering.  Bernard can picture his face, red and flushed.  “Um- no, I’m not- Mr. Wayne took care of me for a while, when my dad was- when he couldn’t, but he’s not my dad, or anything.”

Bernard’s eyes sting.  He forces levity into his voice.  “That’s an awful lot of protesting.”

“Drake.  My last name’s Drake.”

“Right, right.  Gotcha.  Thanks, Timmers.”

“Sure,” Tim says, annoyed.  Then, “... you see my homework all the time, how do you not know my last name?”

“I can’t read,” Bernard says, immediately.  “Welp!  Love you, bye.”

He hangs up to Tim saying “Bernard-” and tries not to feel like an asshole about it.

---

He spends another twenty minutes staring at his phone before he musters up the courage to call Darla.

It rings for several minutes.  For a moment Bernard thinks he’s gonna get kicked to voicemail, which is exactly the kind of anticlimactic bullshit the universe would drop on him for being anxious about this.

The phone picks up, a quiet out-of-breath noise in his ear.

“Hey, dumbass,” Darla’s voice says.  “You okay?  Tim thinks you’ve been kidnapped.”

It’s her voice.  It’s young and smooth and tripping over the corners of words in the ways a gangly teenager does, and how did she ever sound this young?

“Bernard?” Darla says, worried.

Bernard hangs up.  

He stares at the screen background, his heartbeat obnoxiously loud in his ears.  He can’t be here.  He can’t do this.

He stumbles to his feet and leaves.

---

The thought of going home makes him wanna puke, but the thought of Tim showing up to his house with homework and not finding him and then going on some hellbent bender around Gotham at night just begging to be mugged makes him wanna puke more, so he crawls back up the gutter pipe and crawls back through his window.

The house is empty.  The heater churns tepid air, faint background noise, but there’s no footsteps, no running water, so humming or cursing or singing.  Bernard floats down the stairs, dreamlike, past photos of himself and his mom and his dad, his grandparents, his cousins.  The kitchen smells like the cleaner that always gave him a headache, the couch is neatly made up.  When he opens the door to the garage, Mom’s car is gone.  His old bike is still hung by its wheels on its holder.  The fridge still whirs with its faint, not quite healthy grind, and this is so fucking weird.

He stumbles back up to his room.  Collapses on the bed.  A lump beneath the covers turns out to be Mr. Spots, the one plushie he managed to hide from his dad as a teenager and so was spared the horror of the garage sale, the plushie he hasn’t seen in three years and in real life is probably in a landfill somewhere.

He tucks Mr. Spots into the crook of his arm, buries his face in the pillow, and tries not to think for a while.

---

The door slams open.  Bernard startles, hard, straight from half-sleep into a nightmare, he’s back in his childhood room and he’s done bad on a test or talked too much to Darla or Tim or Dad got sick of the mess in his room and he’s come up to take away and destroy anything distracting, like his phone or his console or the pinboard-

“Oh thank god,” his mom croaks.

Bernard stares at her, flatfooted.  His mom’s eyes are redrimmed and her mascara has run and she is striding into the room with no heed for his mess, the scattered papers that she steps on.  She comes right up to Bernard before he can move away, and enfolds him in a hug.

“Mom?” Bernard asks, bewildered.  It comes out a little high-pitched.  His mom’s arms are warm and painfully tight as she crushes him into her blouse, and she smells like pine, and it’s been three years since Bernard hugged his mom, and it hurts, and he’s clutching her back without thinking about it.  “What’s going on?”

Past his mom’s curly brown hair, his dad leans against the doorframe.  He looks exhausted, his eyes swollen.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, and then a raspy laugh that isn’t really even a laugh.  “You picked a hell of a day to play hooky.”

“I-” Bernard says, opening his mouth to find excuses, but his dad doesn’t even look mad.  In fact, his dad is coming towards them, which makes Bernard’s heart lurch, but he just sits on the end of the bed, his hands folded.  “I didn’t mean…”

His mom squeezes him, tighter, and then lets go.  Bernard unwraps his arms obediently, letting her pull away to gently rub at her mascara.

“No, no,” she says, and then she sighs.  “Sweetie, there was… something happened at your school today.”

No.

“What happened?” comes out of his mouth, like he doesn’t already know, like the answer isn’t coming to break him in pieces.

His parents look at each other, a tiny, drawn glance, and his mom says-

He doesn’t catch all of it.  The blood is pounding in his ears.  Something something attack, something something shooting, something something, your friend… Bernard, baby, say something-

Bernard doesn’t remember the day of the shooting very well.  Flashes of red.  Screaming.  The crack in the brick wall in the nurses office, that he had stared at instead of Darla, that he had traced with his eyes instead following the shallow rises of her chest, that he studied instead of watching one of his best friends die.

He isn’t breathing.  His dad is saying something, but here’s the truth: Darla is dead, and if he had bothered to check what day it was, he could have stopped it.  

A hand on his shoulder.  He yelps, throws it off, and Dad’s saying, “Kiddo, I’m trying to help you,” in the kind of tone that brooks no argument.  Bernard goes loose, lets the hand close around his shoulder, hot and suffocating, and his mom wraps around him.  He doesn’t want to be here.  He doesn’t want to be here.  He doesn’t want touch, the counselor said overstimulation was a result of the trauma and could occur any time he felt anxious and that he is allowed to not want people to touch him, but his dad’s grip is firm, and there’s no arguing with that, not really.  His dad has decided that this will help and nothing will change his mind, and Bernard deserves this, anyway, for not trying, for wasting a second chance, probably the only second chance he’ll ever get for Darla.  He wasted it.

He cries into his parents’ suffocating hold, choking on air, sobbing so hard he sucks air in and out too fast, and he’s going to throw up.  He’s going to throw up.  His stomach lurches, he scrabbles at his mom’s hold but she holds on tighter and it is helping, it is, it means she loves him, and when he turns his head and vomits on the covers she just hugs him tighter, saying softly, “Oh, Bernard.”

Bernard cries.  He cries and cries and cries.

---

He spends the rest of day catatonic in bed.  Neither of his parents protest, just drift in and out, petting his hair.  His mom takes the duvet away to wash and brings back the huge, fluffy, mildew-smelling cover from the guest room, bundling him up in it.  His dad leaves food from the take-out place they always liked on his bedside table.

Sometime past eleven he sees a flash outside his window, something yellow and red and green.

He closes his eyes and begs whatever put him here that he wakes up in his shitty apartment with the popcorn ceiling and coffee smell from Tim making his unholy Turkish coffee concentrate and breakfast in apology for ditching their date and the downstairs neighbor’s cat yowling at the window.  He’ll take waking up in a Gotham ditch with Robin hovering over him, fuck it, he’ll take just the ditch and trudging his own way home.  Just anywhere but here.

---

He wakes up with a mouthful of spit.

He coughs and blinks awake.  The ceiling above is smooth, the carpet is blue, the blanket is his brown duvet and for a second he curls his hands into his greasy sheets, confused, before it all comes flooding back.  Darla’s voice on the phone.  His parents, careful instead of scathing.

This can’t be real.  This can’t keep going, he can’t live through the funeral, Darla coming back to life and almost throwing his car into a wall, Tim disappearing from his life again, he can’t do all this over again.

He’s crying when his mom opens the door.

“Have you seen your father?” she says, glancing around his room, and it’s like hearing a record or watching a movie for the second time.  “He- oh, Bernard, are you alright?”

Bernard stares at her, wide-eyed, feeling like he’s been hit with a hammer.  His voice comes out wet and thick.  “Yuh?”

“Are you sick?” his mom doesn’t step into his room, wrinkles her nose at the mess.  She sweeps her hair away from her face, and sighs.  “Do you think you can go to school today?  Your father will throw a fit if you miss it.”

This feels weird.  His parents hadn’t bothered him for almost a week after- last time.  That had all passed in a haze, his mom in and out, his dad in and out less as he got more impatient.  They hadn’t asked him to go to school the day after Darla died and they couldn’t even if they had wanted to; it had been closed for the better part of a month.

The duvet beneath his fingers is brown, not flower-patterned and mildewy.  The phone is on the bedside table instead of stuffed in his pocket.  A textbook peeks out of his half-open backpack on the floor.

“Uh,” he says, stupidly.

His mom rolls her eyes and starts to step away.  Her make-up is neat, her blouse is clean, and it's the same blouse as yesterday.

“Well, I’m sure you can explain to your father if he finds you when he comes home,” she says, which goddamn Mom, before she closes the door and leaves.

Bernard stares at the Wonder Woman poster on the back of the door, his eyes still red and his nose still stuffy, before lunging for the phone, unlocking it so fast he’s shocked he doesn’t drop it.

Tuesday, the phone blinks back at him.  Cloudy with a chance of rain.

Bernard feels like white noise.  He’s blue-screened.  It’s been real, world, but he is outta here.

“Holy shit,” he says, just to hear his own voice and make sure this is actually happening.  “I’m doing Groundhog Day.”

Chapter Text

Bernard walks into Louis E. Grieve Memorial High School like he owns the place, which is hilarious because he’s a gangly long-limbed teenager smelling like shitty Axe body spray and sporting a chin full of ingrown hairs.  He emptied out his backpack because literally why would he spend three hours hauling around textbooks, it’s not going to matter, and instead filled it with the first aid kit he found under the bathroom sink (EXTREMELY lacking), Mr. Spots, and snacks.

His plan: none.  His anxiety: bad.  Bernard: out.  Time to forcibly remove Darla from the school.

Wait he hadn’t come out at this point in time.  Fuck.  Oh, god.  He cannot come out to the entire school, he would literally rather die.

“Hey, Berns.”

Bernard shrieks and spins.  Tim looks up at him, bemused.

“Wow,” he says, in his light child’s voice, sarcastic and biting.  His face is younger and fuller, still holding traces of baby fat; he’s missing the scar on his chin he swears up and down he got from a car accident but Bernard knows a knife wound when he sees one, and the shadows beneath his eyes are less pronounced.  Adult Tim is only an inch shorter than Bernard, but at sixteen Tim still hasn’t hit any kind of growth spurt, and he has to look up a whole head to meet Bernard’s eyes.  He’s still vampire pale with dark hair, and…

Wait.  Wait, he's definitely wearing make-up.  Bernard can see the edge of concealer along his hairline, and did Tim always wear make-up?  Does this bitch have zits?  Was Bernard insanely jealous of Tim’s clean skin for years for no reason?

“Timmerella, Timbo, Tim-tam, my-” Bernard squawks.  He doesn’t say my love, my darling, my honey bunches of oats, but it's a close thing. “-main man!  My dude!  How’s it hanging?”

Tim is squinting up at him with a half-smile, his eyebrows rising steadily into his hairline, and oh god this is a child.  This is an actual baby.  How were they ever this young?

“I’m fine,” Tim says.  “You look like you’re freaking out.”

“I’m not!” Shit.  Fuck.  “Where’s Darla?”

Tim gives him a weird look, and oh yeah, he’s definitely already fucked this up somehow.  “... math?”

Bernard stares at him blankly, willing his brain to remember where math was, if class started already, any context about math.  Any at all.

“Mrs. Henderson’s class?” Tim says, and he sounds more amused than suspicious, but there’s creeping doubt in his face.  “... where you’re supposed to be?”

“Fuck!” Bernard says, with feeling, as the memory comes flooding back; ancient, doddering Mrs. Henderson and kicking the back of Darla’s seat while trying not to fall asleep to the quadratic formula.  He fumbles before deciding that here is where teenage-Bernard would book it to class, so he books it.  

The last flash of Tim’s face he sees his brow is pinched, like he’s trying to put a puzzle together, and oh yeah Tim is definitely on to him.  Shit.

That’s probably fine.  Tim will dig until the end of time but maybe he won’t start until the shooting, in which case they’ll all have other things to worry about.

He darts down the long hallways, trying to remember the way to the math and sciences wing.  It’s like walking back in time.  The students swarm and separate in their little groups, the noise echoing off the walls.  It’s not nearly as cloistered as he remembered it being; he can see the the jocks are over by the lockers slamming the doors louder than they need to, but they’re intermingling with other kids; goth kids and prep kids and nerds and the theater kids and- oh yeah, there’s the anime kids- all interweaving and talking together, and wow he really bought into the concept of cliques with zero proof, huh?  God, this is weird.

He gets the wrong classroom twice; one empty and one occupied by two dozen students who turn and look at him, bewildered, as he slams the door again.  At least being a semi-responsible adult means he no longer cares what they’re thinking.  Teenage-Bernard would have chewed himself up over that.  Adult-Bernard does not give a flying shit.

He finds what is probably the right door and doesn’t give himself time to consider, just flings it open.

Across the classroom, Darla is leaning back in her chair, chewing on a pen cap.

Other people are moving and breathing.  Bernard can barely hear them.  Darla’s dark, curly hair falls in ringlets over her shoulders, spills down her back; earrings glitter in each ear.  Her punk jacket covered in patches and studs clinks against the plastic chair, she’s wearing her stupid gray jeans and boots and she’s every inch some horrifying amalgamation of thrift stores and Hot Topic-

“... to join us, Dowd,” Mrs. Henderson says, in her dry voice, and Darla turns, meets his eyes.

She smirks at him, all black lipstick and proud, hooked nose, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners.  It’s like being stabbed, it’s like being strangled.

Bernard, very gently, closes the door.  Then he runs away.

---

He makes it to the bathroom before he throws up.

He barely makes it to the garbage.  He lurches in and catches himself on the disgusting trash cans that spawn in every public school bathroom, plastic crinkling under his hands as he holds himself up, his stomach on fire, and vomits.  He didn’t eat breakfast, he doesn’t know what he’s throwing up- the food he ate at dinner with Tim?  The food he ate three years ago the day before she died? 

Darla’s face had dropped, offended and confused as he closed the door, and that’s just like her.  Was just like her.  For her first, kneejerk response to anything to be anger, and god Darla had been such an angry kid.  Is an angry kid, because she’s here.  She’s here and alive and unscarred and young and stupid and this is the cruelest trick that the world’s ever played on him, this is going to break him like sheet glass.

He stumbles away from the garbage, his head swimming, and ducks into a stall.  Half crouching and half leaning on the cold, sticky porcelain and god school bathrooms are so fucking gross, Bernard buries his head against his arm and wheezes.

It’s just that he sat next to Darla as she died.  He listened to the screaming and sobbing outside, muffled by the door, and Darla’s shallow, raspy breathing.  And he hadn’t paid attention, just floated somewhere else, and at sometime in that drift he’d tuned back in and realized the low rasp had stopped.

He went to her vigil.  There hadn’t been a funeral, but Darla had been popular; Darla had been pretty and angry and full of life, and Tyrone and Amber and a couple of the other kids had put something together.  He held a candle and stared at the flame and cried ugly, ugly tears, and then three weeks later Darla held his car above her head with magic and threatened to drop him off Gotham bridge.

He throws up in the toilet.

Footsteps outside.  The door opens.  Bernard screws his eyes shut, spitting out a sad little string of bile and hopes fervently they leave.

Instead Darla crawls into his stall.

“So- stop screaming, it’s just me- so what was that about?”

Bernard wheezes, clutching his chest.  His mouth tastes foul, his throat has the awful raw sharpness that comes right after throwing up.  Darla is alive and here, curling her legs up to sit next to him on the filthy stall floor, looking at him with her dark eyes.

“This is the boy’s restroom,” Bernard squawks.

“I know, it smells like piss,” Darla says, and she glances into the toilet.  Her face is starting to fall from angry confusion to concerned confusion, which is worse, this is so much worse, oh fuck- “Yikes, we gotta get you to the nurse.”

Bernard hasn’t been in the nurse’s room since Darla died.  “No!”

Darla jerks her head to stare at him, alarmed and surprised.  Bernard wheezes, and there’s not enough air, he’s trapped in this suffocating space, he’s tied to the altar, he’s in the car held weightless over the river and he can’t fucking breathe.

“Shit, okay,” Darla says, and she’s really concerned now, her child’s voice cracking, and she’s so young, she’s never had to deal with her friends having a breakdown and Bernard is having a breakdown.  “It’s okay, Berns, no nurses.  We won’t go to the nurse.”

Bernard’s throat makes a choked sound that could charitably be called a grunt but is probably more like a sob.  He curls, scrubbing at his face.

“M’sorry,” he gets out, his voice high-pitched and crumbling.  “M’okay.”

“Bullshit,” Darla says, scared, and then her hand is on his shoulder, jumpy and unsure, rubbing circles with her thumb.  “What happened?  Are you- shit, is this ‘cause I called you a pig yesterday?  I didn’t mean it like that-”

Bernard hiccups on the start of a hysterical laugh.  “No, m’fine, I’m not- I- I’m just anxious.”

“So anxious you threw up?”

 Yeah, cause he’s stuck in a groundhog day loop of the day his best friend dies and his other best friend disappears without a word, but he can’t say that to her, because then he’d have to explain everything, and he’d get an eyeroll and told that he’s gotten caught up in his conspiracy theories or worse she would believe him and then he’d have to describe her death to her and he would literally rather die.

“Uh,” he says, intelligently.  “It.  Happens?”

“Since when?” Darla keeps rubbing her thumb in a circle, and it’s boiling and too much, even that little point of contact, but Bernard can’t think of asking her to stop.  Not when he hasn’t- oh fuck Darla’s hand is on his shoulder.  She’s alive and her hand is on his shoulder and he hasn’t felt her hand in years.

“Since-” his voice cracks as he struggles to think of a good answer, since he can’t exactly say since I got tied to an altar and almost sacrificed, no biggie, “Uh.  A little while?”

Darla purses her lips, clearly not satisfied, and it’s like being decked with a bat, it’s like being taken out with a two-by-four, the way her eyes narrow, the way her nose scrunches, a hundred different tiny gestures Bernard hasn’t seen for four years.  He hiccups.  His stomach rolls and he bites his lip hard.  He can’t throw up in front of Darla, she’d freak out, she doesn’t deserve that.

“You should have said something,” she says hotly.

Bernard recognizes that for what it is, concern channeled into anger, that she just needs a second to cool down.  His brain doesn’t get it and his body flinches away from her.  He couldn’t have said anything, he’s in a time loop, but Darla’s voice gets stuck and drags in his ears, enraged, saying Where’s Tim, Dowd?

“Breathe, fuck, breathe, I’m sorry.”  The hand on his shoulder tightens, and it takes everything in him not to jerk away from it.  “I didn’t mean, we could have helped.  I’m not- mad or anything.”

Bernard chokes on a laugh, strangled, because when is Darla not mad?.  “B-bullshit.”

Darla’s voice cracks around a laugh, sharp and short and nervous.  “Okay, bullshit.  But I’m not…”

She trails off.  Bernard breathes, shaky, resting his head against his arm, braced on the toilet.  Everything’s too warm and for a minute he seriously considers pressing his forehead to the porcelain before deciding that’s too gross.

“You know we’d help you, right?” Darla says, hoarsely.

Oh god, here come the tears. He’s gonna cry the ugliest cry the world has ever seen because Darla is a blaze of fury and fire and she’s here and she’s alive and she cares so much and no.  No, absolutely not.  If he starts sobbing now he won’t stop for at least an hour and no one needs that.

“Let’s ditch,” he blurts.

Darla slumps, some of the tension leaving her shoulders, clearly relieved at having any kind of direction.  “Yeah.  Yeah, sure.”

That’s all he needs.  He staggers to his feet, catches himself on the stall wall.  His stomach rolls, but all that comes out is a truly disgusting burp, so he’ll take it.

“Jesus, Dowd, don’t fall,” Darla is saying.  She’s putting on a brave face but she sounds scared underneath.  Fuck.  Shit.  “Here-”

She slots herself under his arm, hooking her hand around his waist.  High school Bernard would be over the moon at that, he thinks, hysterically.  Right now it burns, making his stomach flip, sweaty and too close, and he desperately wants it gone but he can’t.  It’s Darla.

Also it’s helping him stay upright.  He could get his balance back if he concentrated, but gripping Darla’s shoulder white-knuckled works too.

They stagger out of the bathroom.  The halls are completely abandoned.  Bernard registers distantly that he’s breathing really hard.

“We should go to-” he fumbles, trying to remember what exists currently.  “Anders! Anders park.  Take a walk.  Or, uh, the- see a movie.  We should see a movie.”

Darla scoffs, grabs for normalcy with a strained joke, “Aiming for a date, Dowd?”

Bernard honestly wasn’t even thinking about that, but her words drive up under his skull.  Tim’s not here.  It’s just Darla and Bernard because Tim’s still in class and oh fuck he has to get him out too because it would be just like Tim to get murdered when Darla’s finally out of danger.

“Tim!” he says, high-pitched.  It’s not quite a shriek, but it’s close enough that Darla flinches.  “We should bring Tim!”

“I mean,” Darla hesitates, and Bernard has never, in his life, seen Darla hesitate.  It’s such an alien look that for a second he doesn’t understand what’s happening.  “He probably can’t.  His dad’s been on his case a lot lately.”

“Fuck his dad,” comes out of Bernard’s mouth without any conscious thought whatsoever.

“I mean, yeah,” Darla says. 

Bernard could care less about Tim’s dad, he could care less about Jack motherfucking Drake, and if he meets him here- when he’s still alive- holy fuck Jack Drake is still alive.  Bernard can finally live out his fantasy of breaking his jaw.  Okay, so Bernard cares about Jack Drake, insofar as he would like to inflict gratuitous amounts of violence on him.

This is also wildly off-topic.  Bernard veers back.

“We need to get Tim,” he says, probably more aggressively than he needs to.

Darla purses her lips.  “Berns-”

“We need to,” Bernard says, frantically, and his head is full of electricity and his mouth won’t fucking stop.  “We need get Tim and leave, please-”

“Okay,” Darla says.  She’s trying for soothing, but her voice is strained with fear or anger or both.  “Okay, Berns.  Hold on.”

Her arm wiggles out from between them, fumbling in her pocket.  Bernard can’t stop talking, his mouth is open and things are falling out, a desperate waterfall of word vomit.

“We should go and see the- the new Aliens movie, is that out yet, we should just go, we should go, we’ll bring Tim he likes movies-” Tim liked spy movies, especially, or anything with fight scenes, which he would meticulously pick apart how stupid or unrealistic it was, like he had any fighting experience whatsoever.  “We’ll watch- we’ll watch- Atomic Blonde, that’s a good one-”

Darla’s holding the phone up to her ear.  Her other hand keeps an iron grip on Bernard’s waist, keeps him upright as they stumble down the corridor.

“Or if that’s not out yet, we could watch a dinosaur movie, or something-”

“Heyo,” she says, into the phone.  Bernard tries to shut up, bites down hard on his lip.  “It’s an emergency.  No, not that kind.”

Bernard’s mouth tastes like bile and iron.  Shit, is he bleeding?  Did he bite down hard enough to make himself bleed?

“Movie emergency,” slips out, more squawk than actual words.

“It’s Bernard, he’s-” Darla squeezes his waist.  “... I dunno.  A panic attack?  Look, we’re getting him fresh air, and he- yeah, I know- shut up, Tim- he’s asking for you, okay?”

Oh, fuck.  Tim won’t want to leave.  He can see the future laid out like a empty road, like a clear horizon, and he can see it now; Tim loves his dad, Tim’s dad is mad at him right now and Tim wants so badly for his dad to love him, and he appeases him at every turn and three years after his death he won’t say a bad word about him to Bernard even though Bernard knows, okay?  Bernard sees the shadows under Tim’s eyes and the desperate response to any positive affection, the surprise when it comes.  Fuck, Bernard is gonna beat Jack Drake into the ground.

“Tim!” he squawks, swinging his head close to Darla’s.  His skull bounces off Darla’s head, and it hurts, jarring, makes the nausea come swimming up again.  He barely hears Darla’s grunt.  “Tim, Tim, Tim-Tammy-Tak Tim we gotta jet.   Wanna see a movie?  We’re going to see a movie.”

“Berns,” Darla says.

“A good movie!  Spy movie.”  Bernard bites on his tongue.

“It’s okay, Berns,” Darla says, gently, for her.  “You’re okay.  Tim’s coming.” she holds the phone closer to her ear again.  “You’re coming.”

A buzzing response Bernard can’t hear over the blood in his ears.  His mouth tastes coppery, and oh yeah he’s definitely bleeding.  Fuck.  Goddamnit.  Hopefully it's just his mouth and not his lip, if Darla looks at him again he’s gonna pop.

“No, Tim,” Darla says, clicking her teeth, annoyed, and stresses, “He wants to leave with all of us.”

He does.  He does.  He wants to get Tim and Darla out of here and go see a movie where he won’t have to look at them or think about them for at least an hour, in which case hopefully he’ll have wrestled everything under control and can see them without puking.

“Great,” Darla says, relieved.  “Yeah, sure.  Mhm.  Okay, see you in a minute.”

She ends the call and looks up into Bernard’s face.  Bernard swallows and hopes the way his eyes slide off to the side will be attributed to, say, the fact that he’s having a panic attack, and not, say, that he hasn’t seen Darla in three years and its kind of fucking him up.

“We’re going out behind the soccer fields,” she says.  “Think you can make it that far?”

No.  Probably.  “Fuck yeah, darling Darla,” he says, instead of any of this.  “Let’s blow this popsicle stand.”

---

The fresh air helps a lot.  Every time he breathes in it steals some of the heat in his stomach, siphoning off the frantic energy and soothing it into something exhausted, but calmer.  As he comes down, he becomes aware that his skin feels clammy and sticky with sweat, and he’s shaking where his arm is slung around Darla’s shoulders.  She can probably feel it.

By the time they get to Tim, Bernard is confident that he can look at his boyfriend’s younger counterpart without bursting into tears.  They creep behind the fence and Tim is crouched down, frowning, his sharp eyes catching them immediately, and Bernard’s no longer sure.

Darla’s shoulders lose the rest of their tension, going soft with relief under his arm, and then she dumps him into Tim’s lap.  He goes down in a gangle of limbs.

“Fix it,” she demands.

Tim’s bony knees dig into his ribs, but his arms curl around his shoulder, warm, his blue eyes looking down at him, sharp as the sky and worried.

“Hey, Tim-tam,” Bernard squawks, a little sharper than he means to.  “How’s it hanging?”

“I don’t know,” Tim says, softly, and it hurts, it hurts.  “What’s going on?”

“Nothing!” comes out of Bernard’s mouth, and then, “A movie!  Wanna see a movie?”

Tim and Darla glance at each other, concern in their faces, and something else too.  Fear.  Or suspicion.  It’s probably not suspicion, they probably just think he’s having a panic attack- literally why would they expect anything else- but the look catches in Bernard’s brain and stays there, like an alarm, blaring and insistent.

“How about the park?” Tim says, soothing, practiced.

The park was fine, the park wasn’t the school.  And if they made noises about going back, Bernard could just burst into tears.  It seemed to be working so far.

“Park’s great!” he says.  “Park’s awesome.  Which park?”

“Anders,” Darla says, immediately, but Tim shakes his head.

“Jackson,” he says, in the same soft voice, like Bernard will startle or bolt.  Darla purses her lips, ready to argue, but Tim glances at her, and she bites her tongue.  It’s an invisible conversation, and it’s been so long since he’s been with both of them that Bernard can’t really read it, and this is so goddamn weird.

“Jackson!  Great!” he pipes up, high-pitched, and then scrabbles out of Tim’s lap, probably elbowing him pretty hard.  “Tim-tam’s park, haha!  Cause it’s your middle name-”

“We know, Bernard,” Darla says, exhausted, “You make this joke every time?”

He does?  “I do?” Bernard says, stupidly, before the memory comes flooding back, and oh yeah, he totally made this joke a lot.  “Oh yeah.”

Darla and Tim are both looking at him, confused and worried, and his skin prickles and bubbles under their attention.  He bounces away from them, trying to keep a cool head, and starts to lead the way.

Luckily he still remembers where Jackson Park is.  He passes by it every now and then on his way to work, and the streets haven’t changed that much.  Darla and Tim take turns bracketing him in on either side, which is weird, because back in high school he was usually the friend who got shunted to the back on narrow sidewalks.  Now, though, Darla attaches herself to his hip and complains about chemistry class homework (Luckily “There was homework?” has always been Bernard’s kneejerk response to literally everything) and Tim occasionally slips forward to walk briefly beside them before retreating behind again.

Tim is quiet, which is never a good sign.  A quiet Tim is a thinking Tim, and a thinking Tim is a Tim who can read Bernard like a big, lit-up billboard.

It turns out that Darla’s the bigger problem, though, because as soon as they slip inside the park and find a semi-hidden pathway, she turns on him, arms folded.

“Spill,” she demands.

Bernard fumbles, mouth working, and his voice comes out high-pitched. “Huh?”

“What’s going on?” she gestures at him.  “You almost fainted.”

“I, uh.  I didn’t, though, it was just, uh, i-it,” Bernard swallows around the stutter, glances at Tim for back-up.  But this isn’t his boyfriend, this isn’t the man who definitely went to some kind of How To Help Your Significant Other With PTSD conference and came back with an encyclopedic knowledge of panic attacks and flashbacks and trauma.  This is Tim from high school, and he’s just watching Bernard, eyebrows furrowed, trying to put together a puzzle.  “It was just a- panic attack.”

“Since when do you get panic attacks?” Darla asks, frustrated, and runs a hand through her hair.  She doesn’t expect an answer, because she follows it up with, “You’re still shaky.”

“Yeah, uh, I,” this is weird.  He doesn’t have to explain this much, because Tim went and did his own research and he’s not that close with anyone at work.  “I’m just low on juice?  They’re really tiring.  I’m good, though, I brought snacks?”

“In your backpack?” Darla asks, and then swings- oh she’s carrying his backpack.  He didn’t really process where it went during the time in the bathroom.  She unzips it.

“Do you know what triggered it?” Tim asks.

“Uh-”

“Oh my god.”

Darla is holding Mr. Spots.  Bernard stares.  He doesn’t think that ever happened in high school.  He was always too embarrassed, always too hyperaware of the cool persona he was trying (and failing) to maintain, especially in front of Darla.

Darla never met Mr. Spots.  And now, in this time bubble or memory or trick, Darla is holding Mr. Spots, smiling and delighted.

“You have a stuffed giraffe?” she says, teasing.  She starts to say something else, but stops herself, biting her lip.  When she speaks again, her voice is genuine.  “It’s cute.”

“His name is Mr. Spots,” comes out of Bernard’s mouth, because if his choices are petty humiliation or try and lie to Tim he’ll take petty humiliation.

“Mr. Spots,” Darla says, reverently, and squeezes him briefly against her cheek.  “Okay, okay, wait I’ll tease you about this later.  Snacks.”

She pulls out a granola bar at random and chucks it at his head.  He nearly fumbles it, starts to unwrap it with shaky hands.

“Should we find a place to sit?” Tim asks, and it takes Bernard a moment to realize he’s asking him.

“Uh-” he feels like a deer caught in headlights.  “Sure?”

Tim nods, and walks further down the path.  Bernard follows, nibbling at the granola bar, Darla following behind and inspecting Mr. Spots, delighted.

“I thought you were too cool for toys,” she jabs at his hip with her elbow, teasing. 

Bernard is aching and fucked up and walking a tightrope to keep from crying, so he opens his mouth and the sad, sad truth comes out.  “I think I wanted to be.  Like I thought no one would like me if I still had stuffed animals.  Which is dumb.  Stuffed animals are cool.”

Darla looks a little like she’s been hit with a bat, like she wasn’t expecting any kind of emotional vulnerability.  Bernard’s really fucking up these conversations.  It’s just that he blocked out a bunch of high school and he has no idea how to act like the two dimensional funny kid he used to present in class.

“You’re a dork,” she says, after a moment, but it’s unsure.  She sticks Mr. Spots into the crook of her elbow and threads her arm through his.  “Stuffed animals are badass. Anyone who makes fun of you is a coward.”

“You make fun of me.”

“Everyone but me.”

“Tim makes fun of me.”

“Tim’s a coward.”

“You keep saying that, but none of you will come dumpster diving with me,” Tim says from where he’s snuck back up on them, because he’s a cryptid with no sense of privacy.  “Come on.”

He leads them to a bench, brushing dry pine needles off it.  They sit, squashing Bernard in the middle, which is hysterical because he’s at least a head taller than both of them.

“So,” Tim says, again.  “Do you know what triggered it?”

Goddamnit it, of course he wouldn’t let it go.  Darla scoffs, but Tim shoots her a look.  Bernard fumbles with his food.

“No, it was just- it just happens, sometimes,” he replies.  “Look, I’m-” if he says he’s fine, they’ll want to go back.  “I’ll be fine, I just need- a day away from- everything.  Y’know?”

Tim nods, slowly, like he really does understand.  He’s really smart, and somehow he already knows what triggers are- did he know what they were in high school?  That doesn’t seem right.

“Why’d you need us along?” Darla asks, probing.

This one is easy, at least.  He shoots her a bewildered look.  “‘Cause you’re… my friends?”

Darla scowls.  It’s a glimpse of her, three weeks from now and four years ago, snarling, eyes glittering with red sparks.  Bernard can’t quite suppress his flinch.  Darla’s face falls.

“I’m not… I mean, I’m fine with coming along,” she says, quickly.  She purses her mouth, clearly trying not to frown but still intense.  “I just… look.  Nothing happened this morning?”

Bernard has no clue why they’re being so insistent.  Usually when he trips or says something confusing, he can make them laugh it off with oh it’s just Bernard being Bernard.  He guesses almost fainting in the bathroom is more alarming then his usual bullshit, but they’re looking so much for a specific reason and it's not like Bernard can tell them yeah so I time traveled and/or got stuck in a specific memory and I’m having a lot of really complicated feelings about it.

“I just-” his voice comes out shrill.  “I just panicked.”

It’s a lie.  It’s so obviously a lie.  Bernard can read it in Darla’s face, that she knows it’s a lie, and he’s starting to sweat again, his chest buzzing, and he needs her not to ask.  He needs her to drop it.

Darla studies his face, her expression twisted up.  Bernard swallows.

“Panic attacks suck,” Tim says, conversationally.  

Darla purses her mouth and looks away, and Bernard slumps, relieved.  Tim leans into Bernard’s side, gentle, careful, and he flops against him, relieved and entirely instinctive, and drops his cheek down to rest on Tim’s head.  Luckily he takes this in stride.

“Yeah,” Bernard croaks.

They’re quiet for a while.  Tim nudges his hand to remind him to eat his granola bar.  Darla remains tense and quiet, bothered either by the new discovery that he has panic attacks or by the fact that he won’t explain them to her, but she fishes more food out of Bernard’s bag and drops them into his hands.

Neither of them make any noises about going back to school.

---

After a while Tim and Darla start up a meaningless conversation.  It’s just background noise, talking about the newest bullshit way Tyrone tried to ask Darla out, AP Literature homework, how the clock in Mr. Miller’s classroom jumps by a couple of seconds if you hit it with an eraser and if it would be possible to trick him into letting them out early.  Dumb stuff.  Kid stuff.

Bernard breathes in and out through his nose, slow.  After a while it becomes easy enough to be second nature, and then second nature enough for him to think about other things.

Other things like… he doesn’t know how to hang out with Tim and Darla anymore.  They can tell, too, their conversation a little stilted, a little leaning, waiting for Bernard to jump in.  They both keep giving him side glances, suspicious and concerned in equal measure, Tim’s sky blue eyes and Darla’s dark brown stare.  He tries, blurting out responses mostly at random, but it’s awkward.  

It’s hard.  This used to be natural, this used to be easy.  It’s still natural and easy for Tim and Darla, or it should be.  It’s just Bernard, displaced, fumbling with relationships three years out of date.

Maybe they’ll blame the panic attack.  Probably not, though.  Darla’s good at reading through his bullshit and Tim’s always been a perceptive asshole.

---

It’s noon by the time they get moving again, and Bernard’s slowly starting to relax.  Maybe they’ll make it.  Lunch break starts at 12:30, and the guns happened at lunch.  They’re so close.

Tim bullies them into standing up and going for a walk, slow and lazy.  There’s a cafe nearby that he wants to try, and they move down the path at a crawl, both Tim and Darla bracketing Bernard, and he’s trying not to scare them, he really is, it’s just that it’s really close to time and he’s tenser and tripping over his words as they get closer, his skin prickling and threatening to sweat through his clothes.  At one point Darla tucks Mr. Spots into his hands, which is incredibly sweet and just really cute and Bernard really wants to say aw!!! but doesn’t trust his voice not to crack or shriek with nerves.

They reach the edge of the park and Darla shifts, quietly, muttering “Shit.” 

Bernard’s heart just about stops, and he whips his head up, looking for the gun.

There isn’t one.  People are walking up and down the sidewalk, jackets held tight against the chill, and it takes Bernard a minute to find the man lounging casually against the brick path wall, smoking.  He’s big, dressed in a creaking overcoat, and oh shit, that’s a mafia guy.  Like straight up mafia.

Darla is scowling.  On Bernard’s other side, Tim has gone quiet and still.  Bernard is frozen between them, his mouth struggling to move.

“So, uh,” he manages.  “Cafe, right? We’re going to a cafe?”

Darla breathes out and slumps.  Then she straightens.

“Tim, get Bernard out of here,” she instructs.

“No,” comes out of Bernard’s mouth, instantly.

“Darla, no,” Tim says, and his voice is even.

“Don’t freak, I know him,” Darla says, frank.  She rolls her eyes.  “He’s one of papà’s.  He’s probably just freaking out ‘cause I ditched.  Berns,” she adds, turning around.  “Look, something happened to you this morning.  Yeah?  Yeah.  And I get you don’t want to talk about it, but listen- some stuff is happening-” (“Darla,” Tim says, sharply, but she steamrolls on) “Look, if anybody talked to you this morning, you have to tell Tim.  Okay?”

Bernard’s mouth works uselessly, because how the fuck does he interpret that?  What?  Holy shit, he spent the last three hours terrified they’d somehow realize that he’d bounced back into the past and instead they think he’s been mugged, or…

Oh holy shit, they know about the shooting.  How do they know about the shooting?

She squeezes his shoulder, and she’s standing up, and-

Bernard lunges.  Tim makes a faint sound, surprised, and catches his shoulder, but Bernard still manages to grab her wrist.  

She turns to look at him, startled. He doesn’t know what he looks like.  Desperate, probably.  He doesn’t care, because Darla is looking at him, angry, savage, adoring Darla, with her dark eyes and mass of curls and proud nose, alive and unbroken.

“Don’t,” he says, faintly.

Darla is frowning.  And then her hand is coming up to catch his wrist, holding him back.

“Bernard,” she says, quietly.  “I promise I’ll be okay.”

“You won’t,” comes out, in a tiny voice.

“I will,” she says, harsh and sure.  A deep breath.  “I hate my dad.  But I know he loves me.  He’d rather cut off his own hands then see me stub my toe- fuck it, he’s literally cut off people’s fingers ‘cause he thought they went too far with me-” okay, there’s a lot there Bernard would like to unpack, but they don’t have time.  “-so that guy? Over there? If I show up with so much as a scratch he dies, and he knows that.”

“Darla,” Tim says, softly.

“Tim,” Darla replies, a little mocking.  But she squeezes Bernard’s hand.

Bernard wants to yank her back into the park, wants to go and hide, and he would, really, except- except the mafia guy is watching them, casually, and there’s no way Bernard can outrun him.  Well, he might be able to.  Maybe.  But he’s big, and-

The man bent over him, at the altar, where he couldn’t move his hands-

He’s big.  He’s big, okay?  And maybe- maybe this is enough.  Maybe Darla will get saved by not being at school in- less than ten minutes- and instead hidden somewhere safely away by her crazy mafia dad, who’d put a bullet in anyone who touched his daughter.

His grip loosens, and Darla slips her wrist free.

“I’ll be okay, Berns,” she promises, softly.  “Do what Tim says, okay?”

“Okay,” his voice cracks, and between one breath and the next she’s gone, walking up to the smoking man.

This is definitely a mistake.

---

Tim is walking him somewhere when ten minutes later, both their phones ding.  Tim looks at his.  Bernard doesn’t bother.

“Shit,” Tim says, faintly, and then urgently, “Change of plans.”

Bernard’s not sure if he can handle this.  Scratch that, he definitely can’t.  “Yeah?”

Tim’s hand finds his and squeezes hard, turning Bernard so they’re facing each other, and god Tim’s so young and his face is haunted.  He sees it in Adult Tim, sometimes, a brief flash of something hunted that makes Bernard want to dig Jack Drake out of his grave and beat the snot out of his corpse.  Had Tim always looked like that?  Had Bernard just not noticed?

“You need to go home,” Tim says, speaking rapidly.  “Get into your basement and barricade the door with the pool table.  Don’t come out.”

Bernard swallows past the dryness in his throat.  Fuck, he’s tired.  “What about you?”

“I’m going to my brother’s house,” Tim says, suspiciously quick, like a practiced excuse.  “He never checks his phone, I need to make sure he’s alright.  I’ll be fine.”

Bullshit, Bernard thinks, tired, and says, “I can help-”

“No,” Tim says, firmly.  He’s already backing away from Bernard, getting ready to jog down the sidewalk in the opposite direction.  “I’ll be fine.  Go home!  Don’t go to school!”

Here is where teenage-Bernard would make a joke, here is where teenage-Bernard would crack something dumb about prim and perfect prep Tim telling him to skip class.  He can’t bring himself to bother, which is fine, because Tim has already taken off in the opposite direction.

He could die.  He might die.  He’s probably running back to try and find Darla, the idiot, he’s going to get shot.

Bernard’s chest is one big hollow of slow, oozing horror.  In the face of it everything seems pale and far away.

He goes home.

---

He doesn’t bother to stay in the basement.  The gang war spilled out over Gotham after the shooting, yeah, but it never got as far as his house.  He trudges up the stairs and into his room, shutting the door behind.

He looks at the alerts set in his phone, just once.  Shooting at Louis E. Grieve Memorial High School.  Fighting spiraling out from there.  Stay home or find cover.

He wraps himself up in the greasy sheets and blanket.  Tucks his head into his pillow.  Just stays like that, for a while.

---

His parents come home and say the same things, his mother’s mascara running down her cheeks, his father red-eyed.

“... your friend,” his mom says, and his stomach swoops.

“Fuck,” he says, faintly.  “No, no, no, fuck.”

His mother’s face is crumpled, but now it breaks more, and she sits beside him.  “I’m so sorry, baby.”

“No!”

He’s standing, and he’s shaking, and it hurts worse this time, with Darla’s face and voice fresh in his mind, sharp and proud and angry and young, stupid young, baby young, absolutely-should-not-be-shot young.

“She said she’d be fine!” he shrieks, incoherently, “She swore she’d be fine!”

“Bernard-”

“Bernie, kiddo-”

“She promised!” Like promises matter to a bullet, like promises mean something in the face of a gun.  “I’m gonna murder her!”

“Bernard,” his mom says, chiding, like that was a step too far, and she pulls at his arms and he doesn’t want to sit, he doesn’t, except his dad says “Bernard,” warningly, and he sits, and his mom wraps her arms around him.

Bernard’s gonna kill Darla.  Bernard’s gonna go to sleep, and wake up, and it will still be Tuesday- it had better still be Tuesday, if he wakes up and time chose now to move forward he will actually die- and he’s gonna march into the school, and drag Darla to his house and lock her in the basement and die at the hands of the mafia and he could not care less.

He just has to get her through today.  Just one day.

Chapter Text

On the third day, he spends an hour writing shit down.

His mom opens the door like a recording, like a movie he knows by heart, exasperated and mildly grossed out by the state of his room.  She leaves maybe half an hour later, without checking to see if Bernard’s gone to school.  It’s familiar enough that he doesn’t notice at first, and then just unfamiliar enough to be jarring, just one more moment of disinterest in a years long timeline of disinterest.

He very carefully makes a list.

1. Alarm at 7:00 (disgusting, how did he survive high school)
2. School starts 8:30
3. Classes (math, ????)
4. Lunch 12:30.

He almost labels lunch “guns bitch!!” but his stomach lurches and he just leaves it at lunch.  It’s not like he doesn’t know what it means.

The next list is short, which sucks.

1. Don’t do nothing
2. Don’t let Darla go with mafia guys.

He stares down at the two bullet points for a long time, his mouth kind of dry.  It doesn’t get longer.  He adds a period after Don’t do nothing, ponderous, but it doesn’t really help.

The last thing he does is turn a new page in the notebook and carefully scribble down:

• Tim & Darla know about the shooting

He looks at that for a minute.  They knew something was up.  And they thought it was why Bernard panicked, they kept asking him if something happened that morning.  Kept prodding at that, like it was something specific.

So maybe they didn’t know about the shooting specifically.  That makes sense.  He can’t picture either of them coming to school if they knew ahead of time that, you know, someone was gonna bust in during lunch and spew bullets.

He edits:

• Tim & Darla know about the shooting something

Maybe they just wanted something concrete to blame for the panic attack.  Bernard gets that.  He wanted that a bunch of times, too, early on, when they were just starting.  Something to blame, something that could change.

It took a while to come to terms that it doesn’t work like that.  But Bernard’s had that time, and Tim and Darla haven’t.  

He bites his lip.  Adds:

• Tim and Darla know about the shooting something probably.

That’s… pretty much all he’s got.

Great!  Great.  This can only end well.

He slams the notebook shut, decides last minute to not take it with him- he mostly just needed to write the stuff down anyway, to get his thoughts in order, and Tim is way too nosy for his own good- and dumps all his snacks in his backpack.

He tucks Mr. Spots into the crook of his elbow and books it to school.

---

It doesn’t go quite like last time, because Bernard gets there after the bell rings and the hallways are mostly deserted.  That’s fine.  That’s better, even.  That’s great.  He makes it to math in record time, now that he remembers the room, and spends thirty seconds trying not hyperventilate before he opens the door.

The room smells like dust and paper and drycleaner.  The students are all splayed out at their desks, bored and halfheartedly taking notes.  Mrs. Henderson, in her blouse and slacks and enormous glasses, nails him with the kind of disappointed stare that would have stung in high school but now just feels silly.

And there’s Darla, turning around.  Sharp, eagle nose.  Black lipstick.  Coils of black hair.  She smirks at him, her pencil tapping against the desk, and fuck, is it going to hurt every time?  It’s like the first bite of nicotine, scraping raw over tongue and teeth, it’s like being stabbed.  He can’t live with this.

“How nice of you to join us, Bernard,” Mrs. Henderson says in her dry little voice.  “I don’t suppose you have a late pass?”

Wow, Bernard forgot what high school was like.  He makes a funny noise.

“No-ope,” he says, high-pitched.

There’s a moment where the rest of the class looks at him, unsure, but then someone titters and they break into quiet laughter.  Mrs. Henderson scowls and says, “Take a seat, Mr. Dowd,” and oh shit which seat was his seat, and oh yeah, it’s the empty one behind Darla.  Oh no.  Oh fuck.

Darla’s smirk has slid into a frown, her forehead wrinkled, and she gives him a look that reads, pretty clearly, what the fuck are you doing? before turning around to face the front again.  Joke’s on her.  Bernard has no idea what he’s doing.

That’s a lie.  He knows what he’s doing.  He is going to 1. Not stay in school because FUCK that, which leaves 2. Convince Darla to ditch, which is easy.

He’s trying to figure out a good time to tell Darla “Hey let’s ditch” when Darla tosses something over her shoulder onto his desk.  The crumpled ball of paper smacks against his fingers and he barely manages to catch it before it rolls onto the floor.

The note reads:

whats wrong with u

Oh yeah, notes.  Bernard stares at that, realizes he threw his pencil case out of his backpack this morning, and ends up digging through his backpack for almost a full minute before he finds the world’s oldest blue highlighter, and scratches out:

mental illnes baby

And then, under that because he can’t forget the most important part:

lets ditch

He waits until Mrs. Henderson is looking at the board, and then leans his long-ass teenager arm over Darla’s shoulder and drops it in her lap.  Darla catches it with a muttered curse, unfolds it.  After a beat, her shoulders twitch.  More scribbling.

Mrs. Henderson drawls on about the quadratic formula.  The ball of paper beans him in the nose this time.

ur lookin for a pity date awfully early

Fuck Darla.  Actually, no, wait, he spent half of high school flirting obnoxiously with her, he definitely deserves this.  He scratches back:

were bringing tim

Darla takes longer to reply this time.  It’s hard to figure out what she’s thinking, because her back is to him, and also- also- he hasn’t talked to her in years.  He stares at her jacket and is struck with the vicious horror of staring at a stranger where a friend used to be.

The note lands on his desk.  It reads:

You sure you’re good?

The correct grammar sits there like an unvoiced accusation.  Bernard doesn’t write lol no because Darla’s basically a baby and she doesn’t actually deserve that.  He does think about it though.

Aw babe r u worried? ;)

Darla kicks his leg, but some of the tension leaves her shoulders.  Bernard relaxes.

Okay. Okay, he’s got this.

---

Darla immediately shoves herself into his side when class lets out.

“What’s wrong?” she demands.

Her jacket presses into his ribs, and the texture of it is weird and borders on too much, but it’s not as bad as it was yesterday- last loop- whatever.  God, this sucks.

“Nothing,” he blurts, because he’s an awful little liar.  “It’s just too nice a day to spend inside.”

His voice cracks embarrassingly high and he blunders to a stop, too shellshocked by his body’s abrupt betrayal to figure out a better excuse.  Darla squints at him with her dark eyes, sharp and disbelieving, but the thought oh god I have to do puberty twice is filling him with so much all-encompassing horror that her doubt seems mild in comparison.

“Uh-huh,” she says, pointedly, then she sighs through her nose, short.  “Look, I don’t think Tim will come.”

Bernard’s heart jerks around in his chest, but he manages a smile, just this edge of manic.

“Bet,” he says, because he has zero control, and pulls his phone from his pocket, scrolling through his contacts.

Darla stares at him, her arms crossed, frowning like Bernard is a puzzle, or an annoyance, as Bernard holds the phone up to his ear.  His chest aches.

Tim answers the phone, confused.  “Bernard?”

“Tim, my man!” Bernard says, brightly, and then ducks his head as several students glance at him.  He tucks himself close to Darla, running on some old, just-remembered routine, and she rolls her eyes but moves so she blocks him from view, and it feels almost natural, instead of an ancient and rusty machine struggling to start.  Bernard does not cry, but it’s a close thing.  “We’re ditching.  Meet us by the soccer fields, be there or be square, etcetera, etcetera.”

Tim’s confusion fades into annoyance.  “Yeah, no.  I can’t.”

“Not a choice, my main dude.”

“Bernard, I really can’t.”

“Tim,” Bernard says, and his voice cracks.

Darla looks back at him, sharp.  The air feels too hot, oppressive, and suddenly her shielding him from the crowd of students feels more like being pinned against the wall.  His hands are clammy.

He’s not trapped.  He’s not.  He could leave at any point.  Except he can’t, because he has to take Tim and Darla and they can’t fucking be here.

“I… look,” Tim sighs, quietly.  “I’ve missed a lot of school already this year.  I have to keep my attendance up.”

Tim missed school because his dad was in a coma, literally all of those absences were excused, they don’t count.  Bernard knows the real reason, the reason is Jack Drake looming over Tim’s life, just like Bernard’s dad looms over his, because for all the differences in their childhoods this is something they share, a dad that expects too much and forgives too little.  God.  Fuck.  Bernard hates Jack Drake so fucking much.

“... Bernard?” Tim says.

Bernard’s been quiet for too long.

“Sorry,” Bernard says, and his hand comes up to cup the phone, to keep Tim’s voice close to his ear.  His voice sounds raw and sore, like he’s about to cry.

“Berns?” Tim says, worried.

“Berns?” Darla says at the same time, suspicious.

They had left with him when he was panicking, and he thought that was because they were worried about him, specifically, but it had been because Darla thought something specific happened.  That he got… kidnapped, or threatened.  Or something.  That he knew something was wrong, and she had told Tim to leave with them, so they could press him for details.

They know something is wrong.  Did they always know something was wrong?  Did Bernard walk through today, completely oblivious until the first bright pops at lunch, while Darla and Tim knew what was coming?

They can’t know.  But the idea that they might, that they did, and didn’t tell him- just let him walk through that day like an idiot- that stings, sharp and unexpected.  He knew he played stupid in high school, but he thought they trusted him, that they would tell him.

Except he’s not telling them either.  He could just tell them.  He could just open his mouth and say “Hey, there’s a school shooting at lunch,” but then they’d want to know how he knew that, and what is he going to say? “Hey I think I’m stuck in a time loop?  Also I time traveled back to this specific day and in fact I’m from four years in the future?”

He knows the response to that.  He knows it by rote.  It would be eye rolling, and “That’s not fucking funny,” because most of his conspiracy theories in high school were fairly benign and this was not.  This would make Darla furious, and she wouldn’t leave, because she’d think he was joking, and she’d have every right to be angry with him for joking about this. 

She would stay in school, a boiling point of fury, and she’d die.  Bernard’s breath is too fast in his chest.  She’d die, again.

Darla’s hand is on his shoulder, too hot and too close.  She’s looking at him, face drawn and worried, and on the other side of the phone, Tim is listening, making a noise like the start of a word before cutting himself off.  Bernard’s scaring them.

“We can’t be here,” comes out of his mouth, faintly.

Darla’s eyes search his.  He doesn’t know what his face looks like.  He feels sweaty and too pale and too hot at the same time, like all the blood has left his face and yet he’s still too warm.

“... Okay,” Tim says, gently, in his ear.

All the air leaves him and he slumps against the wall.  He registers faintly that he’s shaking.

“You’ll come?” he says, his voice cracking.

“Yeah, Berns.  I’ll come.”  A pause.  “Is Darla with you?”

Darla must be able to hear him, because she says, “Yeah, I’m here,” before Bernard can fumble out an answer.

“Great,” Tim says, kindly, like Bernard is a frightened animal, something gentle and careful.  He’s too relieved to care.  “I’ll meet you by the soccer fields, okay?”

“Okay,” Bernard says, relieved.  “Okay.”

They’re going to leave.  It’s going to be fine.  It’s going to be fine.

“C’mon,” Darla says, as the hang-up tone plays in his ear.  She loops an arm around his waist, like she did in the last loop, determined and quietly angry, a simmering ball of fire.  Kindness has never come naturally to Darla and this prickly attempt at gentleness is going to make Bernard bawl like a baby, because she’s trying to be gentle, for him.

He grips her shoulder and lets her lead them outside.

---

Bernard’s not as shaky this time, so when Darla goes to drop him in Tim’s lap he manages to keep his feet.  He almost wishes he hadn’t, cause he could really use a hug from his boyfriend, except this isn’t his boyfriend, this is a kid in high school, and he’s so young, stupid young, baby-faced young.  Bernard feels vaguely sick.

“Fix it,” Darla says, again, an audio clip he’s heard before.

“Hey,” Bernard fumbles, and he doesn’t remember what he said last time, or if it matters- does it matter if he says the exact same thing again?  No, right?  “How’s it.  How’s it going?”

“I don’t know,” Tim says, softly, and then almost the same words as last time, “How is it going?”

“Fine!  Fine,” Bernard says instinctively, except, these are his friends and they love him and they want to help him and it hurts, okay, and he just doesn’t want- he just wants his friends.  The heels of his palms press into his eyes before he registers himself doing it.  The warm darkness helps.  He swallows, forces the words out.  “I mean- not.  Not fine.”

Darla makes a sharp, questioning noise, like she just needed a spark to flare up.  “What do you mean not fine?”

“Darla,” Tim says, softly.

“Was it Tyrone? I’ll kill him.”

It takes Bernard a hot minute to even remember who Tyrone is.  “No! No, not- fuck, I forgot about Tyrone.”  Tyrone survived, right?  Everyone else at school survived but Darla?  Shit, shit, he hasn’t even thought about the rest of the students in the jam-packed fucking school.  Tim and Darla glance at each other, concerned and furious respectively.  “No, not- I’m just…”

He’s just what?  He runs his hands through his hair.  Darla’s death hangs overhead like the gray, overcast sky, an inevitable promise of rain.

“I’m just having a bad day,” his voice cracks.

His friends are quiet, and they’re not even his friends, not really.  They’re the memory of them, young and bright and unmarred by all the suffering in their lives.  They’re babies.  They’re so small, he forgot that Darla was five foot nothing and Tim barely more than that, and it doesn’t help, it makes it so much worse that he towers over them and looks down into their soft, baby-cheeked faces and oh god they probably still have acne.  They’re so stupidly young.

Tim’s hand touches his arm, gentle, kind, and Bernard’s gonna break down in tears.  Fuck.

“Okay,” he says, soothing.  “How about the park-”

“No!”

He jerks out of Tim’s hand, and Tim and Darla are both staring at him, now, Tim with a faint furrow between his eyebrows, Darla with the expression she had last loop, startled and afraid, and it’s not the expression she had when she was shot, it’s not, but the fear and shock in her face drives an ice chip into his chest.

“Not the park,” Bernard is saying, his voice hoarse and high-pitched, “We can’t go to the park.”

“Okay,” Tim says, gentle, soothing, and his voice pulls at Bernard like the promise of sleep, and he wants to cry, the tears are gonna spill jagged and painful out of him.

“Let’s see a movie,” he manages to spit out, before Tim can say anything else.

“Okay,” Darla says, immediately,  “Okay.  Whatever you want, Berns.”

Bernard’s throat makes a faint noise, and Tim doesn’t move forward, because he’s so careful with touch; scientific and exact, like he’s memorized the textbook on physical contact and only applies it gingerly and precisely.  Darla is full of fire and spikes and doesn’t give a shit.  She grabs Bernard’s hand and squeezes it, hard.

Her hand is small in his.  He squeezes back, somehow both broken by her affection and flooded with steely resolve.

I’m going to get you out, he thinks but doesn’t say.

---

They go and see a movie.

Darla buys the tickets, two giant things of popcorn, slushies, and like six different kinds of candy, dumping the lion’s share in Bernard’s lap.  Tim doesn’t hover, exactly.  He’s always been good at being unobtrusive.  But he’s present, somehow always within reaching distance without smothering.

They let him pick the movie.  He fumbles, skipping all the action flicks because if he sees a gun he’s gonna puke, and then skipping the horror films because if he gets jump-scared he’s gonna puke, and then skips the rom-com because if he gets reminded that he’s next to the high-school version of his boyfriend who doesn’t even know what it’s like to kiss a boy he will puke.

They end up with the newest animated kids film.  Something about dogs.  The characters are bright on the screen, all squishy shapes and rounded edges, bouncing on a little, contained adventure guaranteed to end happily.

The theater is mostly empty because it’s eleven in the morning on a school day.  Bernard still gets seats in the back.  Tim and Darla follow along without complaint.  They pin him in on both sides, each still a head shorter than he is.  It’s like being guarded by dachshund puppies.  He comes this close to laughing, but doesn’t dare, because he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to stop and the last thing he needs is Tim and Darla thinking he got hit with Joker toxin.

Bernard stares at the screen without really seeing it, hoping against hope that they’ll take the hint and not ask any questions.

Darla lasts about ten minutes.  She shifts, says softly,  “... Berns, what’s going on?”

“I think the golden retriever lost his owner,” Bernard replies, deliberately misunderstanding.  His voice wavers way more than he wants it to.  “Or his dogsitter.”

Darla shifts, a precursor to elbowing him.  But then she doesn’t.  Bernard, staring determinedly at the screen and trying not to shake, can’t see her expression.  Tim, on his other side, is almost invisible, quietly eating popcorn.

“... look,” she whispers, finally.  “You know- if someone talked to you today, or threatened you, or something-”

Tim shifts, but doesn’t interrupt like he did last loop.  Bernard wonders dizzily, what exactly is different.

“-or anything, just-” Darla huffs, frustrated.  “You can tell us.  You can.  We’d help you.”

She sounds so earnest, so fiercely genuine, that Bernard’s throat gets lumpy and he screws up his eyes, determined not to cry.  There’s a boulder in his mouth that he can’t swallow down.  

He could lie.  He could lie here and say someone held him at gunpoint this morning and told him to say nothing, except that’s so unbelievable; a gunman would be more likely to shoot him to keep him from spreading the word than actually let him go.  He could say he ran away, but they wouldn’t believe that for a second either, because High School Bernard was the bumbling, two dimensional class clown, and neither Tim nor Darla saw through him enough to recognize any kind of real competence he might have.  He could say he overheard something, that he just managed to get away; but then why wouldn’t he have told the police, or the school, or something?

Oh.  That’s a thought.  If this round doesn’t work he could just call the school and leave an anonymous bomb threat.

“... Berns?”

Darla is looking at him, and he looks back despite himself.  

The alarm that she’s trying to hide is the expression of a child with something too big for them to handle.  It bites into his chest.

“... It’s fi-ine,” his voice cracks, such an obvious lie, and Darla’s face twists, frustrated and terrified together.

“What happened?”

Some middle aged woman with her gangle of kids shushes them from a couple of rows down.  Darla turns to flip her off and Tim reaches across Bernard’s lap to gently smack her hand down before she can.  His skinny teenage arm brushes against Bernard’s stomach, thin where Adult Tim’s arms are thick with muscle, and Bernard blinks, hard, eyes wet, stares at the movie.

“Nothing happened,” he says quietly, unconvincing even to himself.

“Bullshit,” Darla whispers harshly.  

On screen, the golden retriever is talking to an alley cat.  Bernard shifts uncomfortably in his seat, and that doesn’t help his case at all, but he can’t stop it.  He’s shaking and if he doesn’t bounce his leg or arm or something he might explode.

“... please drop it,” comes out of his mouth, so quiet he barely hears it.

Darla is bristling, Darla is full of fire and righteous fury and she’s not going to drop it, Bernard can see it in her face, and this is going to hurt, this is going to hurt so goddamn much.

“Darla,” Tim says, softly.

They have a completely silent conversation with Bernard between them.  Bernard stares at the movie, terrified that if he moves Darla’s gonna snap, and even more terrified that if he looks at them, really looks at them, he won’t be able to read the invisible communication running between them like thread in a tapestry he is no longer a part of.

“... we’re not done talking about this,” Darla says, finally, low like the promise of violence.

Bernard will take that.  He’ll take anything, anything that buys another five minutes, another ten, anything that keeps Darla alive.  Just for one day.  Just one day.

---

Bernard keeps checking his phone, shielding it with his hand so he’s not kicked out of the theater, so Darla and Tim don’t follow him out of this dark, quiet place and into the bustle of Gotham where in half an hour a gang war will tear the streets apart.

Tim watches him out of the corner of his eye; Darla is a quiet, trembling ball of barbed wire.  Bernard tries to ignore them, tries to keep his phone in his pocket with the screen off, but he keeps obsessively checking the time.  No one can blame him, okay.  This is a totally reasonable thing to do.

Wheezing as 12:30 approaches like the blade of a guillotine is probably a less reasonable thing to do.  Bite him.  He’s trying.

Darla’s hand finds his and squeezes, gentle, and his fingers cramp with how hard they close around hers.  He’s gotta be pressing bruises into her skin, but she doesn’t let go.

12:30 comes.  Bernard stares at the bright number on his phone, knows that the lunch bell is ringing, that any minute now the first gunshot will happen, and that they won’t hear it here, in the dark theater, with bright music playing.

12:31.  12:32.

The relief squeezes his chest like a fist.  He blinks tears out of his eyes and he can feel the crash coming; he’s gonna start bawling like a baby.  He can’t yet, they’re not safe, not by a long shot, but it’s something.  It’s something.

He puts the phone down.

---

The credits roll and they stumble, bleary eyed, out of the theater, Tim and Darla bracketing him like it’s their job to keep him upright.  It’s probably for the best; Bernard’s legs feel like jelly.  Oh yeah, he didn’t eat breakfast.  He’s sustaining himself on popcorn.  Also he’s had at least two mini panic attacks; not quite as crippling as the first loop, or the big one in the second, but definitely rapid breathing and sweating, and he’s had low-grade anxiety all day.

Literally no one can blame him for this.  He’s doing Groundhog Day, except the stakes are Darla’s life.  Holy shit, like that one anime.  Erased.  Is Erased out yet?

Darla’s shoulder presses into his ribcage, which is how he feels her tense.

“Shit,” she mutters.

Bernard’s heart rabbit kicks in his chest, and he jerks his head up, looking for the flash of sunlight off metal, looking for the gun.

The man from the last loop, the mafia guy.  He is outside the theater.  He’s peering into the window.

Darla is starting to sigh, and let go of his arm.  Tim is opening his mouth to say something.

“No,” comes out of Bernard’s mouth.

Darla stops, looking at him, confused and alarmed, and Tim is suddenly holding his upper arm with rigid strength.  Bernard’s heart beats hard in his chest and he can hear the blood in his ears and he knows all the color has left his face and he’s fucking terrified.

“Berns?” Darla says.

“We need to leave,” Bernard says.  “Right- right now, right now.”

Darla opens her mouth, alarmed and angry and too slow, and Bernard grabs her hand and bolts.

A couple of people stare or jump out of the way, but the theater is mostly empty.  Tim is already on their heels, the fast little shit, and Darla squawks but she goes and that’s all that matters, because the mafia guy is coming to take Darla and if she goes with him she dies.   The hall is dimly lit, yellow light passing over them in gleaming flashes, Darla’s face drawn and afraid, Tim’s face clear with sharp focus.

“What’s going on?” Darla wheezes, and Bernard sobs, his eyes blurring, and Darla’s hand tightens in his.  “Bernard!”

The emergency exit gleams red at the end of the hall, and Bernard slams his shoulder into it, hard.

It opens.  The alarm starts blaring.

They burst out onto a side street, concrete and trash and the dull promise of rain, and Bernard stumbles, unsure where to go, but Tim grabs his arm and pulls him, surprisingly strong.

That’s weird.  Bernard knew that Adult Tim tried to follow him into the cult, to track him down- which is unbearably sweet and also what the actual fuck, Tim- but he always thought that attempt had been clumsy, the attempt of a desperate weird kid to keep a friend from becoming a statistic.  High School Tim holds his hand and picks his directions with purpose, like he knows what he’s doing, so they’re a train of teenagers, Tim and Bernard and Darla.

Then he shoves them into a different alleyway, ducking behind a dumpster, and Bernard almost bites Tim’s head off because they have to move.

“Who were you running from?” Tim asks, eyes sharp.

Darla makes a noise and is already talking.  “He’s one of my dad’s, Berns, he wasn’t going to hurt me!”

“Darla,” Tim says, but his eyes are on Bernard and Bernard is wheezing for breath, and Tim is waiting, for the explanation, for what Bernard can’t give.

“If you go with him, you’ll die,” Bernard chokes out, and he realizes abruptly that he’s crying, “You die, Darla, you-”

Darla’s breath hitches, funny, and her face is blurry through the wash of tears.

“Berns,” she says, trying to be gentle.

“Did he do something to you?” Tim asks, and Darla inhales, sharply.

“I-” what can he say?  What can he say?  “Just- you can’t go with him.  Darla, I can’t-”

“Oh god,” Darla says, softly, and then, “Papà took you.”

Bernard’s chest hurts, he’s struggling to breathe, panic is turning the edges of his vision gray.  Oh god, he made Darla think that her dad kidnapped him.  Oh god.  Is that good?  Would that work?  Can he lie for that long, to Darla’s face, to Tim’s face-

Shuffling at the alleyway entrance. Darla’s head whips up, Bernard’s breath catches in his throat.

It’s the man, moving down the alleyway, hands out and open, a gesture of peace.

There’s a horrifying rattle of metal, and Bernard jerks in place, yelps, thinking oh god the gun, but it’s Tim, Tim who is now hanging from a fire escape and reaching for Darla, Darla whose pulling away from him, her mouth open, her eyes full of fire.

“What did you do?” she shouts at the man, her fists raised.  “What did Papà do to my friend?”

“Miss Aquista,” the man says, soothing, and Darla is moving forward and Tim’s too far away and she’ll die, she’ll die, she’ll die.

Bernard makes a snap decision that’ll probably get him killed, and lunges.

Darla is light and easy to shove.  He sweeps her back into Tim’s hands, making Tim fumble and curse and Darla shout something, and in the same movement he kicks, high, and the man catches his foot but not the following fist, and it’s on.

Bernard’s chest is full of adrenaline and glass shards, and he can fight, he can, he remembers the We Are Robin movement and that sudden, heady promise of purpose, running and training and fighting with a hundred other teenagers in Gotham’s shadowy underbelly; he remembers the unexplainable loss after that movement broke up and how that need led him scrambling into the hands of a cult that brought his pain tolerance up to something he knows is unnatural.  He latched onto fighting after listening to Darla bleed out, after she held his car over the Gotham bridge, after Tim left and Bernard realized that he can say all the right things and still be helpless, and he’s kept up fighting training even now, even while he’s planning to enter Gotham Uni as a pre-med, even as his life has moved into something more stable, more kind.

Well.  Had been more stable.  Now he’s stuck in a time loop fighting one of the Aquista mafia guys, who catches a swing sent too wide.

He should be able to do this.  But the guy has his whole forearm in one huge hand  and rams his fist into Bernard’s skinny ribcage, leaving him wheezing, and Bernard’s limbs are too short and too long at the same time; he’s gangly, he’s not used to fighting in his teenage body.  He helped Robin take down twenty cultists, and he’s going to get beaten to a pulp because he’s running Adult Fighting software on Teenager hardware, and oh god that is such a Tim metaphor.

“Bernard!” Darla screams, and Tim makes a guttural noise, and why aren’t they running, why isn’t Tim taking Darla away?

Pain explodes in his throat.  His vision goes black, his body heavy and useless.

He can’t breathe.  For a long, horrible minute he can’t even move, a bloody second stretched out and rubbery.  When he comes back into his body, he’s already struggling, thrashing weakly, concrete cold and damp against his back, his ears ringing.

“... could have… leave…”

“... -nard! Bernard!”

“... you killed… fuck..”

“.. Darla..”

“Stay-”

He’s on the ground.  He can’t breathe.  His throat throbs like a second heart.  His vision is blurry with pain and tears, and it takes him a minute to understand the screaming, many armed creature silhouetted in the alleyway mouth; it’s the man with his arms locked around Darla’s neck and shoulders, hauling her away.

Bernard wheezes and tries to get up, but hands are on him, turning him gently, pulling him up.

“Berns,” Tim says, urgently, barely audible over Darla’s howling.  “Wait.”

“D‘rla,” Bernard protests, weakly.

Tim moves with intensity, like something lurking beneath the skin has breached the surface, energy sharpened into deadly focus.  He’s already slung one of Bernard’s arms around his shoulders, but now he curls an arm around his waist, and Bernard’s too dizzy and terrified and focused on trying not to choke to feel weird about it.

Tim shoves him upward.  He shouldn’t be that strong, his arms are like pool noodles, but Bernard finds himself on the fire escape, legs dangling.

“Climb,” Tim directs.

He drops away toward Darla and the man, now fully out of the alley and disappearing around a corner, and Tim’s so fucking small.  He’s so small.  What is he planning to do?  It’s going to be like the cult, all over again, where Tim, soft, rich, stupid Tim tries to punch his way into Gotham’s underbelly because of Bernard, only this time there’s no Robin coming to save them.

Bernard can’t talk.  His neck hurts like a rock lodged under his chin.  The guy punched him in the throat.  He opens his mouth to tell Tim to come back and all that comes out is a croak.

It’s too late.  The man is gone, and Darla is gone, and Tim is gone.

Bernard’s breath hitches.  He fucked up.  He fucked up, again.

The crying starts like it’s happening to someone else, snot and tears running down his face, bile in his mouth.  He sits there, useless, one leg dangling over the edge of the fire escape, his ribcage one giant bruise, his heart like a knot beneath his breastbone.

He’s so fucking tired.

---

He doesn’t bother to climb.  No one is going to come back for Bernard, not after the news of the gang war spirals out.

At some point he hears gunshots.  It’s not uncommon in Gotham, so no one passing by in the street acts alarmed.

He gets up.  Painstakingly lowers himself to the street; slips and jars his ankle on the concrete.  His ribs are throbbing.  His face is damp.  He aches in every part of his body, he is purple and blue and bruised.

He doesn’t want to go home.  He doesn’t want his parents to see him and watch him limp, he doesn’t want their suffocating questions, he doesn’t want to be touched.

He goes home anyway.

---

Mom bursts through his door right on time, her mascara running, her hair a mess.  Dad is right after her, huffing low in his throat in relieved, wry amusement, saying, you picked a hell of a day to play hooky.

The sound feels like it travels underwater.  He turns to look at them, can tell the minute they see his face.

“Baby,” his mom breathes, horrified, and rushes forward.

Bernard flinches, but she doesn’t see, and it’s not really a flinch, anyway.  He’s too far under.  It’s like a slow, full body jerk, everything lagging a second behind.  She already has her arms around him, and they close in, and they hold him still.

It’s just his mom.  She’s just hugging him.  It’s just Mom.

His skin is crawling.  The walls are breathing.  Are the walls breathing?  His chest aches and his heart throbs under his ribs like a rock, struggling to beat, and he’s sweating so bad, god he must smell awful, and it’s such a weird detail to focus on, now, but it’s all he can think of.

“... happened?” his dad is saying.  His voice is hoarse and tight.  “What did you do?”

He can’t breathe.  He starts to thrash, slowly, like he can’t quite remember what he’s struggling to do, but he can’t move.

“Lloyd,” his mom says, harshly.

“Look at his face,” his dad says, “Was it the shooting?  Why didn’t you run, Bernie, your face looks like a-”

“Lloyd,” his mom snaps, and then quieter.  “Breathe, baby, you gotta breathe.”

He can’t.  He’s being held, his arms pinned together, and spiders crawl under his skin.  “Le’ go’v me.”

“You’re okay, baby,” his mom murmurs, and he’s restrained tighter, limbs held crushingly close.  “It’s okay.”

“It’s okay?” someone is shouting, loud, an angry man’s voice.  “What about this is okay?”

“Lloyd-”

They’re shouting.  They won’t let go of him.  He’s caught and held by the chaos monster, dragged away from Tim, motionless on the ground, and being carried away through Gotham city streets, and he needs to get away.

“... the school…”

“... bruises on his…”

“... his friend-”

“Tim,” Bernard gasps out, ragged, because Tim had been motionless on the ground of the hamburger joint, and oh god they killed him, they killed him because of Bernard, “Tim!”

“... the Drake kid-”

“Shut up, Lloyd!” and then as he thrashes harder, tries to get up, “No, no, lay back down, baby.”

The restraints disappear.  Bernard heaves in one breath, two, but then the hands are back, pushing him down.

They’re tying him to the altar.  They’ve cracked six of his ribs and lacerated his back and now they’re tying him to the altar and they’re going to kill him.

Bernard shrieks, lashes out.

He catches the chaos monster in the face, hard, and there’s soft skin beneath his knuckles, and he yelps, high pitched, and Bernard blinks, the world slow and oozing like honey or molasses, and it’s wrong.  It’s not the chaos monster.

His mom looks back at him, stunned, clutching her cheek.  Her skin is dead white from her cheekbone to her ear, and even as he watches, the skin is starting to flush red, the fresh beginnings of a bruise.

“Mom?” he says, confused and small.

That unfreezes his dad, who lurches forward.  His backhand cracks across Bernard’s face, a bright flash of pain.  It feels far away, like it’s happening to someone else.

“Don’t you ever touch your mother again,” Dad snarls.

His mom is wide-eyed and staring at Bernard, pale and afraid, holding her cheek.  He doesn’t know what he looks like, but she doesn’t protest as Dad drags her out, disappearing out into the hallway, the door to his room closing.

He hit his mom.

He turns to the side and throws up.

---

Sometime late at night, as he lays curled on his side in bed, the room smelling like stale sweat and vomit, he sees something out the window, red and yellow and green.

He closes his eyes and doesn’t think much of it.

---

His alarm rings.  He jerks out of a fitful sleep, his mouth full of spit, and blinks at the ceiling as everything comes flooding back, the mafia guy, Darla, his mom.

Shit his mom.  Fuck.  He hit his mom.  He had a flashback and hit his fucking mom.

Someone knocks on the door and opens it.  His mom peers inside.

““Have you seen your father?” she says, the exact same thing she’s said every loop.  Her face is clear and unblemished, mascara done up neat and tidy, no sign of swelling or bruising.  “He said he’d- oh, Bernard, are you alright?”

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Bernard blurts out.

Her face goes from concerned to exasperated.  “What did you do?”

“I-” the words lay thick and fumbling in his mouth.  What is he supposed to even say here?  He hit his mom and she doesn’t even remember, because it didn’t happen to her, or hasn’t happened yet, and he’s just supposed to, what, stand there like nothing is wrong?

His palms are sweaty.  His mouth is dry.  He’s going to have a panic attack.

Apparently he’s been quiet for too long, because his mom sighs and rolls her eyes.

“Whatever,” she says.  “Just keep me out of it, will you?”

She shuts the door.  Bernard stares, his mouth working.  He knows his parents didn’t like him very much, or care about him.  He knows they don't care about him.  This isn't any different. 

It shouldn’t sting as much as it does.

Chapter Text

The fourth loop, Bernard ditches the movie theater and tries the arcade.  It’s across town.  It’s dark and filled with flashing lights.  It has three different exits; four if they use the roof access.  It should be easy to lose a tail in the crowd of teenagers playing rhythm games and losing at pinball.

Except it’s a school day.  The arcade is almost entirely empty.  The lights flash at the empty 90’s carpet and a pop song plays over the speakers.  Bernard chews fitfully at the world’s greasiest pizza, ignoring Darla’s pointed stare by watching Tim play Dance Dance Revolution.

He’s weirdly good at it.  Not just at hitting all the arrows on time, but his movements are fluid, not the choppy awkwardness of a teenager growing into their limbs but the liquid smooth dance of someone intimately familiar with their body and the way it moves.  Weird.  Bernard has a brief thought that maybe Adult-Tim’s time traveled too, but he dismisses it after a minute.  If he had, he would have said something. It’s not like Bernard’s been subtle about dragging them to different places every time loop.

“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Darla hisses into his ear.

Bernard refuses to meet her eyes, watching Tim’s back, the undercut at the base of his neck.  He hasn’t had hair that short in years.  Bernard’s chest aches.

“Nope,” he mutters back, and ignores Darla’s snarling.

---

Darla says all the same things, with only slight variation in wording.  Asking if he’s okay.  Asking what’s going on, if he is hurt or sick or scared.  What they’re running from.

This time they get into a public street, Bernard running like hell, dragging Darla behind him, the man fast on their heels.  Tim tries to redirect them into an alleyway and Bernard snaps out “No!” loud enough that Darla actually trips, her hand jerking in his, and Tim’s eyes dart over, lightning quick, just a flash of the whites of his eyes, wide.

The man catches up with them anyway.

Bernard fights.  He catches glimpses of Tim and Darla like rapidly changing screenshots; Darla shouting, Tim holding her back, watching Bernard with a stunned expression, fists and dark hair and wide eyes.

The man slams Bernard into a wall.  He hears a wet crack inside his skull, like shattering the crust on drying concrete, like smashing eggs, and thinks oh god I can’t afford to go to the hospital.

He’s on the ground.  The sky is overcast, and the light claws at his eyes.  He squeezes them shut.

Darla is screaming.  Other people are shouting.  Someone is touching his face.

“D’rla,” Bernard slurs.

“Bernard,” Tim’s voice is saying, urgently.  “Bernard, open your eyes.  Come on.”

His head throbs like a drum, like the unbearable cacophony of rain on plastic.  If he opens his eyes the light will stab into his brain and then he will vomit, and no thank you, he doesn’t want to.

“Don’t do this to me,” Tim is saying, and there’s something almost childish in his voice, a kid begging someone not to go.  “Don’t you dare- Bernard.”

People always leave Tim behind.  His parents, and then just his dad.  Mr. Wayne.  His brothers did something to him, Bernard knows even if Tim has never shared the details, and his favorite sister is always in Hong Kong.  People are always leaving Tim.

Bernard can’t be that to Tim.  Not again.  Not even now, when half those people haven’t left Tim yet.  He just can’t.

He pries his eyes open.  The light doesn’t hurt.  Tim is hovering over him, blocking out the gray sky, his eyes wide and blue and set in a child’s face, struggling for expressionless and mostly settling on fear.

“That’s it,” Tim says, breathless.  He’s normally the color of milk, but now he looks almost ice-white.  “Don’t close your eyes.  Stay awake.”

“M’kay,” Bernard says, because he’s fine, he can still salvage this loop, maybe Tim can get Darla this time and it won’t go bad.  “Mm.. I’m ‘kay.”

“I know,” Tim says, soothing, “I’m getting help, okay?  Just stay awake.”

One of Tim’s shoulders is hunched, his phone tucked close to his ear.  Bernard blinks, eyes watery, the world a bright and wobbly fishbowl, and his chest is tightening and his head pounds and Tim needs to get Darla.

“D’r…” Bernard’s tongue is thick in his mouth. “G’t D’rla.”

“It’s okay,” Tim says, uselessly, and the world gets brighter and watery-er and he’s crying.  Bernard’s crying.  “Darla will be okay, I called GCPD. I’m staying with you until the ambulance comes, okay?”

Bernard wants to scream.  The cops?  Tim called the cops? 

What did he expect?  Tim grew up in Bristol.  He still goes to those fancy galas the Waynes throw.  He probably shakes hands with the rancid heart of the GCPD, so detached from the real world that he doesn’t realize Gotham PD is so rotten its fucking gangrenous. 

Darla won’t be okay.  Darla will die, just like every loop before, and Bernard will wake up in his childhood bed with his feet sticking over the edge, no closer to saving her.

Bernard sobs, dully, and there are gentle fingers in his hair, careful, careful.

“It’ll be okay, Berns,” Tim says, softly, tender, his head ducked closer to his.  His cold, bony hands brush against his forehead, tuck a curl of hair behind his hair.  “You’ll be okay.”

He will be.  Darla won’t.

---

His head doesn’t hurt the next morning.

He touches the back of his head, where it had been pulsing like a star, throbbing so badly that he threw up in the ambulance and spent the entire rest of that loop in a haze.  But now the skin is clean and unbroken, and when he pokes and prods it doesn’t hurt.

That opens up a bunch of options for him, if he wants to consider it.  He can throw whole loops away, get kidnapped by the mafia so he better understands what the hell is happening, walk into Crime Alley looking for the Odessa gang, knock on the door of Black Mask and just ask him what’s going on.

He’ll probably get shot.  He hadn’t been shot in the cult.  They were probably too worried about them going to a hospital.  He wonders, absently, what it feels like.

Guilt slams into his chest a half-second later.  Tim hates it when he takes stupid risks, when he lets himself get hurt or go hungry or thirsty because pain just doesn’t feel the same to him anymore.  It’s some combination of apathy and addiction, constantly chasing the high from the chain whip, the brass knuckles, the first breath of air after they half drowned him, laying his own silk shirt over his face and pouring the wine over until he choked and passed out.

Tim wants him to be better, and Bernard wants that, too.  It’s better to have pain be something he flinches away from automatically.  It’s, y’know.  Healthier.

Bernard swallows and shoves the thought deep down, where it probably won’t bother him again for at least a couple of days.

---

This loop, they make it almost to one o’clock.

It turns out the trick is using the buses.  Bernard has no idea how the guy stalking them gets beaten by public transportation, but he’s too wired to question it.  He’s almost manic in his desperation, practically vibrating in place.  It’s gotten bad enough that Darla (beautiful, angry, alive Darla) pulls them out of the booming noise of Gotham downtown and into a quiet park.

There’s enough foliage that Bernard doesn’t feel too exposed, but he flips his hood up over his hair anyway.  The last thing he needs is them getting spotted because his hair is beacon-bright yellow.

The more relieved he is, the more he shakes, because panicking takes energy, okay?  But it means that Darla’s also angrier, stalking beside him like a storm cloud, scowling at the desperate misdirection and lies Bernard tries to feed her, and fuck, she’s so mad.  She’s gonna kill him.

Before she gets the chance,  Tim’s phone rings.   He checks it, angling it away so Bernard can’t see, and his face goes carefully blank, and oh yeah.  Bernard knows that face.

“Is it your dad,” Bernard and Darla say at the same time, in the same tone, more statement then question.  They glance at each other, Darla’s anger softening a tiny bit, and Bernard’s heart is thrumming a little loud, because he’s on the same wavelength as his friends for once, thank fuck.

Tim smiles, his perfect rich man smile with nothing behind the eyes, and says, “Sorry, I’ll just be-”

He gestures over his shoulder, already standing to walk away.  Bernard’s gonna kill Jack Drake.  He’s gonna tuck Darla safely away in a concrete bunker and then show up to the Drake house with a bat.

He and Darla stay quiet by mutual agreement, but Tim talks softly and Bernard only catches snatches of his conversation.  It’s words like yes and of course and no, it was- an emergency.   And then a barely there flicker, less a flinch and more blinds shuttering down, Tim shrinking back inside himself, hiding.

Yes sir, Tim says, and Bernard hates Jack Drake with a rage that starts low in his belly and burns, burns, burns.

Darla’s breathing is short beside him.  Her anger’s got a new target, which suits Bernard just fine.  She can help beat up Jack Drake.  This is fucking perfect.

Tim is coming back.  Bernard tries for a smile.  It comes out a grimace

“How’s your pops?” spills out of his mouth, the kind of thing he would have said back in high school when he thought pops sounded kind of jaunty instead of dialogue for a teenager on Disney Channel.

Tim smiles his pristine, ruefully apologetic rich man’s smile, perfectly even.  It’s like looking at a pod person, or those hyper realistic rubber masks.  

“I’m so sorry,” he says.  It’s a damage-control voice, the baby CEO-in-training voice.  “Something’s come up.”

Bernard hate hate hates Jack Drake.  He doesn’t want Tim to go, but maybe Tim would be safe at home.

If he got home.  He doesn’t remember the exact time the alert appeared on their phones, he’d been so out of it the first couple of loops, and their phones had been off during the movie, and it’d been too loud in the arcade, but it had been around now, and what if it goes off while Tim walking home and he runs off to- to find his brother, like he said he was doing last time, and he got shot or murdered?

“Fuck your dad,” Darla snarls.

It snaps them out of it.  Bernard makes a sharp sound that could be a high giggle and Tim’s face crumbles into something genuinely apologetic.

“I haven’t ditched school in a long time,” he says.  “He’s just- worried.”

“Yeah,” Darla snaps.  “About his rich man reputation, maybe.  When is he gonna give it up?  How long have you been paying rent?”

“Technically we pay a mortgage,” Tim says.

“Oh excuse me, a mortgage.  For fuck’s sake, Tim, this isn’t high cream of society, or whatever, he doesn’t need to keep- fucking hounding you like this.”

“Drake Industries still does a lot of business in private sectors,” Tim says, smoothly.  “We keep up our reputation where we can-”

“That’s such bullshit.”

“-regardless of our circumstances.”

Tim’s turning into his CEO-robot form, or an early version of it, a polite and distant mask.  He did it sometimes, early on in their relationship, when he was late for dates or tripped up in some other way, until Bernard managed to get through to him that it was really freaky to be addressed like a billionaire being greased up for funding.

Adult Tim still slips up on occasion.  It’s familiar enough that Bernard finds himself huffing half a laugh, opening his mouth.

“You’re going Lexcore,” he says.

Darla blinks at him, caught offguard.  Tim’s face crinkles, half confused and fully offended.  “What?”

“You-” Bernard fumbles, because usually Tim would just blow a raspberry and try again, with less Polite Gala Voice.  But this isn’t Adult Tim, this is Child Tim, who’s never bought Bernard ridiculously big bouquets in apology for accidentally eating the last of his sunflower seeds, or spent three hours cleaning dishes after he tried to cook in Bernard’s miserable little apartment kitchen and almost blew up the stove.

“You’re just- you know,” Bernard says weakly.  “Going all soulless business man.”

“Ha,” Darla says, viciously pleased.

“Lexcore like Lex Luthor?” Tim says, face twisted with shock and visceral disgust, sounding so deeply insulted that Bernard wonders Tim has a grudge that Adult Tim is somehow better at hiding.  Maybe Luthor fucked over Drake Industries? Or Wayne Industries?  Bernard doesn’t fucking know, he doesn’t keep up with CEO drama.

“Obviously like Lex Luthor,” Darla says, pleased.  A pause.  “Luthor’s the company that makes weird robots, right?”

“He makes gross human rights violations,” Tim says, strangled.  He looks like he’s been hit in the face with something deeply unpleasant, like sewage or raw fish bait.

“What, as a business model?”

“How do you sell human rights violations?”

“I don’t sound like Lex Luthor,”  Tim stresses. “I’d be a better CEO! I was a better CEO!”

“I always forget you ran your dad’s company for a hot minute.”

“I dunno, Tim,” Bernard says.  “I think the fact that you were a CEO at all puts you in the same class as Luthor.”

“This is going to be my fucking villain origin story,” Tim says, and Bernard cracks a laugh, a real one, not the nervous tittering he’s been doing on and off all day.  It’s such a relief to banter with his friends and have it feel natural, instead of like a puppy trying to navigate on wet tile, tripping up at every turn.  In the corner of his eye, Darla softens, leaning into him, and Tim’s mouth crooks up at the corner.

“I can’t believe you’re going to be Gotham’s newest C-rate villain,” Darla says, grinning, and Tim loses the smile immediately, looking at her with revulsion.

“I would do better than Condiment Man,” he says, in the tone most people use to describe dogshit.

“I dunno, it really depends on your whole shtick.”

“I feel like if your shtick is ‘I can do this better than Lex Luthor’ then you’re already a bad supervillain, cause then you’re just copying off someone else,” Bernard says, because this is funny.  “Like a knock-off Lex Luthor.”

“Oh my god, that can be your name!” Darla says, beaming.  Tim looks ready to murder.  “Knock-off Luthor!  It has double-meaning too, ‘cause it could mean you want to knock him off.  Like kill him.”

“This is defamation,” Tim says. “When I get my costume together, you motherfuckers are first.”

“Aww, Tim-tam, you’d miss me!” Bernard whines, flopping over.  Tim ducks his arm and starts moving away, and Bernard tries to pout but it’s ruined by his laughing, open mouthed smile, and it’s natural, it feels like it’s supposed to, bantering with friends.

“You can’t hurt these pretty faces,” Darla says, and then her temple smacks into Bernard’s cheekbone, mushing their heads together so they can both hit Tim with puppy dog eyes at the same time.

“I don’t have to take this,” Tim says, throwing up his hands, laughter in his voice.  “I’m leaving.”

Bernard’s stomach jerks.  The easiness and relief evaporates.

“Aw,” Darla whines, but the anger has largely left her voice, and while she slumps into Bernard’s side with disappointment, there’s not any heat left in it.  “Can’t believe you’d ditch us.”

“Do you have to?” Bernard blurts.

Tim turns to look at him again, and he can feel Darla holding herself still, pressed against him but trying to make herself invisible, like if she doesn’t blow up or growl or simmer he might actually spill what’s going on with him.

Tim’s face is concerned, but also testing.  There’s something cool and analytical in the way he regards Bernard.  It’s not uncaring, but it’s not quite kind, either.

“Yeah,” he says, gently, apologetically.  And then, only half joking, “Will you survive without me?”

Yes.  Bernard’s been fine this whole time.  It’s Darla who keeps dying, Darla who keeps getting dragged away, Darla who disappears, Darla, Darla, Darla.

He doesn’t say any of that.  Instead, he makes himself laugh.  It comes out sawing and cracked, terribly and obviously fake.  Darla slides her hand into his and grips hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

“If I don’t, make sure they bury me with my theory board,” he says.

Tim’s studying him with his quiet, even eyes, calculating, and he was always too goddamn clever.  But after a long moment, he says, “I don’t think they can fit a ten by ten foot conspiracy corkboard in a coffin.”

“It’s a theory board,” Bernard whines, but it’s familiar ground, and some of the tension leaves.

“Yeah, and it’s at least fifteen feet across,” Darla says.

“This is bullying.”

“Nerd,” Tim says, fondly, but then he leans hard into Bernard’s side, wrapping an arm around him.  Bernard leans into it, turning his cold nose into Tim’s hair, tightening his grip on Darla’s hand so he’s touching both of them, Darla’s hot palm and Tim’s greasy hair.  The idiot forgot to shower again.

“Stay with Darla, okay?” Tim says, softly, and Darla’s grip tightens in his hand in agreement.

He’s trying.  Fuck, he’s trying so hard.

“Okay,” Bernard says, voice cracking, and holds on just a little longer.

---

The alarm comes ten minutes after Tim leaves.

Darla checks her phone.  Bernard, sweating, doesn’t stop her, isn’t even sure how she’s going to react.  How would he react if Darla made them leave the school and afterwards there was tangible proof of a shooting?  Well, Darla’s family was the mafia.  How would he react if Tim told them to leave school and afterwards there was a shooting?

Freaked out, probably.  But not angry.  Bernard’s pretty terrible at being angry, at least at anyone who is not his parents, and in high school his self-esteem was so shot that being treated like a moron by his two best friends hadn’t fazed him much.

“There’s gunfire at the school,” Darla says, eyes wide at her phone.

Bernard swallows.  His throat is one huge lump.

“They’re saying find shelter- Berns,” she breathes, and turns on him, eyes wild and burning, putting the pieces together.  “You knew about this!”

“I- I didn’t-” his words are thick in his mouth.

“You made us leave- you made us get Tim,” she says, bewildered and angry and boiling up with fury, “You know something!”

“No-”

“Why aren’t you telling us?” Darla asks, gripping his hand iron tight.  She shakes it lightly, her mouth full of fire.  “We’ll protect you.  We will.  Who the fuck threatened you? What did you hear?  I need names, or- fuck, or what they look like- Bernard-”

Oh god, Bernard can’t lie, not now, not to her, not to the Darla who never died, who never woke up full of blood-red magic and alien rage.  He opens his mouth-

The man turns the corner.

Bernard’s voice chokes.  His head is ringing with the memory of being slammed into concrete, phantom pain in his skull and spine, and fuck, fuck, he’s so fucking screwed.

Darla sees his fear before he can hide it, whips around.  Her eyes settle on the man, and the hand in his tightens to the point of pain.

“My dad got you,” Darla whispers, horrified, and no, no he didn’t, but Bernard’s voice is choked in his throat, and before he can say no she is letting go of his hand, her eyes blazing.

“What did you do?” she screams, already moving forward, her hands curled into fists.  “What did Papà do to my friend?”

The man raises his hands in a gesture of peace, a video clip Bernard’s seen before, “Miss Aquista-”

Fuck, he’s going to have to do this again.  Okay.

Bernard lunges.

---

He loses badly.

It’s because of Darla.  Bernard never fully appreciated Tim holding her back until now.  She is not a fighter.  Bernard has no idea how Henry Aquista thought it was okay for his daughter , daughter of a mob boss, who he lets go out IN PUBLIC, to not know any basic hand-to-hand, but she clearly doesn’t, or at least she knows only the bare basics, or something-

Maybe Bernard’s biased.  He trained in the We Are Robin movement; he watched Red Robin demonstrate how to fight an enemy blindfolded.  Maybe Darla’s a good fighter, even! It’s just, you know, she’s throwing herself at her dad’s henchman, who has to be trained to fight, and probably fights more often than either of them.

The only thing she’s got going for her is neither Bernard nor the man wants to hit her.

Bernard tears something in his shoulder when he pulls a punch back to avoid clipping her by accident.  He takes a lot of hits while trying to finagle around her, his head ringing and his teeth aching, and she’s shouting the entire time, howling at the mafia man in mindless fury.

It ends like it’s ended the past several loops, with Bernard on the ground, ears ringing, and Darla dragged away.

His skull pounds like the battering of drums.  He doesn’t want to be here.

He closes his eyes.

---

The next loop, he spends most of the morning trying to figure out what he’s going to do about Tim.

Here’s the problem: Tim, at some point, gets a phone call from his dad.  It’s before the city-wide alarm on their phones.  This makes Tim go home.

It also didn’t happen on the loop where he walked Bernard home.  What was different about that loop?  About this one?  The only thing Bernard can think of is the bus, and he can’t think of why that would make Jack Drake call Tim.  

Only… Tim had a city bus pass, like the rest of them.  Bernard remembers this vividly because in freshman year he almost passed out from laughing when Tim tried to pay the bus driver with a credit card.  Was the pass connected to a bank account?  Did Jack stalk Tim’s fucking bus pass expenses?

He’s gonna kill Jack Drake.  He briefly entertains the idea of giving up this loop entirely and just breaking into Tim’s house to throw hands, but decides he’s not quite at that point of blithe disrespect to Darla.  Yet.

The point remains: Tim gets a call, and leaves, and he might make it home safe, and he might not.  Also, he’s not there to hold Darla back while Bernard fights the Aquista henchman, so if it gets to that point (which it has every time), Darla will try to interfere and Bernard will get beaten into the ground.

So the real question is, does Bernard want to keep trying to avoid the henchman coming to take Darla away, or does he want to keep trying to beat him up until he gets it right?  What would getting it right entail?

Bernard doesn’t think he can kill anybody.  It’s just not- he doesn’t think he can do it.  When he tries to think about it, about shooting someone or driving a knife into throat or chest or eyes, he just- his stomach lurches and bile pools in his mouth.  

People start killing when they’ve been driven to an edge.  Maybe watching Darla get dragged away, over and over, will drive him to that point.

He very carefully does not think about that.

He knows a little about non-lethal takedowns, but the truth is it’s really, really hard to choke someone out without hurting them permanently.  He knows the theory behind a blood choke, but he hasn’t actually done it in a real fight, and he has no idea how to finagle someone into that position, especially someone who actually knows what they’re doing.

He could also just keep trying to get away.  He has no idea how many loops he has left, or if he’s stuck here for eternity, or how to make the loops stop.  He has no idea why he’s here, and he should work on that, on getting back home to his Tim, Adult Tim who is settled more into his skin and moves with confidence, who mainlines caffeine while pushing for minimum wage increases in Gotham legislature, whose eyes light up like stars whenever he sees Bernard.

He can’t not try to save Darla.

He buries his face in his sweaty, lanky teenage hands, and tries not to cry.

---

He’s late to school that day, which turns out to be fine.  He finds Darla in math, is shaking and somber enough that she agrees to call Tim and ditch.

He tries the Gotham City Natural History Museum next, which has a metal detector at the entrance and multiple exits.  It also has the bonus of getting to point at the giant tyrannosaurus skeleton and say “Look, Tim-Rex,” breaking the tension enough that Tim groans and Darla punches him in the arm.

Apparently the mafia guy isn’t carrying metal, or otherwise security looked the other way.  Bernard gets smashed into the display of ancient insects, cutting his hand on the sharp steel corner and smearing blood over the glass.  Darla is dragged away among the screaming of the crowd.

Tim doesn’t stay with him that time, gets him propped up against the wall with his balled up jacket staunching Bernard’s palm before he takes off, his eyes haunted and wild.  There are other people around, strangers, who talk to Bernard in earnest voices, asking questions, urging him to stay awake while emergency response comes, making him hold his arm above his heart and putting pressure on the jacket when his grip starts to fail.

Blood drips down his arm and sluices off onto the floor.  Bernard watches it until someone gently turns his head away, saying, “Don’t look at that, kid, c’mon,” and he finds himself staring at the amber display instead, tiny creatures caught out of time with no way out.

He closes his eyes.

---

For the next three loops, he tries, in order:

Gotham’s Japantown.  (During the fight, something in his ankle cracks and snaps.  He manages to duck going to ER, because Tim left to go after Darla and in the confusion he managed to slip away from the well-meaning restaurant owners, which he feels really bad about because he definitely bled all over their nice floor.)

The Granton District mall. (For some reason, it’s far enough that the man doesn’t find them until after Tim leaves, so Darla intercedes and Bernard ends up thrown off the second story walkway.  Falling steals the breath out of lungs, and he spends the rest of that loop in a haze of pain, almost falling unconscious and jerking awake every time as the falling sensation comes again, and again, and again.)

A cat cafe.

He loves that loop.  Tim looks charmed and also terrified, frozen in his chair as a kitten climbs up his pants leg and caterwauls at him.  Bernard remembers Tim mentioning that his parents never let him have pets growing up, and all the pets at the Wayne Manor belong to the younger brother that apparently hates his guts.  Bernard’s thought about suggesting he get a cat, but in the end hadn’t mentioned it.  There’s no way Tim would have time to care for an animal.  He barely takes care of himself.

Now Bernard’s really revisiting the idea, though.  The kitten circles in Tim’s lap and settles in, purring loudly.  Tim’s face has gone all gooey and soft.  Darla has lost her violent, angry edge in favor of smiling crookedly and taking pictures on her phone.

“You should name it Salsa,” Bernard says.

Tim starts, looking up.  His thin, boney hands are petting the kitten like it’s made of glass, even as it rams its head into his palms in a demand for more pressure.

“Our apartment has a no pet policy,” he demurs.

More like Jack has a no pet policy.  Bernard wrinkles his nose.  “I thought you owned the apartment?”

Tim doesn’t fumble, but he does wrinkle his eyebrows.

“I forgot that you know that,” he says.  There’s a faint suspicion forming in his tone, like a thought not quite formed.  Ah, shit.

“Is it your dad?” Darla asks, disgusted, before Tim asks how Bernard knows what he knows.  The mention of Jack pulls Tim into his diplomat’s voice, smoothing his features out into something pleasant and empty.

“It’s the building policy,” Tim replies.  He shrugs expansively.  “I wouldn’t have time to care for her, anyways.”

The kitten meows loudly in his lap, impatient, and leaps back to the floor.  Despite his casual tone, Tim’s eyes flicker to watch it go.

Bernard’s whole chest is warm.  When he gets home, to Adult-Tim, he’s going to tell him to get a cat.

--

Luckily, the man doesn’t find them until after they’ve left the cat cafe.  No cats are hurt.  Bernard, on the other hand, ends that loop with cracked ribs.

He thinks about what he’s going to do, as he stares up at the hospital ceiling.  He wants his Tim, Adult-Tim, and his world.  He wonders if saving Darla would cascade across years and years, and if he would somehow end up in a future he didn’t recognize, with a Darla who never became the Warlock’s Daughter and a Tim who never became his boyfriend.  He thinks about seeing Darla and Tim in his time, and them not being the people he knows; he thinks about seeing strangers.

He can’t not try.  He can’t not save Darla.

He closes his eyes, digs his hand into the thin hospital gown.  The sharp, stabbing pain wakes him up a little, but it still feels distant, like it’s happening through a layer of gauze, or behind a window.

He’s so desensitized to pain.  Tim- his Tim, Adult Tim, hates when he does this, when he hurts or allows himself to hurt because it just doesn’t register like it should.  That’s what he’s been doing these past several loops, with the man, throwing himself headfirst into a fight he’s too clumsy and unfamiliar with his own body to win.

Maybe he could win the fight if he tried for long enough.  But he doesn’t know how many loops he has, and Tim would hate it, just the idea of Bernard running into a metaphorical brick wall, breaking bones and getting concussed and ending every day in the hospital, just to find the one loop where he keeps Darla away from her mob family.

He wants to be better.  He wants to take better care of himself, and not wade into pain like a curious swimmer into ocean surf, letting pain wash over him without thinking or processing it.  He wants to be healthy.

He has to try something different.

Chapter Text

He decides that he’s going to try and hide in the basement.

It’s a dumb idea.  It is such a dumb idea.  But the Dowd family basement is solid concrete, sunk deep into the ground; it’s a Gotham-style basement, which means it’s insulated against heat, cold, radiation, Joker gas, fear gas, Ivy pollen, and Killer Croc.  The insulation is mostly successful- Bernard has fond memories of bunkering down there during an Arkham breakout with barely a giggle- and it should be able to hold against a guy who is, for all intents and purposes, a mook. 

A mook who keeps beating the shit out of Bernard, but still.

That just leaves convincing Darla to go there.  She was willing to ditch school with him when he was clearly having an anxiety attack to go faff about in the city, but he doubts she’d feel the same about coming to the Dowd family basement and shoving the tool locker in front of the door.  That’s just creepy.

It also takes away any room Bernard has for pretending he just had an anxiety attack.  Ditching school to run around the city can be passed off as anxiety, hiding in a basement is paranoia.

Which is fine!  It’s not like she believed him when he said it was just anxiety.  She keeps asking what happened, who hurt you, so he can just tell her what she expects to hear.  Make something up.  Say, “I overheard someone talking about killing you,” which would be weird, but he’s been so nervous and jittery these past several loops that maybe that would be enough.  Or maybe “Someone cornered me on the way to school and asked where to find you and I panicked and told the truth so now we have to hide,” which seems more believable than Bernard just happening to overhear someone planning to kill Darla.  Anything like that.  Anything believable .

He could tell her the truth.

He bites his lip, staring at the corkboard taking up half the far wall, a spiderweb of red thread.  What was the last horrifyingly bad theory he said in high school?  Robins were mass produced clones?  Batman was like Manbat, but with better control over himself?  Darla always reacted to that by rolling her eyes.  How was “Hey, I’m stuck in a time loop” any better?

Well, he could prove it, probably.  Like in movies, where people said exactly what the other person said at the same time.  He’d just have to memorize a bunch of shit.

He swallows.  Okay.  Okay, he could consider that.

Darla wouldn’t call the cops, either, because she actually understands how they work.  The problem is Tim, perfect, pristine, Bristol-raised Tim.  Tim, who called GCPD that one loop while he kept Bernard awake, the absolute fucking moron.  Tim would want to go to them for help, expecting it to be handed to his wealthy, white ass, and not take into account that shelter for Darla Aquiesta was not something they would jump to provide.  Especially since the Drakes are no longer in a position to be handing out bribes.

So he can’t tell Tim.  Or he had to convince Tim not to call the police.

He doesn’t know how to start with that one.  Isn’t his older brother a cop?  Fuck.

He waffles around the idea for a little bit, because what else can he do? It’s not like he has an easy way to convince Tim to hide without sounding suspicious as hell, and it’s not like he’s going to go home early, not unless something happened.

Ooh.  Something like beating up Jack Drake.

Bernard stares at the ceiling, pursing his lips.  He understands it’s an awful idea, he really does.  He understands that this is stemming from an intense, personal desire to break Jack’s face in.  He understands there are a dozen better ways to go about that than beating up Tim’s dad.

But he really wants to.  He totally could, too; from what he understands the man was fifty-fifty bluster and manipulation, with no real fighting skill to speak of.  Also, he’s crippled.

Bernard wonders, briefly, if he should feel bad about beating up a man in a wheelchair.  He decides it really depends on the man in the wheelchair, and since the man in the wheelchair is Jack motherfucking Drake, there’s basically no moral quandary.

Didn’t the guy in Groundhog do this too? Not beating up a significant other’s shithead dad, but throw time away doing dumb shit because there were no real consequences.  It’s not like beating up Jack Drake would last, or that he’d remember, or even that version of Jack Drake would even exist after this loop.

Fuck it. 

---

The first problem is getting into the Drake house.

It’s not too hard.  Bernard’s been there before; he remembers hanging out in Tim’s kitchen and teasing him about his hot step-mom.  The exact streets are fuzzy, but after getting turned around a couple of times, passing under the enormous, looming apartment buildings, he finds one he recognizes.

The real issue is getting into the building.  It’s locked; he doesn’t have a key.  He pretends to fumble through his pockets while the bored looking security guy at the desk watches him with half lidded eyes.  In the end, he buzzes a room at random, picking one near the top floor.

An elderly voice answers the buzzer.  “Yes?”

“I’m so sorry, I forgot my keys,” Bernard says, earnestly.  “Can you buzz me in?”

A fumbling pause.  “I’m sorry, who is this?”

The lie snaps into place, as clever as it is awful, and Bernard is opening his mouth before the thought even fully forms.  “Tim Drake? I live in 304.  I just, I forgot my homework, and we have this project coming up-”

“Oh, Timothy,” the woman says, relaxing.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you, your voice sounds so strange.”

“It does?” Bernard says, hoping to sound confused.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, why did Tim know his neighbors?  Who talked to their neighbors anymore?

“Oh, my ears aren’t what they used to be,” the old voice sighs.  “Your father couldn’t buzz you in?”

“I don’t want to bother him,” Bernard says, scrambling for a lie.  “What with his legs, and back, and he hates the sound of the buzzer… I was worried he wouldn’t be able to get up to get it.”

“Oh, say no more,” the old voice says, and the door buzzes as it unlocks.  “There you are, dear.”

“Thank you!” he says, trying not to feel guilty about lying to Tim’s elderly neighbor, and opens the door.

He trots confidently past the security guard up the stairs, acting like he has every right to be here.  It works; the security guard watches him for a moment before turning back to playing solitaire on the computer.  From there, everything is familiar, up the stairs, turn the corner, midway down the hall.

The hallway is empty.  That’s probably for the best, considering.  He hesitates just for a minute before he knocks.

No one answers for almost ten minutes.  Bernard knocks again, insistent and annoyingly loud.  Oh fuck, did Jack go somewhere?  Where would he go? Bernard has a hazy memory of Tim saying all his physical therapy appointments were at home, and he still wasn’t recovered enough to go to work.

He hears a long, painful exclamation from inside, and dragging footsteps.  The door whooshes open.

“What?” Jack Drake demands.

He’s not in a wheelchair.  He’s standing, barely, holding onto the doorjam like it’s the only thing keeping him upright; even leaning against it, he’s hunched, his head barely clearing Bernard’s chin.  His face is lined and his hair is graying and he looks really, really old, some worn out version of the monster Bernard’s always painted in his head.

He looks like he would fall apart if Bernard touched him.  Bernard hesitates.

“Who are you?” Jack demands.  There’s a little bit of spittle forming in the corner of his mouth.

“Oh, uh,” Bernard stammers on, just barely managing to avoid giving his own name like an idiot.  “Uh, I’m Tim’s friend-”

Jack snarls, low.  His face is pale with pain, which is probably why he’s being so curt.  “What’s my shithead son done now?”

Bernard punches him.

At first he doesn’t register that he’s done it.  Jack’s face goes slack with pain and shock, falling away from the door, and it’s only as he writhes soundlessly on the floor does Bernard realize that he punched him in the throat.

It’s shockingly quiet.  That makes sense; Jack will be struggling to breathe, let alone shout.  He thinks, absently, that it should be louder.  In the cult it had felt very loud, struggling for air, blood thundering in his ears, drowning on dry land.  It’s different being on the other side of it.

It’s the most natural thing in the world to step quietly through the open door and close it behind him.  Bernard locks it, just in case.

“Sorry,” he mutters, not sure why he’s apologizing.

Jack’s breath whistles on an inhale as he struggles, his eyes flat with fear, clutching his throat.  When Bernard steps towards him he wheezes shrilly and tries to scramble back, pathetically.  Bile churns in Bernard’s stomach, but so does anger, roiling and sickly.

“Hey,” he says, like this is a normal thing to do, and then suddenly everything he’s ever thought about Jack comes welling up in a horrible, all-consuming flood.  For a second it gets caught in his throat like a fire that won’t quite catch, then explodes out of him in a rush.

“Did you know Tim disassociates?” he asks.

Jack wheezes on the ground, wild eyed, staring at Bernard like he’s insane.  That’s fine, Bernard feels a little insane.

“Do you even know what that means?” He steps forward into the hallway and leans down.  Jack gasps and lashes out, but it’s so easy to knock that pathetic, grabbing arm aside and haul Jack up by his shirt.  He’s not even that heavy, all sloughed, rotting ribcage and rolling eyes.  “It means someone ignored him when he cried, or screamed, or fought; it means his brain has learned to just go away when something hurts him.”

“Ss,” Jack tries, wheezing around nothing, his hands coming up to fumble at Bernard’s wrists.  Bernard doesn’t let him get his bearings, lifts him so he’s forced onto his toes and walks him backwards further into the house, into the tiny living room.

“He’s touch-starved, too,” Bernard is spitting now, and he can feel the heat in his face.  “He’s been touch-starved the entire time I’ve known him, and he didn’t fucking know it; because you didn’t hug him or hold him or fucking touch him and he flinches away from it like he’s surprised every time-”

One of Jack’s hands fumbles for his pocket.  Bernard lets go of his collar with one hand to slap the phone away, and it tumbles against the floor as Jack whimpers.  Bernard catches it with one foot, keeps his toes over it, has a sharp, visceral memory of his own dad, feels something snap into place.

“What about this?” Bernard snarls.  “Did you do this too?”

He brings his heel down hard.  The phone cracks and splinters.  A beast in Bernard’s chest howls in absolution, a terrible and sickening triumph.

Jack’s eyes roll in fear, making a horrible gurgling noise, clawing weakly at Bernard’s hands, and it’s laughable, it is no effort at all for Bernard’s skinny teenager arms to hold this man.

“W’ d’yu wa’?” Jack tries, desperately, and then again when Bernard gives him a little shake.  “Wha’ do you want?”

He wants to go home.  He wants Darla alive, he wants Tim’s childhood to have been kinder to him, he wants the shitty mattress in his shitty apartment far away from his parents and Jack and Henry fucking Aquista and anyone who ever tormented them.

“This,” Bernard snarls, instead of any of that, and punches Jack’s nose.

The cartilage breaks under his knuckles with a wet crunch.  Jack howls like a wounded dog, abruptly cut off when Bernard slams the blade of his hand into his throat again, and drops him as he chokes, crumpling like wet paper.  His head just barely misses the coffee table, and for a second Bernard wonders what it would have been like, if he had smashed his skull on the furniture and spilled brains across the carpet; the thought crystalizes, threatening to burn beyond his control.

Jack sobs on the ground, curled up and pathetic, his nose crooked and blood on his shirt.  There’s blood on Bernard’s knuckles, bright, and the beast in his chest roars but he feels separated from it.  He realizes that he’s gasping for air, his eyes streaming.

Fuck, he’s crying.  He doesn’t even know why he’s crying, and he hates that he is, that he’s showing any kind of weakness to Jack Drake, but he can’t help it.

Fuck it, whatever.  So he’s crying.  So what?  He’ll still kick Jack’s ass.

“Hey,” he says, his voice raw, dropping into a crouch.  “Do you think you can crawl?”

Jack chokes, clutching at his throat.  Bernard gives him thirty seconds before he slaps him, his hand shaking, the strike weaker than he would like.  Jack jerks and his eyes roll to meet Bernard’s face.

“Do you think.  You can crawl?” Bernard repeats, caustic and mockingly slow, only broken up by the hitching in his voice.

Jack chokes, his eyes narrowing.  There’s spittle in the corner of his mouth, and he mouths something, struggling to talk.  Bernard will take that as a yes.

“Okay,” he says.  His breath hiccups around a sob, but he keeps going, his voice snapping fire and tears.  “Here’s what’s going to happen.  I’m gonna walk away and leave you here, and when I’m out of the building I’ll call an ambulance for you.  If you manage to get down the hallway to a neighbor or something before that, great.  Good for you, you fucking bastard.   Got it?”

Jack wheezes, still meeting Bernard’s gaze, his eyes wild, and something burns in his gaze, anger surfacing.  He spits in Bernard’s face.

It spatters across Bernard’s cheekbone.  For a moment he feels weirdly detached, looking down at this rotting skeleton of a man, hatred burning in that decaying face.  Then he punches Jack’s nose a second time.

Jack wails, and Bernard slaps that out of him, leaves him writhing and crying on the floor.  Bernard is crying too, dribbling snot and tears down his face and he doesn’t care.

“Tim deserved better than you,” he snarls, low and trembling, and then stands before he can give into the raging beast in his chest and just kill him.  Jack makes a sound like a whimper swiftly stifled, and that last whisper of fear appeals to the monster in his chest, leaves it smug and satisfied, but there’s also a rising flood of sickness, his stomach turning over.

Bernard leaves.

---

He’s rattling down the stairs as fast as he can go when he realizes there’s blood on his jacket.

The sob comes boiling out of his throat like it belongs to someone else, long and miserable.  He rips his jacket off, frantically, throws it away from him, and then his legs wobble and he has to sit down on the concrete landing.

Fuck, he beat up Tim’s dad.  Jack’s blood is on his jacket.

He doesn’t have time to think about it; Jack will be crawling down the hallway now, someone could come up the stairs.  He picks up the jacket and ties it around his waist; scrubs the tears and snot off his cheeks.  His hands come away pink tinged; Jack’s blood must have hit his chin.

Fuck.  Fuck, fuck fuck.

He makes himself move, falls more than walks the rest of the way down the stairs, stumbling, his face hot, and makes a beeline out the front door.  The security guard makes a noise like the start of a word, startled, but the door slams behind him before he finishes.

It’s cold out here without his jacket on.  It bites at his exposed arms and face, makes him shiver; the overcast sky threatening a rain that will never come.

He walks briskly down the sidewalk, his eyes swollen and stinging.  He doesn’t know what he looks like.  People very carefully don’t look at him, like proper Gothamites, so he guesses he looks pretty damn insane.

He feels insane.  The snarling, raging beast has subsided, and in its place is something screaming and retching.  He beat up a crippled, sick old man; he beat up Jack Drake, who tormented Tim in ways that he’ll never speak of; who Tim loves despite everything, and oh god, Tim’s never going to forgive him-

The bile surges up.  Bernard stumbles, barely makes it to the road before he vomits.

The puking seems to go on forever, every moment of it mind-shatteringly bad.  His head swims and he just manages to not faceplant in the street.  A couple of cars honk at him, but no one stops.  Why would they? He’s just some kid, drunk or high or drugged in the middle of the day, a glaring target for traffickers, and no one will risk stepping into something over their heads for one skinny teenager out of the hundreds just like him.

After a couple of minutes his stomach settles.  He spits out the last taste of bile.  His face is damp with either tears or sweat; his heart throbs like a knot beneath his breastbone.

Tim loves his dad.  He shouldn’t, god knows he shouldn’t, but he does.  He loves him so much.

Bernard bites down on his lip, tears sluicing off his chin.  He gives himself one minute.  One full minute to just stand there and breathe.

After sixty seconds he straightens up and starts walking again.

---

On the way to the school he dials 911.  The operator picks up fast and says something, but Bernard’s too far away from himself to really hear her.

“Hey,” he interrupts. “There’s an injured man in the apartment building on Gregory Ave. and Fifth.  In three-oh-four.”

“Okay, we’re sending an ambulance.  Stay on the line-”

Bernard hangs up.  Then, for good measure, he drops his phone on the sidewalk and stomps on it, once, twice, cracking it open before kicking it into the sewer drain, watching it clatter down into the dark.  If the fall doesn’t kill it, landing in Gotham’s swampy sewer system will.

Maybe Killer Croc will eat it.

---

He gets to school just in time for the end of second period.

The bell rings shrilly through the speakers, students spilling out of the classrooms.  He doesn’t have his phone; he doesn’t know where to go.  What was Darla’s second period?  What was her third?  Wasn’t it English, or social studies? Fuck, fuck fuck.

He sees someone he does know, though, tall and shouldering his way through the throng.  Holy shit, was that Tyrone?  He hasn’t seen him in years.  It’s surreal to look up at this musclebound football player and see baby fat in his face.  Holy shit, Tyrone’s a high schooler.  He’s a baby.

Bernard legs it through the crowd, dodging around classmates.  People stare at him, bewildered, muttering to each other, and someone shouts “Hey you good?” which he ignores.

Tyrone turns as he approaches, squinting at him, confused.  He looks a little alarmed, which is fair.

“Tyrone,” Bernard says, and his voice sounds high and urgent to his own ears.  “Do you know where Darla is?”

“Uh, hey, Bernard,” Tyrone says, which.  Huh.  Bernard did not think Tyrone knew his name.  “You okay, man?”

“Fine.  I’m fine.  Where’s Darla?”

Tyrone hesitates, grimacing at him, and Bernard knows he looks crazy but he also knows if Tyrone doesn’t tell him right now he might start throwing punches.  At least Tyrone would be able to punch back.

“Still in history, I think?” Tyrone says, finally.  He jerks his thumb over his shoulder.  “Mr. Kelley wanted to talk to her-”

Bernard is already halfway down the hall in the direction Tyrone pointed.  Tyrone shouts “You’re welcome!” sounding annoyed, but doesn’t break Bernard’s legs like he always thought was gonna happen if he ever talked to him directly.  Man, he definitely thought a bunch of stupid shit in high school.

He skids around the corner, glancing through the open doorways as he goes, looking for anything familiar; snatches of whiteboards and posters and bookshelves and desks, people dodging out of his way and watching him with wide eyes.

Darla steps out of a doorway.  Relief hits him like a truck.

She’s scowling over her shoulder, her hair in ringlets over her back, all proud crooked nose and angry, sparking teeth.  She’s alive and bright and young, and he’s gonna tell her.  He’s gonna tell her everything, and fuck, he hopes she believes him.  His eyes prick and he blinks, hard; please, please let this work.

She hears him coming, and turns to face him, and Bernard sees the slow motion slide of expressions, surprise, happiness, confusion, worry; her eyebrows drawing together, eyes wide.

“Darla,” he says, “We gotta-”

“What happened to you?” Darla speaks over him.  Her hand comes up to meet him, grabs his sleeve; she’s scanning him up and down.  “Holy shit-”

“Darla we have to leave,”   Bernard stresses, trying to speak quietly, but he’s shaking as his hand comes up to tangle in her fingers.  

“What the fuck?” Darla says, but she’s staring him down with real alarm now, worried and confused and angry, angry, angry.  “You’re fucking freezing, why aren’t you…”

She trails off, looking at his hand.  There’s blood beneath his fingernails.

“We have to go,” he whispers, and it comes out more a sob than anything else, his voice high and stressed.  He tugs her along, and she makes a surprised noise, half offended and half afraid.  “We have to, we gotta go.”

“Bernard!” she says, pulling back.  Bernard stops trying to pull her, running on some long-forgotten sense of how Darla works, stays still while she studies him with wide eyes.

She must see the fear in his face.  Her hand tightens around his.

“... Okay,” she says, finally, and Bernard shudders in relief as he starts down the hallway, almost running, Darla’s hand in his.  “Where?”

“My house,” he says.  “The basement- if we use the basement-”

He trails off as they move quickly down the hall.  Darla has her phone in her hand, tapping at it rapidly with her phone.

“Your basement,” she repeats, as she puts her phone back in her pocket, keeping pace with him.  “Why?”

“I’ll explain when we get there, we just- we have to go, Darla, it’s almost lunch.”

“Lunch isn’t for forty minutes,” Darla points out, and there’s a current of heat beneath her words, rage carefully restrained.  “Let’s just- hold on, okay?  Let’s stop in the parking lot.”

Bernard makes a pained noise despite himself.  But she’s right.  Lunch isn’t for forty minutes.  It’s simultaneously too long and no time at all.  What’s forty minutes before a gunfight?  They need to be far away when it happens, they have to go.

Darla’s a tinderbox about to catch, a smoldering gas tank, always a moment away from exploding.  It’s like defusing a bomb.  He has to be careful, he can’t push her too far too fast.

“Okay,” he says in a tiny voice, and lets Darla redirect them towards the parking lot.

---

Tim’s in the parking lot.

Bernard doesn’t realize until they turn the corner and Tim is there, fiddling with his phone.  Bernard lurches to a stop, sickened, but Tim is already looking up and coming over.  Why is he here? Shouldn’t the police have called him by now? Or the hospital?

Darla doesn’t let him stop, just tightens her hand on his and pulls him over and Bernard follows, stumbling.  She seems relieved, is already shoving Bernard towards Tim.

“Fix it-” she starts.

Tim’s hand catches Bernard’s elbow.  Bernard wrenches himself out of his grip before he can think about it, before he considers that it’s really way more suspicious to act like he doesn’t want Tim to be here.

Darla cuts herself off.  Tim stares at him, bewildered.

“What are you doing here?” spills out of Bernard, high-pitched.

Tim opens his mouth, shuts it, opens it again.  He glances behind Bernard at Darla, searching for answers.

“Darla texted me,” he says, careful.  Shit, that’s what Darla was doing with her phone.  Tim’s hand flexes, but he doesn’t reach for Bernard again.  “What happened?”

“Nothing,” Bernard says, at the same time as Darla says, “He won’t tell me.”

He was going to tell her, he is going to tell her, he just- has to get rid of Tim, has to get him off campus, has to get him distracted.  What’s distracting?  Besides his dad, why hasn’t his dad called him yet? Or the hospital, or the police, anyone, why is he fucking here.

Tim is frowning, but his expression is mostly placid, calmly concerned, like Bernard only tripped and stubbed his toe.  It’s perfectly believable, except for the fact that Bernard is freaking out and Tim always responds to emergencies like this, with a calm, unshakeable focus, like nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

“Did something happen before school?” Tim asks, his eyebrows pinched together.  “I didn’t see you before first period.”

“N-no, nno-” Bernard blurts, and he’s starting to slur his words, he needs to get that under control, he needs to find something to distract Tim, he needs to find a believable lie.  “Nnno, I, I fe-ell.”

Oh, fuck, that’s the worst lie.  That’s literally the worst lie.  Darla inhales, sharp and angry, but she cuts herself off before it becomes a word.  Tim’s eyebrows draw further together.

“You fell?” he says, gently, when it becomes clear that Bernard’s not going to elaborate.

Bernard swallows convulsively, almost coughs on his own spit, his mind churning.  Oh god, they think he’s being abused.  He might as well have said ‘I fell down the stairs.’ Fuck! Shit.  Would they believe that? Would that be believable, that his dad hit him, or his mom, or some random neighbor or teacher or something-

He has blood beneath his nails. 

He can’t explain that.  What can he say? His dad hit him, so he punched his face in and got blood on his hands?  That he clawed at the fists thrown at him, at the hands extended to hurt him?

“I-” he fumbles for time, glancing side to side, anything but look at his best friend, at the baby version of his boyfriend, at the face he once knew like the back of his hand.

Tim lets him fumble for a minute.  Then, telegraphing his movements, he slowly holds his hand out, palm up.  He doesn’t grab Bernard, or force him to take it.  Just leaves it open, in offering.

It breaks something in Bernard’s chest.  Tim loves him.  Even this Tim, who only knows the loud, laughing high school version of Bernard who was allergic to any serious emotional talk, loves him.  Tim sees that he flinched away from touch, so he’s offering it instead of giving it.  Letting Bernard choose.

Bernard tries to say something.  It comes out as a dry sob, and he reaches for Tim’s hand.

“Berns,” Tim says, not quite able to hide his worry anymore, his face breaking, and he catches him, his clammy little vampire fingers lacing with his.  Darla comes up, tiny and boiling hot and full of fury, but she stops herself from touching him.  They see how he flinches away from touch, even though he’s never had a problem with it before in high school, even though this hypersensitivity should be jarringly new to them; they see it and they respect it and it’s more than his parents did, more than they ever did for him.

Bernard sobs low, burying his face into his free hand, and Tim’s grip on his palm anchors him to the ground, holding him without complaint for the mess Bernard is making.  Fuck.  Fuck, this was not the plan today.

“I,” Bernard says, cause they’re not going to leave until he spills his guts but Tim calls the cops and Bernard needs a lie, so he grabs for what they’ll expect.  “My- my dad.”

Darla goes rigid.  Tim’s hand twitches, but his voice is calm.  “Your dad?”

“He-” the best lies start with the truth, so he chooses a truth.  “I- my mom.  She- she scared me.”

Tim is quiet and attentive, Darla is boiling up with rage, trembling like a band about to snap.  Bernard fumbles through the loop where his mom held him until he hit her and his dad slapped him.  He has to tweek it, because he had a flashback and he can’t mention that, but it’s not hard.

“I- I was having a nightmare,” he says, stumbling, “And she- she woke me up and I- I h-” his voice shrivels, not wanting to voice it, but he pushes forward.  “I hit her- I didn’t mean to, I swear I didn’t know, I was- I thought she was the monster-”

Darla is quiet, Tim is quiet, but neither of them have left or made any noise of disgust and they’re listening, still, so Bernard fumbles on, “But I- I did and dad- dad hit me-”

“I’ll kill him,” Darla snarls, angrier than Bernard’s ever heard her.  “I’ll fucking kill him.”

Tim doesn’t tell her to stop.  She’s gone bright and boiling hot, and usually Tim would step in, calm her down as effectively as poking a hole in a balloon, taking the edge off her rage.  But now he doesn’t.  He’s still holding Bernard’s hand, but he’s gone still.

“I-” Bernard doesn’t know why he feels the need to defend himself, he finds himself scrambling anyway.  “I know I- I swear I didn’t know it was her.”

Darla grabs his arm, briefly, bruisingly tight, but as he flinches she lets go.

“Shit,” she growls, and then she turns and stomps away.  Bernard jerks, too late to grab her, but she doesn’t go far, pacing a hole into the concrete, trembling with rage.  Tim is deadly quiet, his face frozen.

“I swear I didn’t know,” Bernard tells Tim, desperate.  He gives Tim’s hand a little shake for emphasis.  “I wouldn’t do that.”

Tim inhales quietly, like he’s coming out of a trance.  “I know, Berns.”

The relief pools in his chest, but its shortlived.  Darla comes marching back.

“You’re not going back to that house,” she says, furious.  Her teeth are snapping and her throat is full of fire and she is alive, alive, alive.  “You can live with me.”

“Darla-” Tim starts, as Bernard’s stomach drops, but Darla turns on him, eyes flashing.

“You?” she explodes, poisonous.  “You can’t even figure your own situation out, Tim.  He’ll end up ‘falling down’ another set of stairs.”

Bernard stares at Darla.  Tim is frozen.

Darla leans back, her face breaking, her eyes looking briefly askance at Bernard.  But she doesn’t take it back.

Tim’s phone rings.

Tim doesn’t move for a long minute.  Then he lets go of Bernard’s hand, slowly.  Takes the phone out of his pocket and hangs up without looking at it.

“I was going to offer to call Bruce,” he says blandly.

Bernard’s head is swimming.  He stares at him blankly.  Darla grimaces.

“... Bruce Wayne?” 

Tim shrugs, one armed, like offering to call Gotham’s resident billionaire to put up Bernard is normal.  Bernard guesses that it’s not that weird?  He adopted Tim, or he will adopt Tim, and Tim lived with him when his dad was in his coma.  Fuck, Bernard’s met Bruce in his proper timeline outside of the timeloop.  It was weird, because rich people are crazy, but still.

“... shit,” Darla mutters, but doesn’t apologize.

Bernard wants to reach for Tim’s hand again, but Tim is quiet and closed off.  Darla is shifting from one foot to the other, and Bernard needs to reach across the gap that Darla’s put between them.  He opens his mouth to say something; what, he’s not sure.

Tim’s phone rings again.  A tiny furrow appears in Tim’s forehead, and he takes the phone out and actually looks at it this time.

“I…” he trails off, awkwardly, and then looks at Bernard.  The frozen expression is starting to thaw into something vaguely guilty.  “I should take this.”

Here it is, Bernard thinks, hysterical.  Darla opens her mouth to protest, closes it, looks off to the side.  Bernard manages to say, “Sure?” in a high-pitched voice, and Tim grimaces apologetically and starts to walk away.

“Barbara?” he says into the phone as he goes, before his voice goes too quiet to hear.

Was Barbara the old neighbor who let Bernard in? Barbara is definitely an old lady name.  Is it a cop that somehow knows Tim personally, or- if Tim lived with Bruce for a while, he had to have had a social worker to arrange that; is that who would call Tim if they found out his dad was attacked?

It has to be about his dad.  Please let it be about Jack, please let Tim walk away.

“... I’m serious about you not going back to that house,” Darla says.

For a moment Bernard doesn’t remember what they were talking about literally thirty seconds ago.  Then his brain tunes back in.  He turns back to Darla.  Her arms are folded.  She’s looking away.  She is every inch a petulant teenager, guilty over hurting a friend and too proud to admit it, all rage and self-wounded ego.

Bernard’s eyes are wet.  He wipes them with the back of his hand.

“That was a dick thing to say,” he croaks.

Darla flinches, fingers curling into her jacket.  She scowls, still looking away, and struggles for a response.

She doesn’t find one before Tim is suddenly turning around, coming back towards them.  His face is dead white.

“I have to go,” he says.

It should be a relief.  It’s not.  Bernard stares at the ground, can’t meet Tim’s eyes.  Darla bristles.

“Seriously?” she demands.

Tim’s already picking up his backpack, slinging it onto his shoulder.  His hand is so tight around his phone that his knuckles are pale knots in his fingers.

“My dad’s in the hospital,” he says, and he sounds like he’s gonna cry, and Bernard’s gonna throw up.

Darla opens her mouth, her eyes blazing, but then she shuts it, slowly, her hands curling into fists.  And then Tim is coming towards Bernard, pale and scared, and Bernard did that.  He put that look there, and he just stands and lets Tim wrap his arm around his ribcage in a quick hug, like he didn’t beat up his dad, like Tim’s not going to walk into a hospital room to see his dad in a cot because Bernard put him there.

“I’m sorry,” Tim says, and he sounds destroyed, guilty and worried and scared all at once.  “Stick with Darla, okay?  Don’t go back to your house.”

Bernard’s mouth unsticks.  He should say sorry, he should reassure Tim that it’s fine, he should come clean.

“Okay,” he croaks instead of any of these things.

Tim lets him go with a final squeeze, turns to Darla.  They communicate something entirely in a look Bernard can’t read, and then Tim squeezes Darla’s hand, once.  She huffs but squeezes back, and then Tim is going, Tim is flitting away, fast and silent, until he disappears.

Bernard stares at the corner he turned and tries not to feel like a piece of shit.

Darla breathes out slowly.

“Come on,” she says.  “Wherever you end up staying, we can at least get your shit and pack it into your car.”

Bernard swallows.  Come on, Dowd, he thinks.  Put your money where your mouth is.

“I lied,” he says, his voice cracking.

Darla looks at him with narrow eyes, confused, concerned, and Bernard keeps going, because if he stops now he’ll never start again.

“My dad didn’t hit me,” he says, and then barrels on as Darla opens her mouth to interrupt, or refute, or whatever she’s going to do.  “I don’t have any bruises, and I’ll take off my shirt or pants or whatever to show you, whatever you need to see.  But the blood’s not from my dad.”

Darla stares at him, bewildered.  “Whose it from?”

“Tim’s dad,” Bernard says, voice cracking, “Because I broke his nose.”

Darla’s mouth opens.  Darla’s mouth closes.  She looks like she’s been hit with a bat, completely stunned.

“What?” she says, astonished.

“I broke Jack Drake’s nose,” Bernard repeats, and his breath wheezes as he gathers his courage.  “And holy fuck, Darla, you’re not gonna believe me why.”

Chapter Text

“Bernard, would you slow down?”

Bernard is rubbing his arms, hard, to try and put some warmth back into them.  So far he’s only succeeded in giving himself rug burn.  He stumbles, tries to slow his pace to match Darla’s shorter legs, but his heart is beating hard in his chest and his tongue feels fat and swollen.

“Just- we gotta get out of this neighborhood,” he says, fumbling, “Before the shootout- fuck, I don’t know how far it spreads.”

“Shootout?” Darla catches up, her mouth grimacing, her eyes wide and eyebrows drawn together.  “There’s a fucking shootout?”

“I’ll get to it, it doesn’t matter, just, I woke up this morning like- I think it’s been a week- I woke up this morning a week ago-”

“Go back to the shootout.”

We can’t, you’d die; Bernard thinks hysterically.  He doesn’t say that.  Instead he says, “Listen, it’ll make more sense if I- just, let me talk? Please?”

Darla huffs as she half-jogs beside him, her face twisted into a frown.  High school Bernard would look at her and see only anger.  Now, Bernard sees the glass-fragile veneer holding it all together, the terrified child underneath.  Fuck, Darla’s fifteen.  That’s a baby.

After a minute she makes a vaguely acquiescing grunt.

“Okay,” Bernard breathes, walking hard.  He tries to slow down, but the school still looms in the distance behind them like an omen.  “Okay.”

Darla is quiet beside him, studying him.  He can’t look at her, stares ahead, scrapes his thoughts together.

“Okay,” he says, again, and then, in a rush, “I’m stuck in a timeloop.”

Darla is quiet for a couple of seconds.  “What the fuck?”

“I know-” Bernard bursts out, and then he’s waving his hands as he walks, “I know it sounds crazy, I know it- I swear it’s not one of the fucking clone conspiracy theories, I- Darla it’s real, I swear it’s real, I’m not lying-”

“Berns, slow down.” Darla makes a frustrated noise, and here it is:

Darla won’t believe him.  Not now.  And that’s okay, he planned for this.  He just- he has to memorize everything she says, and then do the loop over and say all the same things.  He just has to- he has to listen to her.  That’s all.  He can memorize a couple words, he can, and then next loop he’ll say them with her at the same time, and maybe it’ll take a couple tries, but he’s been through, what- five- seven loops already, what’s two or three more.

He’s going to have to stand here and listen to her lose her temper at him.  He’s gonna have to do it multiple times.  Why did he think he could survive this?

“Just…” Darla breathes out through her nose like an angry bull.  She reaches out for his arm, pulls back at last second to just catch the hem of his shirt.  “Let’s- slow down a minute, okay?”

Bernard wants to puke.  He lets Darla pull them to a stop, and then she’s gently tugging at his shirt until he’s turned to face her.

She inspects his face with narrowed eyes.  After a minute she sighs.  “Did you take anything this morning?”

Bernard blinks at her, his mouth fumbling.  “Huh?”

“Was it Tyler? I could have sworn he was only palming tylenol.”

“I-” Bernard bites his tongue, sharp and cracking.  “I’m not high, Darla.”

Darla gives him a look that’s a cross between furious, concerned, and pitying, and it stings like a slap in the face, and Bernard’s chest flares with indignant anger and he unties his jacket with shaking hands.

“Berns-” she starts, and he unfurls his bloody jacket, throwing it into her hands.  She lets go of his shirt, catching it with a grunt, and stares at the swath of reddish brown that had been previously hidden.

“I’m not lying,” Bernard says, and his voice comes out scathing and desperate at the same time, pleading.  “About any of it, Darla.”

“Holy shit,” Darla says, stilted.  She turns it over, looking at it, fascinated.  She doesn’t seem scared.  She actually seems- fine.  Oh yeah, mob boss daughter.  Bernard forgot.

Bernard bites his lip and tastes blood.  He doesn’t know if it’s his or Jack’s.

“... holy shit,” Darla repeats, quieter, and then looks up at him.  Her eyes are dark and shadowed, and there’s a tremor in her shoulders.  It takes Bernard a second to recognize that she’s afraid.  Not angry, even though the mask of frustration sits on her face paper-thin and cracking, but really, actually scared.

“... I swear it’s true,” Bernard says, in a tiny voice.  Darla keeps watching him, expectant, so he continues onward, “I woke up this morning about- seven loops ago, I think, I’m- I’m in a time loop.  I’ve lived this day a bunch of times, now, and every night I start over.”

Darla stays quiet, inspecting his face, her eyes narrow and unsure.  Bernard fumbles, opens his mouth, closes it.  How does he tell her that he’s from four years in the future?  How does he tell her that he doesn’t even really know her, that he’s looking at a stranger that he only sees in old pictures and remembers with a bittersweetness that borders on agony, how does he tell her that she’s died every. Fucking.  Loop.

He can’t.  He has to, and he fumbles with it, his tongue fat in his mouth.

“And- no matter what I do, every loop ends the same, and I’m- I can’t-  I can’t do this again, I can’t go through this again-” he inhales, sharply, to get himself under control.

“Bernard,” Darla says, concerned but also hard and suspicious, and Bernard can’t hear what she has to say next, he can’t.

“You die,” he chokes out.

Darla stares at him while his heart thunders in his chest, and she doesn’t believe him, her mouth contorting into a snarl, flashing her teeth, and Bernard sees the moment where the fury lights up like gasoline.

---

“I thought you were actually fucked up!”

“I’m serious!” Bernard screams right back, and his blood is pounding in his ears and Darla is turning red, furious, shouting back at him.

“That isn’t fucking funny!  You fucking shitstain!”

“I’m serious, I’m fucking serious-”

“Was this for a date?” she throws the accusation in his face like a bomb, spitting with fury.  “Did you think scaring the shit out of me would impress me, you fuck? I thought you grew out of that, I thought you weren’t a fucking incel anymore!”

“Anymore?” he gasps, the breath knocked out of him, gawping with disgust and horror, and it would almost be funny if she didn’t fucking mean it.   “No!”

“Fuck you, Bernard,” Darla spits, and she’s getting ready to turn on her heel.  “I can’t believe I thought you were different-”

“I am different!” Bernard gestures, and anger comes spilling out, “What the fuck, Darla, I wouldn’t do that!  You know I wouldn’t do that!  Would you pull your head out of your ass?”

“My head?” Darla shrieks.

“I haven’t tried asking you seriously on a date since freshman prom!” Bernard’s mouth is full of snapping fire, “And it isn’t because of your dad, it’s because you’re a fucking asshole!”

Darla punches him.

At least, she tries to.  It’s sloppy and telegraphed, and without really thinking about it Bernard slaps her hand aside.

“Fuck! You!” Darla howls, trying to punch him with each word, like he’s to blame for this, like he’s lying, like she didn’t die on him and then hold his car over Gotham bridge with magic, like she didn’t kidnap Tim and ditch them both and disappeared from his life like he didn’t fucking matter-

“I didn’t fucking notice!” he shrieks, voice cracking.  “You know what stays with me?  You know what won’t fucking leave me alone?  It’s that I held your hand and I zoned out! I fucking zoned out! It’s been years and every fucking day I think about how I held your hand and didn’t notice when you fucking died!”

Darla is staring at him, furious but also unsure, her mouth open to snap and growl, but it feels like a scab has come off a wound that never really stopped bleeding, and all the rotting, infected pus of it is coming out.

“I remember the fucking crack in the wall of the fucking nurse’s office more than I remember your face!” Bernard gasps for air that won’t come, eaten away by the fire in his chest.  “The paramedics had to break your fingers to free me cause your blood had all fucking set!”

“Bernard-” Darla’s anger is turning into something else, equally intense, and Bernard doesn’t care enough to discern what it is, only that it’s wide-eyed and inspecting his face.

“I can’t do that again!” he shrieks, and he realizes distantly that he’s started crying.  “I won’t do that again!  Fuck you, Darla, you can’t make me do that again!”

“Bernard!”

Bernard chokes on an inhale; he can’t seem to get enough air in.  He drags his hand under his eyes, trying to scrub the tears away and mostly just getting snot on himself, and he hates this, so much, there’s a typhoon in his chest and head and ears and he’s crying.

“Fuck you,” he says, miserable and exhausted, his eyes squeezed shut.  He rubs at his face.  “Just- fuck you.”

Darla’s quiet.  Bernard doesn’t know what she’s thinking, but he can imagine it, the putrid, roiling anger all tied up with nowhere to go, facing down her crying friend and feeling too guilty to yell again, like Bernard is too delicate to take it, and how she must resent him for breaking under the wildfire of her anger.  Well, maybe she should have thought of that before she started screaming.  Fuck Darla.

Darla stands there for a long moment, before whipping around, stomping away.  

Bernard’s heart drops into his belly, but she doesn’t go far.  She kicks the high fence that blocks off the soccer fields, makes it rattle like a cacophony of pots and pans, and shrieks wordlessly, punching at empty air.  She falls quiet, leaning her forehead against the fence, and Bernard actually sees how she takes a deep breath in, and then out.

She turns around, scowling.  “Fine.”

Bernard’s chest roars.  “Fine?” He snaps back.  “Really-”

“Yes!  Really!” Darla steamrolls over him, throwing her hands up.  “Fine!  Fine.  You’re stuck in a timeloop.  It’s real.  Whatever.”

His heart swoops, caught offguard, but the typhoon’s still shrieking in his chest and it’s difficult to shake.  “You don’t have to fucking patronize me- ”

“You’re my friend!” Darla snaps back, and then breathes in again, barely controlled.  “You’re- my friend.  And I don’t believe you; I think you’re fucking- hallucinating, or something- but- I don’t know.”

Bernard stares at her.  What is he supposed to say to that?  Gee, thanks, sits on the tip of his tongue, but he bites it back.

Darla shifts from one foot to another, uncomfortable and still simmering with anger.

“I guess-” she stops.  Starts again.  “I guess I’m saying that.  I trust you?”

The anger is slowly fading, leaving something aching and confused.  Shit, he’s gonna cry.  Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“So you think it’s real, and I could be wrong.  So.” Darla shrugs, jerkily, almost bumping her chin with her shoulder.  “It’s real.  Or whatever.”

He opens his mouth.  Closes it.  His face feels very hot, and he’s gonna cry, again.  Fuck.  He loves Darla so much, he loves this burning up spark of a teenager who can’t quite keep her rage from boiling over, who tries to be kind anyway.

“Fuck,” he croaks.  He scrubs his face again.  “Um- okay.  Thanks.”

Darla ignores that with all the grace of an emotionally constipated teen.  She shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other, clapping her hands at him briefly.  “C’mon, spill.  Let’s talk and walk.”

Bernard sniffles a gross, snotty sniffle, rubbing his face.  He starts walking again, slower so Darla can keep easy pace with him.  “Right.  Cool.  Okay, so-”

He talks.  Darla stays at his side, a stubborn, supportive rock, and listens.

---

By the time they get to his house, he’s gotten most of it out.  Not that he’s from four years in the future- he has no idea how to start that conversation- but most of the loops, how he’s been sneaking Tim and Darla out of the school, how the man who keeps coming to take Darla away, how Tim called the fucking cops.

Darla wrinkles her nose, but she doesn’t look disdainful or disappointed like Bernard expected from, you know, Tim snitching them out to the police.  

“... I don’t think he called the police,” she says.

Bernard squints at her, confused.  “He literally said he did.  A bunch of paramedics showed up with big, flashing lights.”

“That’s EMTs, dork,” Darla says, but there’s not a lot of heat to it, or not a lot of heat for Darla. “I mean, he probably didn’t have a choice that round because of how badly you were hurt.  But he didn’t call the police any other round, did he?”

“I- don’t know?” Bernard fumbles in his pocket for his keys.  “He started chasing after you.  I mean, I guess he could have called and ran at the same time.”

“So he didn’t,” Darla says, satisfied, completely blowing over Bernard’s totally reasonable explanation.  “It was just that round.  If he’s going to call paramedics, then he has to call the cops too, ‘cause otherwise that would look weird.”

Why does it sound like she thinks Tim would hide this? Fuck, does it have to do with how weird they’ve been acting, asking him if someone talked to or hurt him every time he’s panicked in front of him?

“You think he wouldn’t call GCPD?” Bernard asks, doubtfully, trying to put the pieces together.  He knows Adult Tim’s opinion on police corruption, but he had at least three years of managing the Wayne Enterprises’ various charities, plus he took homeless advocation advice from a contact in his phone called Red Riding Hood who referred to cops exclusively as pigs.  High School Tim grew up in the sparkling, crystalline trellises of Gotham’s superrich, and has only been a regular upper-middle class citizen for maybe a year.  If Tim had an idea that something was up, he might think calling the cops was a reasonable response.

“Of course not,” Darla gives him a vaguely disgusted look.  “Not if he had any other choice.  He’s not stupid.”

“I know he’s not stupid,” Bernard can’t help but snap back.  Luckily it comes out fairly weak, and Darla only rolls her eyes and follows him as he unlocks the house and makes his way over the threshold.

In the late morning, his childhood house is strangely nostalgic and sickening.  Light falls across the pictures on the wall in broad stripes; across the bookshelves and posed family photos.  Most of them were for Christmas cards and include his extended family, like the cousin who used to spit in his food and the uncle who taught him how to drive.

His chest hurts.  He ignores it to head into the kitchen.  If they’re gonna be stuck in the basement for a day, they might as well have snacks.

“It’s just- he’s Tim,” Bernard says, finally.  “He grew up in Bristol.”

Darla doesn’t answer.  Bernard turns, his heart jumping, terrified that she’s been snatched in the two seconds he took his eyes off her, but she’s fine.  In fact, she’s paused in the entryway and staring determinedly at the wall in a way that clicks in Bernard’s brain, some old memory of the way Darla works surfacing like a passing dolphin.  She’s struggling not to tell him something.

“Darla?” Bernard probes.

Darla inhales through her teeth.  Folds her arms.  Holy shit, Bernard thinks wildly.

“I don’t think Tim called the cops,” she says, slowly, measuring her words, “Because he’s been helping me figure out what’s going on with my dad.”

Oh, he was so fucking right.  Of course Darla caught onto her mob boss dad doing whatever led up to the shooting.  Her relationship with her dad might be strained, but she’s not blind.  She knew something was wrong, and it turns out Tim knew something was wrong too.

They didn’t tell him.  They knew something, and they didn’t tell him, and he tripped his way through high school completely oblivious while his two best friends fucked around with the mob, and he didn’t know right up to the point of the first gunshot.

Irrationally, it stings more that Tim knew and didn’t tell him.  It makes sense.  Tim tried to join the cult in a deeply misguided attempt to save Bernard, of course he would have tried to help Darla with the mob.  Of course neither of them would tell High School Bernard, dumb, bumbling, two-dimensional Bernard.  Fuck.  Why didn’t he notice?  Why does it hurt so much?

“Tim’s helping you with your dad?” he says, trying to keep his voice level, except it cracks embarrassingly high halfway through.

“He’s doing something in Odessa territory,” Darla says, generously ignoring that hiccup of puberty.  “I think someone paid him off to- just like- cause problems.”

Problems like a school shooting?

“Isn’t that what mobs do?” Bernard asks before he can stop himself.

Luckily, Darla only bristles a little bit.  “Don’t be stupid,” she says.  “I mean shit that’s bad for business.  Starting fires, robbing banks.  Loud problems.”

Bernard shuffles into the kitchen, looking for easy snack food.  He tries to fit what Darla is saying into the timeline of the day at the same time, so he definitely fumbles the cereal and almost spills it.  Darla leans against the kitchen island, her hair dark ringlets, her lipstick black, her scowling face a fire in the middle of the quiet, empty kitchen.  She is beautiful, vibrant and alive, and at some point today her dad starts a fight that gets her killed.

“The news said the shooting was a gang war,” Bernard says, finally, getting granola down from the top of the fridge.  “Do you think…”

He trails off, staring at the granola box rather than face Darla.  He can feel more than see her stare drilling into the side of his head.

“If there is a shooting,” she says, finally, “That might be a good reason it would start.  Especially since dad’s messing with the Odessa’s.  They might retaliate by showing up to my school.”

Her voice is flat as she says that, like she’s talking about someone else, and not her dad’s war spilling over into her life and killing her.  Bernard looks up at her face, and sees her expression shuttered closed.  It’s something he sees on Tim, sees on him all the time, actually, but never on Darla.  Never furious, living, burning Darla, who snaps and growls and shouts, who hits first and asks questions later, who approaches life with a two-by-four in hand, ready to smash it into submission.

It’s jarring.  It helps, though, that she’s not good at keeping her expression blank.  The corner of her mouth keeps pulling down into a snarl.

Bernard wants to reach out across that space and hold her.  His skin prickles at the thought of touch, but it’s brief, and the love and longing throbs in his chest like an open wound, and he just wants her to be okay, and he can hold her, because she’s here and alive and not dead, and that alone is worth hugging the shit outta her.

He reaches out, shaky.

Her expression cracks, and she reaches back without hesitation or care, grabbing onto his arm and pulling herself toward him.  Bernard’s arms snap around her like a closing trap, keeping her close and safe, and she burrows into his chest, holding him back so tightly that it’s hard to breathe, burying her face into his shirt.  She’s so small.  She’s fifteen, she’s just a fucking baby.

He loves her.  He loves her so much it’s scraping him raw, and he would give anything to keep her alive.

“I’ll fuck up your dad, if you want,” Bernard promises, his voice cracking.

Darla makes a ragged sound that could be a laugh or could be a sob.  Her grip tightens momentarily, affectionately.  “Hard same.”

---

They manage to make it down to the basement, arms loaded with food.  Bernard starts pushing the pool table when Darla speaks up again.

“So, here’s what I don’t get,” she says, casually.  “Earlier you said ‘it’s been years.’”

“Huh?” Bernard wheezes and wonders how he made it through high school with the upper body strength of a geatric scarecrow.  He tries to put together what Darla’s talking about, but he’s coming up blank.

“You said when I died,” Darla says blandly, “That it’s been years, but you still think about it every day.”  

Darla says died in a harsh, flat tone, like talking about amputation, a clinical, unfeeling view of a deeply painful process.  Bernard’s brain starts screaming You fucked up! in neon letters.

“Been stuck in the loop a long time,” he blurts, the first horrible lie he can think of.

Darla gives him a deeply unimpressed look.

“I’m from four years in the future,” he says in the same tone.

It almost works.  Bernard sees Darla’s exasperation, ready to dismiss his explanation out of hand for being ridiculous.  But she frowns, squinting at nothing like she’s putting something together, slowly, like she might actually believe him.

“... okay,” she says, slowly.  And then, because she’s a rude bitch, “Did you go to my funeral?”

Bernard grimaces.  How does he talk about this? He’s pushing a pool table in front of the basement door to barricade it so the mafia don’t storm down and drag his best friend away to be murdered, and Darla is asking him, casually, if he ever went to her funeral.  What the fuck is his life?

“There wasn’t a funeral,” he says, after a minute.  Darla makes a face, offended, and he adds, “Tyrone and- I think Amber- they held a vigil; I went to that.  A bunch of people did.”

Tim didn’t.  There’s no way in hell he’s bringing that up.

“Amber?” Darla asks, wrinkling her nose.  “I barely talk to Amber.”

Bernard pushes the table so it bumps the doorhandle up.  Shit.  Is she going to call him a liar because a classmate decided to help hold a vigil for someone who died?  Bernard’s so goddamn tired.

“Ohhh,” Darla says, slowly, staring up at the ceiling.  “It’s cause she wants to bang Tyrone.”

Or that.  Darla’s being remarkably level-headed about this whole debacle.

She said she didn’t believe him, Bernard remembers.

“Everyone wants to bang Tyrone,” he says instead of any of that, both because it’s true (Tyrone was jacked in high school) and because it’s an easy segue into a different topic.  “Do you know how many girls turned me down to homecoming because they wanted their shot with him?”

“Too many, you weird fuck,” Darla replies.  For a moment Bernard hopes that they’re going to keep talking about his cringy teenage dating habits, but Darla shotgun blasts him with, “So, did you miss me?”

It’s like being sucker punched.  Bernard stands in front of the basement door, halfway turned to the tool locker, and tries to remember how to breathe.

Did he miss her?  Did he miss her? Four years without her growling laugh in his ear, at least three of which he was without Tim either, a barren time with no real friends beyond casual acquaintances, somehow once again regulated to the background.  They should have graduated together, Bernard should have been able to howl Darla’s name as she walked to get her degree; they could have applied to colleges near each other, if not the same ones, gotten smashed on cheap vodka when Bernard finally turned twenty-one, cried through break-ups and classes and finals and work.

Instead he had no one.  He had such an absence of people in his life that he joined a cult.

The last time Bernard saw Adult Darla- his Darla- had been a brief smear of her face in the background on the news, dressed in red and black, hovering impossibly above the ground.  He didn’t even know what she was fighting, or if she was okay, and he had no ability to reach her to check.

“Berns?” Darla asks, and she sounds afraid and guilty.

“You don’t have to be a dick about not believing me,” he says, finally.

He can sense more than see Darla start bristling.  He keeps his gaze firmly on the floor, goes over to the heavy tool locker and starts dragging it over, and busies himself with blockading the door.  He can tell that Darla is biting back the first words coming to her mind.  It’s a testament to how worried she is that she doesn’t immediately take his head off.

She doesn’t apologize, either, but she’s always been shit at that.  Instead she starts helping him cram the tool locker under the pool table so it shoves up against the closed door like a concrete block.

Bernard wipes his face and leans against the makeshift barricade, and Darla sits on top.  After a minute she passes down a granola bar.

It’s not an apology, but it is an olive branch.  He takes it wordlessly.

They sit in silence for a while.  Bernard listens to Darla kicking her feet quietly against the pool table leg, making a double beat, and it almost sounds like a pulse, proof that she’s alive and not dead yet.

---

Darla’s Darla, though, and can’t keep quiet for long.

“Okay, wait,” she says.  She’s laying down on the pool table now, her hands behind her head, looking up at the ceiling.  “You beat up Tim’s dad because Tim called the cops?”

“Uh…” Bernard crumples up an empty chip bag and tries to lob it toward the trash can.  He misses.  “Yeah.  To get him to leave the school.”

Darla hums, kicking her feet.  “Why didn’t you just call in a bomb threat?”

Bernard’s brain turns over slowly like a starting car.  Oh.  He’s an idiot.

Darla snorts at his face, and then gets up and starts pacing across the basement floor.  The whole thing is concrete and brick, with an untouched exercise bike in a corner and boxes Mom always said she was going to throw out one of these days.  There’s a threadbare couch that Bernard guesses he could sit on, but it faces away from the door and besides, he doesn’t want to move.  

There’s a little bathroom too, because a toilet in the basement is the mark of true Gothamite architecture.  Darla walks into it and back out without stopping, pacing like a caged tiger.

“Why did you just get Tim and I out?” she asks.

Bernard turns over to watch her walk, squinting.  She sounds halfway curious and halfway accusatory, like she’s not sure which way to swing yet.

“I…” Bernard fumbles, because he doesn’t have a good answer for that.  “I don’t… you were the only one who died.”

Darla scowls at him.  “Yeah, when I’m there,” she says, reasonably.  “What if more people die because I’m not there?”

They might, they probably wouldn’t, Bernard doesn’t know how this works, and what comes out of his mouth is “Please don’t go back.”

“Well obviously I’m not going back.  But we could, you know, call the school.”

“Oh.” Bernard deflates, relieved.  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Darla pulls out her phone, casual and confident, and Bernard has the brief thought ‘why is she so comfortable calling in a bomb threat’ before she frowns.  She unlocks her phone and fiddles around with it for a minute.

Bernard’s mouth goes dry.  Dread curls in his belly like an armful of snakes, and he can see the disaster oncoming even if he doesn’t know the shape of it.

“Tim’s texting me,” she says, “He says he can’t reach you-”

Bernard’s heart drops into his stomach.  Shit, he thinks, shit shit shit-

Darla’s phone rings.  It’s Tim’s ringtone.  Darla and Bernard stay frozen while “‘There are some that call me…  Tim,’ ‘ Greetings, Tim the Enchanter!’” peels tinnily against the concrete floor.  Darla’s dark eyes meet his.

Bernard unfreezes and lunges, to knock the phone away or hang up or something, but Darla ducks away and accepts the call, tucking it up to her ear.

“Darla!” Bernard hisses, and he’s gonna vomit because there is literally only one reason Tim would call them now and it’s because his dad will have told him a blonde teenager showed up and beat him senseless and said he was Tim’s friend and Tim’s going to fucking kill him.

“Hey, Tim,” Darla says, one hand outstretched toward Bernard like she can keep him at bay if he needs to.  “No, listen-”

Tim’s voice is raw and upset.  Bernard’s too far to hear the words, but the hurt slides like a knife into his ribcage; Tim hurting because of him.

Darla bites her lip as Tim talks.  After a moment she glances over at Bernard, meets his gaze.  Her face is level and dark.

“... I know,” she says, coolly.

“You knew?” Tim’s voice cracks, audible and loud, and Bernard fucked this up so badly, what the fuck was he thinking?  What was he thinking?  People don’t actually beat up their friends’ dads, they just offer, as a joke or a way to say you don’t deserve this, they don’t actually show up to their apartment building and lie to a neighbor to get in and then knock and punch their crippled father when they open the door.

Shit, he’s crying.  He scrubs his hand across his face.

Darla steamrolls over Tim, meets Bernard’s eyes, her face a mask of determination and fury.

“I don’t think he was wrong to do it,” she says, firmly.

Shit, shit, that’s worse.  Bernard frantically slashes the air by his throat with the side of his hand, trying to convey shut up shut up shut up .  Tim’s voice is pained and angry, now, a high, stressed sound, and Darla, hotheaded, rash, stupid Darla is making this so much worse, and she needs to stop.

Something in his face must convince her, because she purses her lips but thankfully doesn’t push it any farther.

“I don’t think you should talk to him right now,” is what she says instead.

Fuck.  Bernard won’t survive Tim talking to him.  He can’t fucking listen to Tim scream at him for what he did, listen to him cry over the ways Bernard hurt him.

He has to.  It’s not about what he wants, or deserves, even; it’s about Tim.  Tim deserves to be able to ask him what the fuck were you thinking? Tim deserves an answer.

He chokes down the bile and holds out his hand for the phone.

Darla stares at him like he’s insane.  Mouths no at him, then, “No, Tim,” into the phone.  

“Give- give me it,” Bernard croaks.  “I don’t- just- Darla, give me the phone.”

“Are you fucking crazy?” Darla hisses.  “You’ll both just feel like shit- I wasn’t talking to you, Tim-”

“Darla-”

Darla scowls.  She points the phone away to give them a modicum of privacy, and says, very quietly so Tim won’t hear, “You really, really don’t have to do this.”

Bernard barks a miserable little laugh.  “It’s a dick move not to.”

“Berns,” Darla says.

“Darla.” Bernard replies.  He meets her eyes and stares her down.

Darla stares back.  She seems equal parts infuriated and confused, caught off-guard by this sudden upsurge in confidence, because Bernard’s not the person he was in high school.  In all the ways he no longer recognizes Darla, Darla no longer recognizes him.  It’s worse for her, because she hasn’t had years.  Her friend became a stranger overnight, wearing a familiar face, and he hates that but he doesn’t regret changing.  There’s a lot he regrets about the years following the shooting, but developing a backbone is not one of them.

Darla finally gives up, her face twisted, forking the phone over.  Bernard swallows and tries not to feel like he’s just been handed his death warrant.

“-arla, please,” Tim is saying when he holds the phone up to his ear.

He sounds like he’s been crying.  Bernard’s heart twists and he’s crying before he can stop it.  He did that to Tim.  Fuck.

“Hey,” he chokes out.

Tim stutters to a stop.  Bernard’s not gonna survive this.  He lost Tim once and in his fucking stupid, mindless crusade to save Darla he fucked up so bad that he’s going to lose Tim again, and he’s not gonna survive this round, not after knowing what it was like to have Tim and be seen by Tim and known and loved, and and and-

“Bernard?” Tim says, voice cracking.

No, Bernard thinks hysterically, it’s not me please don’t yell at me- “Y-yeah.”

Tim is quiet for a minute, and the silence stretches like crystalline, cracking ice, moments from giving out and plunging Bernard into dark, icy water.

“You punched my dad,” Tim says, and he’s trying for blank but he doesn’t quite have the same control that Adult Tim has, and Bernard can hear the tightness in his voice.  It lands like a stone, factual and frozen.

Bernard doesn’t bother denying it.  “Yeah.”

Tim’s quiet again, processing that.  He doesn’t ask why, because he and Bernard and Darla all know the real reason why, which is that Bernard thinks Jack is a piece of shit.

“I didn’t want that,” Tim says, finally.

Bernard swallows.  His throat hurts.  “I know.”

“I don’t need- I hate that you did that.  I hate that you hurt him.  I don’t need rescuing, I’m fine, I’m-” Tim’s voice cracks.  “I get enough of this from Dick, I don’t need it from you, I’m not a victim!  I’m fine!”

The words land like blows from the chain-whip; a sudden, jarring line of numbness that explodes into white-hot agony.  Bernard curls into himself.

“I know,” he says, in a small voice.

“Then why did you-” Tim cuts himself off.  “My dad just started walking again, and you just broke his nose.  They had to give him oxygen; they don’t know what the shock will do to his recovery- you set him back weeks.”

Bernard is crying, Darla is hovering nearby like a stormcloud.  Tim’s voice is ragged in his ear.

“You don’t know what’s best for me,” Tim is saying.  “You don’t get to decide what my dad does or doesn’t deserve, Bernard, you don’t get to fucking do that.”

“I’m sorry,” falls out of Bernard’s mouth.

“No you’re not,” Tim shoots him down immediately.  “You always hated my dad, of course you don’t regret hurting him.”

“I’m sorry for hurting you,” Bernard barrels on.

Tim makes a faint noise, wounded and only grudgingly acquiescing.  Then, voice tight, “What did you think was going to happen?”

He didn’t think about what was going to happen.  He thought about getting Tim out of the school, and his lizard-brain jumped to beating up Jack Drake, and he didn’t bother to think it through (or think about it at all) because Adult Tim always reacts with surprise when he gets a compliment, and he leans into touch like something starving, and he’s easily caught off-guard by Bernard cooking or cleaning or ragging on him until he does dishes, because he grew up so isolated that he has no idea how to take care of himself, and Bernard’s been waiting for a chance to break Jack’s bones for four years.

He works his mouth, tries to find something to say, when the doorbell rings overhead.

For a moment he just stares at the concrete wall, his brain stalling and going nowhere.  He looks at Darla, but she looks back, just as wide-eyed and clueless.

Fuck.  Okay.  Who is here in the middle of the day?  It can’t be the mafia guy.  Please don’t be the mafia guy, Bernard cannot handle watching Darla get dragged away again.  How would he have even found them?

There’s a scraping noise overhead, and movement.  “GCPD, open up!”

Oh, shit.

“Fuck,” Darla hisses, and then her hand is on Bernard’s wrist, dragging him towards the tiny bathroom.

“... Bernard?” Tim asks, tense.

“GCPD-”

The voice overhead is cut off by an explosion of noise, ricocheting off the concrete walls like a grenade.  It could be a firework, or a car backfiring; but the noise is buried in Bernard’s brain like a spike into memory.  That’s a gunshot.

Darla tugs them both into the bathroom and shuts the door, locking it.  It’s barely a three by four foot space, and it only gets more cramped as she shoves Bernard down between the wall and the toilet.

“Darla-” he hisses, frantically, because they should trade places, it’s safer here than just out by the door-

“Stay,” she snarls, and then shoves herself into his lap, her tiny body curled up against his own.  She’s still largely exposed, shoulder and side and legs in clear sight of the door, and she’s going to get shot. Her breath is rabbit-frantic in his ear.  Overhead, people are shouting; something screeches across the porch; something else hits the ground with a dull thud.

“Switch with me,” Bernard says, frantic, trying to move Darla.  She elbows him in the ribs and he still tries to push.  “C’mon-”

“No!” Darla hisses.  “You wouldn’t have any cover at all, we both have a little this way-”

“..nard!” Tim is saying, edging towards panicked, “Bernard, come on-”

He sounds scared, he’s just a kid.  Bernard shoves at Darla one-handed as he puts the phone back to his ear.  “I’m here, I’m okay, I just- Darla-”

“Stay on the phone,” Tim says, and he sounds tense but not with anger, not anymore, just fear, tightly controlled.  “Stay with me.  Where are you?”

It won’t matter.  Bernard can see the oncoming storm like a roadmap; the police came for him because he beat up Tim’s dad, and someone has a gun and is using it, and it sounds like they’re shooting at the police.  The mob.  The cops came for Bernard and the mob came for Darla and it’s gonna be the school shootout but the epicenter is his fucking house.

“Bernard’s place,” Darla hisses.  It takes Bernard a second to realize her face is so close to the phone that she can hear Tim.  “We’re in the basement.”

“Stay there,” Tim says, and it sounds like he’s moving.  “I’m getting help.”

Help like what? Bernard thinks, bewildered.  The police are already here, and the Drake family doesn’t have enough money to hire- bodyguards, or an elite taskforce specifically to rescue them.  

“Darla,” he tries again, “We should switch so you’re against the wall, I’ll cover more of you-”

“No! ” Darla snaps.  She’s trembling against his collar, her head shoved under his chin.  “Just- no, Berns.”

Bernard’s chest is tight and overhead someone fires a gun again, twice, cra-crack, like a heartbeat, like a screaming and violent pulse, and they both jump, jarring elbows and heads and feet against the concrete wall, the porcelain toilet, the tile floor.  

“Just stay with me,” Tim’s voice comes from the phone, soothing and tight with fear, “Stay with me-”  and isn’t it funny, that Tim says stay with me when they’re in danger?  That even now, he’s so scared of losing people that his first words are begging them to stay?  Bernard wants to stay, he’s going to stay, he just has to get Darla there too.

“Darla, please,” Bernard croaks.  “I can’t- I can’t watch you- I can’t do this again.”

Darla turns so her nose is against his throat, her breath warm against his skin, and she is alive, alive, alive.

“Do you know how many people I’ve watched die?” she says, her voice hoarse and low.

It’s such a nonsequitur and it’s such a dramatic, emo teen way of saying it that for a second Bernard thinks she’s messing with him.  He opens his mouth to bite her head off for the fucking audacity when Tim makes a sharp noise in the receiver.

“No one else is dying,” he says, factually, but Darla snorts derisively and Bernard’s heart sinks, because Darla has seen people die.  Probably a lot of people.  Hopefully most of them were strangers, but how many people who worked with her dad got called away and never returned?  How many pediatricians said the wrong thing once while treating her, and got dragged away? How many walks home or lunch meetings or haircuts became shootouts while Darla was there, how many people has she seen shot?

“My dad runs the mob,” she says, “Someone’s gonna die.  It’s just not allowed to be Bernard.”

“Darla-” Tim says, but Darla is leaning back so she can press her forehead to Bernard’s and make eye contact with her dark, fiery eyes, her mouth contorted.

“You,” she says, firmly, “Are not allowed to die.”

Bernard is gonna cry.  His hand comes up to squeeze the back of her neck.  Between them, Tim is quiet.  

“I don’t wanna watch you die, either,” he says, faintly.

Darla bears her teeth, wild-eyed; she’s always seemed half-feral to him, a wildfire stuck in the body of a teenage girl.

“Too bad, bitch,” she says.  “I call dibs.”

Bernard chokes on a laugh, “Fuck you, you can’t call dibs-”

Overhead comes a screaming splinter of noise, the front door breaking open.  Feet pound on the floor above, someone screams down! followed a second later by a firecracker of noise.  Bernard instantly squeezes Darla tighter against him, trying to curl protectively around her, his face ducked down and his arms shielding her head as stone dust rains down, powders their hair and shoulders.

“Darla!” Tim’s voice says, tinnily, “Bernard-”

“I’ll call dibs if I want,” Darla wheezes against his chest, and she’s shaking now, rattling her elbows against the concrete wall.  She takes a measured breath, and some of the mania in her voice smoothes out, but the shaking remains.  “You’re not allowed to die.  I won’t let you die.”

Bernard can’t stop the brief, high laugh.  “Fuck you, I’ve been doing this for longer, I won’t let you die.”

“Yeah, but I called dibs.”

“Goddammit, Darla.”

“No one’s dying; we still haven’t played Cards Against Humanity and it needs three people,” Tim pants.  It sounds like he’s running.  He calls to someone away from the phone.  “Steph! I need the bike!”

“It’s lame even with three people,” Bernard says, because that’s the only thing his brain can grasp at the moment.

“Oh my god, is that Steph like your imaginary girlfriend Steph?” Darla asks, fascinated.  “Invite her to game night.”

“No, the BIKE bike-” Tim pauses briefly.  Overhead, people shout, unintelligible.  “Oh, fuck B-”

Footsteps pound overhead.  There are people in the house, and inevitably they’ll find the basement and the barricaded door, inevitably they’ll force their way through, inevitably they’ll find Bernard and Darla curled up here.

“Yeah, invite Steph,” Bernard gasps, instead of any of this, because he’s actually met Steph and he is grasping at that bare bones sense of normalcy, making plans with friends like they’ll actually all be alive to go through with them.  “I’ll steal Dad’s beer, Darla can bring those little calzones-”

“Fuck yeah,” Darla says. “There’s a new guy who makes a slapping marinara sauce-”

A gunshot, followed immediately by a scream, a high, ringing siren bordering on inhuman.  Darla’s hand clenches in his shirt, and he almost doesn’t feel it, his face tucked down close to her head, his hands shaking.  Her head smells like shampoo and acridic stone dust.

“I’ll bring ranch dressing,” Tim says.  It works as intended, Darla relaxes enough to sneer at the phone.

“If you eat calzones with fucking ranch I’ll put a hit on you, I swear to god.”

“Worth it.”  On the other side of the line, an engine snarls to life, like a motorcycle revving up to speed.  Holy shit, does Baby Tim have a motorcycle? He’s like fifteen.

“What about barbecue sauce?” Bernard asks, trying for innocent but mostly coming out strained.  Darla pinches him anyway.

“Marinara sauce or at least a respectable cream sauce,” she says.  “God, you’re both fucking heathens.”

“Ranch is a cream sauce!” Tim protests, which is only marginally better than Bernard giggling like a twelve-year-old boy and saying “Hehe, cream sauce.”  Before Darla can protest, the shouting overhead rises to fever pitch, a wall of noise that drowns everything out, and Bernard’s voice dies in his throat as he pulls Darla tight against him, again, like he could possibly hold her closer.

“It’s coming closer,” Darla says, her voice small and high-pitched.  Bernard squeezes her, hard.  “Fuck-”

“I’m coming,” Tim’s voice says, over the roaring of the engine and the shriek of the wind, staticky over the line.  “I’m coming-”

“I’m sorry,” Bernard says into Darla’s hair.

“No,” she spits, instantly bristling.  She starts to push herself away, but a moment later jerks back into place against his chest, unwilling to move.  “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Bernard says anyway, and Darla starts to hit him, her punches weak because there’s no room to move, and he keeps going, “It was a stupid plan-”

“No one’s dying,” Darla snarls.  “Say it with me.  No one’s dying.”

“No one’s dying,” Tim says over the line, factual and sharp, and Bernard sobs into Darla’s hair.

“No one’s dying,” he repeats, obedient, his voice shaky with the lie.  “No one’s dying.”

The center of the roaring overhead is starting to move, worse, it’s starting to move down.  There’s a rattle of feet on stairs, and something slams into the basement door outside, and Bernard’s blood is ice and his stomach is a frozen swamp and he’s trapped them, he’s cornered them, he’s made a grave of his own fucking house.

“Shit,” Darla whispers into his throat, and then she’s pulling his head down so his crying is muffled into her hair.  Bernard chokes and stops breathing, frozen and quiet.

“... locked?” someone is saying, barely audible over the noise.  Bernard can’t tell if they have a Gothamite lilt or another accent.

Something slams on the door again, and then a heavy voice says, “Barricaded,” and they are so fucked.

The screaming overhead has faded into background ringing.  Sweat stings Bernard’s eyes as he tries to go over his options, but he feels like he’s rappelling off a long drop, out of control, and then a bang at the basement door, bang, bang, bang, and then someone shouting, of which Bernard only understands fragments.

“-hands up-”

“Open it-”

“-fucking shotgun, Terry!”

A gunshot, and a crash, the screech of something on concrete floor, and that’s the pool table being forced away from the door, inch by miserable inch, while people bellow and howl overhead, and Bernard can’t hear his own voice even while he grips Darla tighter and says I’m sorry I’m sorry I won’t let them hurt you.

Darla’s mouth is moving against his collarbone, her whole body tense as a live wire, and he can’t tell what she’s saying.

The basement door is wrenched open, and someone is speaking, hurriedly, their voice clearer with only the bathroom door separating them.

“In, in, in,” it says, a man’s voice, and someone else panting, and then, sharply, “Duck!”

Rattling of feet down the stairs, and the whistling of something thrown and a sharp cry, followed by a cracking explosion that hits Bernard’s eardrums like a physical thing, leaves his head ringing.

“Come out!” someone else is shouting.  “You’re cornered, fucker, it’s a basement!”

“Vaffanculo and eat shit while you’re at it!”  the man in the basement bellows, followed by a crack that falls like a whip in Bernard’s ears, Darla flinching in his arms and pressing closer, closer, closer.

The phone buzzes with noise, inaudible over the roar, and Darla’s hand finds his and together they wrestle it up so it lays pressed between their faces, Bernard’s ear on one side, Darla’s on the other, close enough to barely make out Tim’s voice.

“Stay with me,” he’s saying, almost inaudible, “Stay with me-”

Another pop of noise, and a hole appears in the bathroom door with a shower of wood dust, a bright circle of light the width of a finger, and Bernard clenches Darla closer and his heart stops because that’s a bullet, but Darla is shivering and alive in his arms still, and when he glances at the opposite wall he can see the new hole in the concrete wall and the glimmering, melted brassy metal inside it.

Bernard sees the future laid out like a cliff, like a fall, like a cave with no way out.  Darla is going to die.  Darla is going to die here, now, in front of him, if he doesn’t do something now.

Even as his muscles bunch to move, shoving away from the wall, to turn and protect her, to curl around her so nothing can reach her, even in that half-second before the fall, his gaze meets Darla’s fierce, dark eyes.  He sees the same conclusion, mirrored, and a deadly, blazing fury.

She shoves him down.  He’s screaming even as she does it.  Her face is set and merciless right up to the moment blood explodes out of her torso.

---

Darla’s eyes are flat and wide, her mouth slack, her face deadly white.

“No!” Bernard is screaming.  She crumples into him, and he grabs her arms.  “No, no, no!”

Her eyes are flitting as she falls against him, and he folds with her so his hands are over her gaping, fountaining side.  He presses down and blood squirts between his fingers and she screams.

“Don’t you dare,” his mouth is moving, “Don’t you fucking dare!”

Blood bubbles in the corner of her mouth, her breathing ragged and gasping.  She clutches weakly at his hands.  Her pupils are pinpricks and she is crying.

“I d-dun’ wa’nna,” she slurs.  “P’eas, B-Berns-”

“Darla-”

“I’mma die,” she says, and her eyes are wide and her pupils are pinpricks and she is so fucking scared.  “I’mm-”

“No one’s gonna die!” Bernard snaps, leaning close.  “Say it with me! No one’s gonna die-”

Darla laughs, a high, bitter laugh that turns into a sob, and her hand comes up and pats at Bernard’s face, leaving spots of hot, sticky blood, and she is so fucking small, she’s a child.

“No’n’s gonna die,” she slurs, and already she’s slowing down.  Bernard presses harder, and she jerks with pain, but even that’s weaker.  “No’n’s gonna die.”

Her hand tangles in his shirt, pulls with no strength behind it.  He goes down, lets her pull him so he’s folded in half over her, hands pressed to her side and forehead resting against his, her dark eyes combing over his face, greedy, desperate.

“No one’s gonna die,” Bernard breathes in the air between them.  “Say it with me, bitch.  Come on.”

Darla grins with bloody teeth, weak, coughs.  Blood spatters Bernard’s face and he doesn’t care.

“No’n’s g’nna die,” she repeats, and they both know it’s a lie.

“Push pressure on the wound,” Tim’s voice is saying in the background, ”Darla- keep breathing or I swear to god-”

Darla doesn’t react to Tim’s voice, and Bernard’s not even sure if she can hear him.  He’s not even sure if he cares, because Darla is dying again and he’s here this time, he saw the moment the bullet entered her body, he saw how quickly Darla went from healthy brown to almost gray, he’s watching the blood bubble beneath her teeth, her blood is on his face.

“No one’s gonna die,” Bernard’s mouth is saying, on repeat, “No one’s gonna die.”

Darla’s eyes comb over his face, and even the anger is draining away, her hand falling away from his shirt.  Bernard pushes down harder, to make her flinch, to piss her off, to make her yell or shout or punch or anything, and she barely twitches and there’s no rage, none at all.

In the absence of that fire there’s only love.  Her gaze is unbearably warm, and it takes Bernard’s breath away, that solid and unconditional affection.

“S’kay,” she says, barely a mumble.  “Y’ll do b’tter nex’ time.”

“Darla,” he sobs, his eyes stinging, his face a mess of tears and blood.  “Darla.”

Her gaze is unfocused, and when he leans down on her injury with all his strength, she doesn’t move at all.

---

Five minutes later, Darla stops breathing.

Chapter Text

The loop has to restart when he falls asleep.  He remembers a few loops ago, drifting in and out of unconsciousness, until he slipped under into something like true sleep and woke up a moment later in his childhood bed with spit in his mouth, like jerking out of a nightmare; so, he just needs to fall asleep and he’ll wake up and it’ll be over.  He’ll be back in his bedroom.  It’ll be fine. 

He could stay here and listen to the screaming.  Could wait until Tim came, with whatever help he was bringing, and let him get killed too.

He could stay here with Darla’s corpse in his lap, her eyes half lidded and unseeing.

Fuck that shit.  He reaches into the bathroom cabinet, Darla’s dead weight shifting in his lap.  There are melatonin gummies behind the mirror, old enough that they’ve started to melt together.  He pops a bunch into his mouth with his bloody hand, tasting old chemical-fruit flavor and iron, and lays back against the concrete.

He holds Darla’s head in his lap, his hand curled in her hair, and closes his eyes.

---

It takes forever to fall asleep, between the screaming, the gunshots, and Darla’s dead face in his lap, but he manages it eventually.  He’s always been good at running away from his problems.

He just- doesn’t stay asleep.  He doesn’t really wake up, either, caught in some foggy limbo, listening to the people dying overhead.

The screaming fades out, eventually.  He catches glimpses as the seconds ooze past.  Darla’s dead face in his lap.  Hands on him, picking him up, talking, their voices far away.  A hand on his neck, checking his pulse point.

He rouses, barely, for that, fighting to keep his eyes open.

Red, and green, and yellow.  Black hair.  White-out lenses.

“... male, pulse slow… thready… no fever…”  Tim’s voice floats overhead.  It’s thin and wavering, and miserable.  Is Tim here?  Tim shouldn’t be here.

“T’m?” he slurs.

The blur of colors moves, and Robin is crouched in front of him.  It’s his Robin, the third one, the viciously clever one, the one who, in a couple of years, will rescue him from the pain cult.

“Hey,” he says, in a low voice.  It’s not Tim, Bernard realizes, it just sounds like him.  He can hear it now, how Robin’s cadence is different, deeper, stronger.  “Hey, you’re alright.  It’s alright.”

It was Robin’s gauntlets checking his pulse.  His hand is still there, slipped down to rest on Bernard’s shoulder, the kevlar brushing against his collar.  He should be relieved, he should feel wonder, because Robin is here to fix everything, but he can’t scrape anything up. 

Bernard’s gaze slips past Robin.  Darla’s corpse lays on the floor.  Robin’s cape has been draped over her, covering her face.

“Hey, hey,” Robin moves so he blocks Bernard’s view.  “It’s okay.  You don’t need to look.”

Robin sounds upset.  Bernard’s mouth is thick, and the darkness is welling up again.  He fumbles.  There’s something on the tip of his tongue, something he needs to do.

“R’bin,” he says.  “Tell T’m… tell ‘m s’okay.  I’ll do b’tter nex’ t’me.”

Robin’s expression starts to fold, something shattered and heartbroken underneath.

“You’re alright,” he says, softly.  “Stay with me-”

Bernard falls asleep.

---

He wakes up an eternity later, his mouth thick with spit, staring up at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom.

The lack of noise is jarring.  He wheezes with panic, fisting the covers.  His hand finds Mr. Spots hidden beneath the covers, and holds onto him like a lifeline.

He lays there, not thinking, for what feels like an hour but is probably only thirty seconds.  Then he gets up in the dead silence, one hand still white-knuckled around Mr. Spots, bare feet rustling over carpet, not bothering to pick up his phone or put on shoes or even real pants instead of his flannel pajamas.

He heaves the window open.  Crawls outside.

---

He gets about a block away from his house before throwing up.

His mouth tastes like bile.  A neighbor down the street gives him a vaguely concerned look, but in true Gotham spirit, elects to ignore him in favor of watering her petunias.  Bernard’s too grateful to care.

Darla’s slack face swims into his brain.  She has blood bubbling in the corner of her mouth, and she’s in the basement, in his lap, she’s in the nurse’s office at school, laid out on a cot.

Bernard vomits again.

Fuck.  Fuck! Okay.  Fuck this shit.  He’s going to have a real, actual breakdown in the middle of the street, and be shuffled off into Arkham for a day, and honestly?  Arkham sounds like a fucking vacation.

There’s an idea.  He’s gonna take a break.

---

He almost decides to meander mindlessly around Gotham with no shoes, before deciding that’s really not the best idea.  He doesn’t actually want to get put in Arkham.  Especially right now.  Isn’t Harley Quinn still in cahoots with the Joker?  Fuck, he misses his timeline.  Even the villains were less unhinged.  The last time he saw Harley Quinn on the news she had crashed a talk show to announce her engagement to Poison Ivy.  No one had even died.

Point is, he doesn’t want to walk barefoot around Gotham.  Besides, he can get his jacket and his wallet.  Maybe get takeout.  Or a tattoo!  It’s not like it’ll be there tomorrow.

By the time he meanders back home, Mom’s car is not in the driveway, but Dad’s is.  Huh.  For a moment his whole chest lights up with sickening hope, because Dad is home, and he hasn’t done that before, right?  Right?  Maybe he’s stuck in the timeline too.  Then he remembers that he barely stayed in the house for longer than ten minutes after waking up, except for that one loop, so… 

Fuck it, he doesn’t know what’s going on.  He trots up to the car.

The driverside door is open, and the keys are in the ignition.  On the passenger seat is Dad’s wallet.  A little ways away, Bernard can hear grumbling in the little fenced off passage between houses.  Oh.  He probably came back to take the trash out.  Mom always chewed him out when he forgot.

Bernard stares at the wallet.  Then at the keys, sitting innocently in the ignition.  At the wallet again.  The last time he talked to his dad in the Adult Timeline, he mentioned conversion camps.  Conversion camps.  In the year 2022.

Why not! He’s always been a petty bitch.

Bernard slides into the driver’s front seat like it’s the most natural thing in the world, closing the door behind him and turning the key.  He peels out of the driveway, not bothering to hide the snarl of the engine, and when Dad appears from behind the fence, bewildered, he’s too late to do anything but shout as Bernard flips him off, gunning it down the street.

---

The car is probably trackable, and it’s not the real prize, anyway, so Bernard parks it at the train station and hops out.  He’s still barefoot, but a minute or two of digging in the trunk turns up a pair of crocs.  Bernard grimaces, wondering briefly if it's worth it, before slipping them on and trotting down the stairs.

(He doesn’t pay the parking meter either.  What’s his Dad gonna do about it?  Cry?)

So far, his prize is- he checks inside the wallet- a debit card, a credit card, and about sixty dollars worth of cash.  Well!  He can do better than that.  Luckily the Gotham Central train station has an ATM so the real issue will be maxing out Dad’s credit card without being mugged or killed.  Honestly Bernard’s kind of looking forward to the challenge.  

The security guard gives him a funny look when he walks up to the ATM, but gets distracted by a brief scuffle by the ticket machines.  God, Bernard loves Gotham.  

He puts Dad’s card in the machine and looks through the options.  It has a withdraw limit, obviously, but it should still be pretty high, and oh shit.  It’s $1200.  

He’s gonna buy so many chicken nuggets.

---

His first stop is getting a jacket, cause he’s cold.  He can buy such a good jacket with twelve grand.  He limits himself to a thousand, because he also wants to buy chicken nuggets and maybe some ice cream, but that’s still literally so much money.

The seller almost turns him away at the door.  He magnanimously gives her a hundred, at which point she probably concludes he is probably a drug dealer and not worth kicking out.  She instead very politely and professionally goes over color and cut, line and form, and heroically makes no comment on how he’s shuffling around in crocs and flannel pajamas.

The jacket in question is butter soft, laying thick and heavy on his skin, with inner pockets deep enough to hide an entire toddler.  Bernard keeps touching the sleeves, marveling at the texture.  Holy shit.  Maybe he should actually let Adult Tim get away with buying him nice things.

The seller doesn’t even twitch when he flounces in front of the full length mirror and admires himself, running his fingers through his mullet.  A pimply teenager beams back at him in flannel pajama pants, ratty tshirt, blue crocs, and black leather jacket.  The only thing missing is sunglasses.

“That looks gorgeous on you,” the seller compliments with a smile.  The fact that she can keep a straight face is incredible.  “The warm undertone was a good choice; it really brings out the gold in your hair.  Now, I think we could get the fit a little better with a personal fitting...”

“Naw,” Bernard says, before she can take the jacket off him.  “This is great.”  He grins at her.  “Do you get paid on commission?”

It turns out she does.  It doesn’t stop Bernard from giving another hundred dollar tip.  He ends up back outside with a grand total of $237.01 in his pockets, which is still enough to buy at least five hundred chicken nuggets.

He threw Dad’s wallet in the lost and found at Gotham Central Station (obviously after taking all the twenties out of it), but he puts the money in an inner pocket, curled in a roll and stuck between Mr. Spots’ hooves.  Nice. 

He swaggers down the street like he owns the world and not like his Dad would call him an eyesore if he saw him.  Hell yeah.  He’s on vacation.

---

Bernard spends the rest of the day galavanting around Gotham, having the times of his life.

He finds a broken pair of sunglasses in the garbage and immediately puts them on, and then he buys a toy wagon from Goodwill.  He takes it through the McDonalds drive through and orders forty twenty-piece chicken nuggets (a grand total! Of eight hundred nuggets!)  

It takes them half an hour to fill the order.  The employee looks dead inside when he reads it off to his coworkers.  At least three dozen different people plaster their face to the window to see the asshole who emptied out the McDonald’s cold storage.  Bernard dabs at them.

He can’t actually eat that many by himself, so he starts giving two or three to every homeless person he sees, and then to every street kid, and then to every college student.  By the time lunch rolls around, he’s down to something that could almost be considered reasonable.

He doesn’t want to be anywhere near the school when it starts, so he makes his way to the outskirts of downtown and wanders aimlessly through some of the community gardens, which have only survived the acid rain and various toxic gasses through heavy donations and fear of Ivy’s wrath.  They’re mostly in the touristy area of Gotham, in the vain hope that people who visit might find a reason to believe the city isn’t a cesspool.

There’s a koifish pond in one of them.  Bernard buys a handful of fish food and throws it to the fish, who come swimming to the surface in their bright, calico colors, lipping at the surface of the water.

It’s quiet here.  Calm.

Bernard lays down beneath a tree, listening to the bubbling of koifish at the surface, and watches the branches move in the wind, and doesn’t get up until long after the gang war.

---

By the time he gets up again, the overcast sky is darkening.  A bright smear near the horizon could be the sunset, spilling oily light between the skyscrapers.  The lights through the park are starting to flick on.

Darla is dead right now.

Bernard swallows and shoves the thought away.  He flees the park.

---

He ends up on the roof of Adult Bernard’s apartment building.  Wait, no.  His apartment building.  He’s Adult Bernard, he’s just stuck in his teenage body.  He’s not gonna slip up and start going insane and thinking of himself as two different people.  Fuck that.

The apartment building has a broken fire escape in the Adult Timeline, so the ladder dangles halfway down.  When he makes his way into the alley, he can see that it’s still that way, or had already been like that.  His landlord said it was a recent break, the fucking liar.

It makes it easy for Bernard to shove the toy wagon up there, though.  He rattles up the steps, holding the wagon awkwardly under his arm, and gets only two weird looks for his trouble.  Most people ignore him.  Gothamites know to mind their fucking business. 

It’s rapidly cooling off.  Bernard is hoping to hide from the wind by the vent, but the spot isn’t empty; a knot of university students squint at him, one of them in the process of passing a cigarette to their friend.  That makes sense.  He’s dressed like a D-grade villain.

God, it’s been so long since he last smoked.  Ever since the cult, alcohol’s been a no go, but smoking’s been okay, every once in a while.  Bernard makes an impulse decision.

“Hey,” he says.  “Trade you chicken nuggets for some of that.”

One of them wrinkles his nose, but the other two look appreciative.  A girl in a hijab beckons him over.

“Dude, he’s a kid,” says the one who had looked disgruntled.

“Yeah? I want chicken nuggets,” Hijab Girl says.  Bernard cheerfully slaps a container into her palm, and she lets out a sharp bark of laughter when she sees the wagon.  “Oh my god, how many do you have?”

“I started with eight hundred,” Bernard says, cheerful.  The student with the cigarette, a boy with a strong nose and a mass of curly hair, passes it over.  “Thanks, man.”

“Eight hundred?” says Disgruntled Boy.

“Are they even halal?” Cigarette Boy asks.

“What are you, a cop?” Hijab Girl replies, and then passes him a chicken nugget container.  He laughs, shortly, and takes it from her.  “Depends on where it’s from.  Which McDonald’s is this from?” she asks, turning back to Bernard.

He’s in the middle of trying not to cough.  The smoke burns more than it usually does.  Bernard exhales through his nose and blinks tears out of his eyes, briefly confused, before remembering- he’s in his teenage body.  Fuck, what if he throws up?  He threw up the first time he smoked.

“Uh, Laurence and Fifth,” he says, belatedly.  “The one next to the strip club.”

Either the one on Laurence and Fifth is halal or Hijab Girl doesn’t care, because she grunts and pops one in her mouth.

“Wait, holy shit, you’re the guy who ran them out of chicken nuggets,” Disgruntled Boy says, but he doesn’t seem that mad.  “My sister’s friend said you walked through the drive through.”

Bernard shoots him a peace sign.  Cigarette Boy and Hijab Girl laugh, surprised, and Disgruntled Boy grins.  He takes the cigarette from Bernard, but he doesn’t lift it to his mouth right away.  He probably just wanted to keep it away from the teenager, which Bernard gets, really, it’s what Adult Bernard would do if a baby asked for his smokes, but still.

He does trade it back immediately when Bernard offers him a chicken nugget box.  As is with all college students, free food trumps everything else.

“I wanna know why,” Cigarette Boy gestures helplessly at the toy wagon, still full of boxes.  “Also, where’d you get the money?”

“Stole it from my dad,” Bernard replies, and the students nod understandingly.  He inhales the smoke and holds it in his chest, passing the cigarette off to Hijab Girl.  A moment later his poor teenager lungs give up and he coughs.  “He’s been kind of a dick to me, lately.”

Hijab Girl nods, and says, perfectly genuine, “Fuck him, then.”

The other two nod.  “Welcome to the club,” Disgruntled Boy tells Bernard.  “My dad’s an ass.”

“It’s a queer requirement,” Cigarette Boy says, quietly. 

The other two laugh, low, and It hits closer than Bernard expected, their instant and genuine acceptance.  That he can see his own experiences reflected in theirs, that he can recognize them.

“My dad’s been talking about conversion camps,” comes tumbling out of his mouth.

Cigarette Boy and Disgruntled Boy frown, almost alarmed, and this might have been a mistake, because Bernard doesn’t need help or interference.  Fuck, at this point in time, Dad doesn’t even know he’s gay.  But he wants to say it, and in this little knot of university students, talking dryly about being queer, he realizes that he feels safe enough to do it.

“I’m fine,” he adds, quickly, and then says the truth because the truth actually works here, “I don’t live with him anymore.  He’s just being a dick.”

“Good,” Hijab Girl says, fiercely.

“I’m sorry, dude,” Disgruntled Boy says, genuine.  “That’s fucking awful.”

Bernard opens his mouth, to laugh it off, to wave it away, like he’s done a hundred times before.  He finds that it scrapes in his throat and won’t come out.

“Yeah,” he says, finally.  “It’s fucking awful.”

They’re quiet for a moment.  Then Cigarette Boy leans back, gently elbowing Bernard’s side.

“You’ll be okay,” he says, softly.  “It might take a while, but you’ll find a place that feels like home.”

The words land in Bernard’s chest and settle there like something warm.  In high school, he might have laughed it off, dismissively, unable to picture a future where he was happy.  But now that he’s had that future, now that he feels confident in who he is and what he wants, now that he’s laid in bed with Tim while the sun crawled across their faces, he knows.  He has that future.  He had that future, and he is going to have it again if it kills him.

“I know,” he croaks.

---

The university students leave, at some point.  Disgruntled Boy has a final tomorrow, if the university reopens after the shooting.  Cigarette Boy just wants to get some sleep.  Hijab Girl offers to put Bernard up for the night, but lets it go when he turns her down.  She nods like she expected that answer.

“Stay safe, kid,” she says.

“Thanks,” Bernard replies, and means it.  She waves him off and disappears down the fire escape.

It’s started to head into truly cold, now, the wind whistling through the gutters and eaves. Bernard should probably find a place to sleep, but he doesn’t want to wake up back in his room.  He’s not ready, not yet.

He sits on the pile of old crates next to the vent and leans back against the wall.  The sky is still overcast, pitchblack, with edges of color occasionally reflected in the clouds.  It’s been overcast all day.  He hasn’t seen a clear sky since the loops started.  Maybe he won’t ever see it again.

Adult Tim’s mentioned taking Bernard to meet his friends in San Francisco.  He talked about making a stop in the Nevada desert to stargaze.  It’s supposed to have some of the clearest dark skies in the world, untouched by light pollution or smog.  Bernard googled a few pictures, just to see, and he spent an hour fascinated by the purple-pink-blue tapestry of the sky, the milky way a glittering, foaming arc.

Fuck, he misses Tim.  He scrubs under his eyes, trying to drag his brain away from everything going wrong with his life, and completely misses the person on the roof until they’re right next to him.

“Holy shit, dude,” a voice says.  “You are literally the hardest person to find, I swear to god.”

Bernard shrieks and throws himself away, tripping over himself and landing sprawled on the concrete.

There’s a girl leaning against the wall, so faux casual it’s painful, with long blonde hair and a domino mask with white-out lenses and dressed in red and green and yellow with a cape grinning at him like he’s an old friend, and holy shit.  Holy shit.   Bernard’s brain reboots about six times as he stares, open-mouthed.

It’s Robin.

“You’re Robin!” he blurts.

Robin (Robin holy fucking shit!  The girl Robin! She was fucking great and didn’t she fucking die??) winks and shoots him finger guns.

“You’re Robin!” he says, again, like an idiot.

“Hell yeah I am,” she says, and then, “Are you wearing crocs?”

“You’re like twelve,” is what comes out of his mouth next, because she has baby fat in her cheeks, she’s a fucking child.

“I get that a lot,” Robin says, casually, and sits on the crates he vacated when he scrambled and landed ass over teakettle.  “I promise I’m older than twelve.  Hey, was that food you had earlier?”

“I-” Bernard is so, completely, terribly out of his depth here.  All his childhood dreams of meeting his heroes and not once did he think about how mortifiying dumb he would be, and what does she mean food he had earlier? “Were you watching us?”

“Just you, technically,” Robin says cheerfully, and she’s already snagged a box from the wagon.  She kicks her feet, playful and childish and she is literally a baby.  “Chicken nuggets! My kinda guy.”

Oh my god.  Oh my god.  Did Batman figure out the timeloop thing? Are they caught in the timeloop thing too?  Are they gonna put Bernard in their weird secret science lab where they grow Robin clones?  “Why??”

Robin slows down her kicking legs.  When she speaks again, it’s still casual, but it somehow doesn’t come across as dismissive.

“Your friend was worried about you,” she says, easily.  

What?  What?  It’s such a mundane answer that for a minute Bernard thinks it has to be a trick.  It’s so normal.   What friends did he even have right now?

“My-” Darla was dead, but that only left- “Tim?”

“Wouldn’t know,” Robin replies.  “Short, black hair, blue eyes?  Looks like a rich kid trying to pass off as normal?”

“I- yeah,” Bernard sputters, because that’s Tim to a T, which meant-  “Tim talked to you?”

“Yu-up,” Robin says, popping the p.  What the fuck, Bernard thinks, hysterical.  “He flagged me down when I was making the rounds and asked me to find you.  Apparently you didn’t come to school today?”

There is so much to unpack there.  Tim noticed that he didn’t show up to school?  Tim wasn’t distracted by whatever he did when he disappeared after Darla’s death?  Tim flagged down a vigilante like a fucking taxi?  And she answered?

“And you just- did?” Bernard stammers, the biggest question.  “You didn’t have- I mean- a lot happened today!  There was literally a gang war.”

Robin’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s a weird lag, her face briefly frozen.

“The gang war’s being handled,” she says, after a moment.  Bernard wondered if he imagined it.  “Besides, you’re important too, kid.”

And the thing is- Bernard knows she means because he’s a person and people inherently have value.  He knows that he’s one teenager that another teenager asked her to find, he knows that he’s one stranger of thousands.  Statistically, he’s nobody to her.  

The way she says it, though.  It’s somehow not trite.  It’s just warm, factual in the way Tim got sometimes, where he said something like it just was, and no other proof was necessary.

Then it occurs to him that wait, he actually is important.  For like, real, superhero reasons.

“I’m stuck in a timeloop,” he blurts.

Robin cocks her head to the side.  If she’s caught offguard, she’s good at hiding it, she just looks curious and a little intrigued.

“What, like in Groundhog Day?”

“Exactly like Groundhog Day!” Bernard bursts out, and then he’s leapt to his feet, hands thrown wide to try and hold all his words because holy shit he can finally talk about this, with a superhero, who will get it.   Darla didn’t believe him, it’s not like he could tell anyone else, but here’s a superhero!  A vigilante! They dealt with fucking aliens on the regular, time travel’s nothing!  “I’ve been here for like seven loops of the same fucking day and Darla dies every fucking time!”

“Oh damn,” Robin says, surprised, and the words come out like a riverflood, Bernard can’t stop.

“I woke up five- seven- I don’t know! I didn’t start counting! Why would I count?  Fuck! I woke up a bunch of loops ago and it’s like four years ago for me and Darla’s here and she’s alive and she’s just as much of a bitch as I remember and I love her so much! She was literally one of my best friends, and now I’m back and it’s all different-”

The story spills out of him, and Robin doesn’t look dismissive.  She doesn’t look confused.  She seems thoughtful, like she’s actually thinking about it, like she believes him.

“-and I keep trying to fight this fucking goon from Darla’s mob family and I keep losing because I’m in my dumbass teenager body which is clumsy as shit -”

He talks about the loop at the museum, the loop in Japantown, the loop with the cat cafe, how he keeps trying and trying and trying and nothing ever works.  He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Robin to ask him, kindly, if he took anything today, if he drank or smelled anything weird.  

She never does.  She just listens, and the story keeps spilling out in all its rotten glory, and he gets to the worst loop, the last loop.

“-and last time- yesterday- I punched Tim’s dad.”

Robin makes a funny noise, but when Bernard looks at her, she seems fine.  “His dad?”

“Yeah, he-” he gestures broadly.  “So- Tim’s dad is the worst, okay?  He literally- it doesn’t matter.  I wasn’t thinking clearly, I just needed- I needed to get Tim away from the school without taking him with me and Darla, because he’s a fucking moron who would call the cops, so I- I know it wasn’t the best idea, but he’s dead where I’m from so I wouldn’t get the chance again, ever, and he was right there and I knew Tim would go to him because Tim still fucking loves him after everything he’s done-”

The rant roars forward, his head full of steam and his mouth full of spikes, and he spits and he spits and he spits and he still can’t get the taste of Jack’s blood out of his mouth.

Robin doesn’t interrupt.  She remains quiet on the sidelines, watching, and slowly the fire fades out.  Bernard’s never been good at anger.

“It’s just- it doesn’t matter.  I shouldn’t have done it.  He was so fucking sad.  Not even mad! I mean, he was mad, but I can handle that! I mean, I can’t, but it wasn’t the worst part, the worst part was- he was just- he was so fucking heartbroken, and I did that to him.”

The air is cold against his face, but he feels boiling hot.  He’s worked himself up into a sweat just by pacing and shouting.  At some point, Robin had finished the chicken nuggets and laid the empty paper container next to her, and now she is chewing on the edge of her glove like she wants to chew her thumbnail.

“I dunno, man, I’m still processing that you’re in a timeloop,” she says, finally.  “Are you sure?”

There it is.  Bernard snaps, reactionary, without thinking about it.  “Yes!”

“Oh.  Wow.”  Robin squints at nothing, thinking.  “Do you think we all go back in time, and only you remember it, or do we, like, fitz out of existence?  Cause I’mma be honest, I don’t want to not exist.”

The easy acceptance throws him.  Just like that? He almost asks, but he doesn’t want to question it.  She might change her mind.

“I don’t know!” He tries to talk at a normal volume but it comes out loud and urgent. “I don’t know how any of this works!”

“Hm.  Okay.  I’m gonna pretend we all go back in time, because otherwise I’ll cry.”  Robin leans back against the HVAC unit.  “So, if you think about it, you never really punched Tim’s dad, cause time rolled back and undid it.”

“I-” Bernard throws his hands up, his stomach churning.  “I guess!  But it doesn’t feel that way!”

Robin nods, acquiescing, and Bernard bowls forward.

“It wasn’t even the worst thing to happen!” he says,  “It wasn’t, it wasn’t, because- because Darla fucking died.”

Robin makes a soft noise that Bernard barely even hears.  He remembers Darla screaming at him in fury, her eyes lit up with internal fire, and he remembers Darla’s corpse face-up in his lap, eyes half lidded and unseeing, those dark eyes with nothing behind them.

“I tried to hide us in the basement- in my house’s basement,” he blathers.  “But the- the mob came for Darla and the cops came for me for hitting Tim’s dad and they- it was the shooting but at my house.  It was at my fucking house!”

“Hey,” Robin is saying, but she sounds distant. 

“She shoved me,” he gasps, and his lungs are tight.  “She shoved me!  I was trying to shield her and she shoved me and she got fucking shot.”

“Hey,” Robin says, more insistently.  Bernard suddenly realizes that she’s a lot closer, her hands open but not touching him, her forehead furrowed.  “Hey, man.”

Bernard wheezes, realizes he’s sweat clean through his shirt.  “I’m fine, I’m- sorry.  I’m fine.”

“It’s okay.  You’re having a bad time.  It’s okay to not be fine.” Robin doesn’t touch him, thank fuck, just gestures to the crate.  “Would it help to sit down?”

“Nno, no,” Bernard says, because he has to remain on his feet, he has to, he can’t let Darla push him down and get herself shot, not again.  “No, I’m- no thank you.”

“Okay,” Robin says agreeably.  “Know any fun languages?”

“I- what?” Bernard asks, voice cracking.

“Like Spanish, or something.” she sits back on the crates, lazily kicking her feet.  “My school only has French extracurriculars.  Can you believe that?  Who speaks French in Gotham?  They could have at least taught Cantonese, or something.”

“I-” Bernard fumbles.  

He did take Spanish in high school, but it’s been so long that he remembers exactly none of it.  He doesn’t know what this has to do with Darla, or the timeloop, or anything, except that Robin is the one asking so it probably has something to do with… something.

Tim had taught him some ASL.  It was a useful skill to know, in Gotham, in case sirens or explosions or screaming made talking impossible.

“I know, uh…” he trails off, finishes his sentence in hand signs.  “A-S-L.”

Robin’s face lights up.  “Dude, that’s so cool.”

“Thanks,” Bernard mumbles, signing it at the same time, tapping his chin and holding his hand out, like he was blowing a kiss.

“Can you count to ten?”

Bernard gives her a weird look, but obediently begins counting.  It’s very simple in ASL, barely more than counting on his fingers, and after a moment Robin waves him off.

“Okay, okay,” she says.  “Hm.  What about the opening to Harry Potter?”

Bernard blinks.  Fumbles.  “I, uh, I don’t actually remember it.  I kind of stopped reading her stuff when the author went off the deep end.”

Robin squints at him, confused.  “Wait, what’d she do?”

Bernard blinks at her.  “Became a terf?”

“A what?”

“A-” oh my god, he’s four years in the past.  Fuck.  Shit.  This hasn’t even happened yet.  “She- became- she becomes, in the future, violently transphobic.”

“Oh shit, really?” Robin blinks at him, surprised, grimacing as Bernard gives her an apologetic shrug.  “Fuck.  Okay, well how about…” she trails off, then her face lights up.  “Does Batman have a sign name?”

Bernard actually knows this from deep diving reddit forums.  He obediently signs, “Batman,” and then follows it with, “Robin, Spoiler, Red Hood, Nightwing.” He almost adds the Signal’s name, a variation on the sign for light, before remembering that the Signal isn’t a hero yet.  Wait, neither is Red Hood.  Or he’s still more supervillain than antihero. Bernard can’t remember.

“Neat,” Robin says, face lit up, after making him say ‘Spoiler’ a bunch of times.  Spoiler in Gotham’s deaf community is a mash-up of ‘answer’ and ‘rotting,’ which Bernard always thought was clever.  “How’re you feeling?”

“Uh,” Bernard says, caught off-guard by all the turns this conversation has had.  “Still shitty.”

“Yeah, that’s normal,” Robin nods easily.  “Your breathing sounds better, though.”

Oh.  It was a distraction.  Fuck, Bernard’s so stupid.  Of course that’s what Robin would do, he’s a panicking kid.  It worked, too, his breathing is more even, and the world feels less like it might slip out from under his feet.  The wind is distractingly cold on his skin.

“I- uh- yeah, thanks,” he stammers.  “Breathing’s good.”

“Poifect,” Robin drawls, thickening her Gothamite accent.  That works, too, Bernard’s mouth twitches at the corner before he can stop it.  She grins at him, pleased. “So! You’re from the future, and you’re in a timeloop of today, and you’re stuck.”

Bernard’s heart lifts.  Please, please, please, he thinks, feeling like a little kid watching Batman and Robin soaring overhead.  Please save me.

“Yes,” he says.  “Is it- can you help me?”

“You’re in luck, kiddo,” Robin winks and gives him a two-fingered salute.  “That’s my whole job!”

---

Robin leads him off the roof, down the fire escape and into the street below, magnanimously helping Bernard wrangle the wagon full of chicken nuggets.  She doesn’t tell him to leave it, which he’s ridiculously grateful for and not really willing to examine why.  She walks with him a block or so, leading him into a tiny 24/7 diner.

If the past week hadn’t happened, then Robin ordering dim sum would probably be the weirdest thing Bernard has seen all month.  She just acts so casual, like she’s not a costumed vigilante teenager up at eleven at night.

“So here’s my plan,” she says, after shoving a whole dumpling into her cheek like a hamster.  “When does the loop start over?”

Something about her is familiar enough that Bernard finds himself teasing her.  “That’s not a plan.”

“Tough fucking patooties.” Robin puffs her cheeks out at him.  A laugh cracks out of his chest, a little frantic, because none of this is remotely normal.  “Chop chop, sucker.  Gimme the sitch.”

“Uh, when I fall asleep,” Bernard says.  “I think.  It could be some time after I fall asleep, like- it could be midnight.”

“Kay, well we’ll find out in…” Robin stares at nothing for a moment, before reporting, “Half an hour, really?.  Shit.  Okay, so I’m going to give you my number.”

“I- your real number?” Bernard says, stupidly, still reeling over the fact that Robin knew the time by staring at nothing.  Does she have augmented vision?  Or like, a bright informational overlay like in superhero movies?

“No, for a burner phone.”  Robin stuffs more food in her mouth.  “D’ ya take n’th’ng wiff ya?”

Bernard looks at her blankly.  She tilts her head in a way that suggests she’s rolling her eyes behind the white-out lenses, but swallows before trying again.  “Do you take anything with you?  When you go back.  Clothes, phone…”

Huh.  He hadn’t even thought of that.  “No, I wake up in my pajamas.”

“Hm.  Dammit.  You’ll just have to memorize it then.”  She points at him with her chopsticks.  “Eat your food.”

His mouth is dry with nerves and relief, and his stomach is in rebellion, but he obediently nibbles on a sesame seed ball.  The food’s probably fantastic.  He tastes none of it.  He held Darla’s corpse in his lap yesterday, and before that he listened to Tim cry because he punched his dad, and now he’s eating dinner with Robin.  He’s too overwhelmed to actually taste anything.

He tries, though.  It’s probably good for him.  It’s not like he’s actually eaten anything substantial all day.

“... what am I doing with your number?” he asks, finally, when he can’t stand it anymore.  “I mean- calling you? Right?”

“Yu-up,” Robin says.  She eyes his abandoned plate, still half-full, but doesn’t push it.  “When you wake up tomorrow- today- whatever.  When you wake up, call that number and ask for me.  Say…” she taps her mouth with the chopsticks.  “Ugh, I hate all the codewords.  Say you’re looking for the blueberry muffin special.”

“Blueberry muffin special,” Bernard repeats, a little incredulous that it’s not something like ‘code operation vampire death’ or another creature-of-the-night-vibe phrase.

“Blueberry muffin special,” Robin confirms, cheerfully ignoring his disbelief.  “Say you’ve talked to me before, and… say that I said that my boyfriend’s birthday is in the summer but I still haven’t gotten anything for him because the thing I wanted to get ran outta stock.  That should be specific enough.”

Bernard has so many questions.  Robin trusts him with a detail about her boyfriend, however vague?  Robin has a boyfriend? (Of course she does, she’s Robin, who wouldn’t want to date Robin).  

What comes out of his mouth instead of any of this is, “Oh, uh, cool.  My boyfriend’s birthday is in summer too.”

Robin looks surprised just as Bernard remembers that he doesn’t have a boyfriend in this time.   Tim is just his friend, his best friend, who ditched him after the school shooting and didn’t contact him for at least two years.  But also his best friend who asked a vigilante for help because he hadn’t come to school and Tim was worried.

“You have a boyfriend?” Robin asks, curious.  Then, awkwardly, like she knows this is a tactless question, “Do your friends know?”

Bernard doesn’t want to say no to having a boyfriend, or dance around who he’s dating, so he settles for the technical truth.  “Uh, I’m not out at school.”

Robin nods, her forehead furrowed.  “Have your- like, has your friend been a dick about- is there a reason you haven’t told him?”

Bernard opens his mouth.  Closes his mouth.  Oh, god.  He hadn’t told Darla or Tim in high school because he was so deeply repressed that he leaned hard into the sexist douchebag act to compensate.  But that was his homophobia, not Tim or Darla’s.  He doesn’t want Robin to think Tim’s an asshole.

“Cause, like,” Robin says when he doesn’t say anything for a minute.  She sounds worried, but also a little tight, like this avenue of conversation is difficult for her.  “I’ll beat him up.  You know that, right?  If he’s been an asshole-”

“No! No,” he says, quickly.  “I’m just- I don’t want- I’m not out yet, that’s all.”

Robin studies his face, but must accept what he says, because she relaxes minutely.  “Okay.”  A pause.  “You know, he sounded really worried about you.  I’m sure he cares about you a lot.”

Bernard’s heart twists in his chest.  He swallows.

“Yeah, uh,” he says.  “I know.”

Robin nods.  She looks like she wants to say more, but after a moment she exhales and stuffs another dumpling into her mouth.

“Okay, anyways,” she says.  “Call me in the morning, operation blueberry muffin, boyfriend’s birthday, blah blah blah.  Then say that I said not to include the big man.”

It takes Bernard a moment to parse that.  “We’re not telling Batman?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Robin doesn’t answer for a minute, chewing on her food.  After a bit, she says, “I recently learned that it’s not just me he’s been treating like shit.”

Oh.  Holy shit.  That is a whole can of worms.  It’s one thing to theorize that Batman raises the Robins in a vat and treats them like tools, it’s entirely another to hear a Robin talk about him like a kid talking about their deadbeat dad.

Bernard has no idea what to say.  Should he be comforting her? Should he offer to fight Batman?  He wouldn’t actually, because he’d die, but maybe offering would make her laugh.

“Besides,” Robin says, casually, before he can figure it out.  “Technically I’m fired.  I’m just wearing the suit to piss him off.”

Oh.  That he gets.

“I stole my dad’s credit card today,” he offers. “Because he sucks.”

Robin grins at him, small but genuine.  She offers him a fist bump.  He knocks his fist against hers, the tightness in his chest loosening.  Damn, he really likes hanging out with her.  She’s fun.  And easy to talk to, and also gets what it’s like to have a shitty dad, instead of Tim who had a shitty dad but refused to talk about it, or Darla who had a shitty dad but no longer talked to him.

She also feels really familiar.  He can’t put his finger on why.

“You know what’ll piss the boss off more?” she asks, cheerfully.  “Getting the stuff we need from his files.”

Bernard doesn’t connect the dots for a second.  Then he does.  “Wait-”

“That’s right, kid,” she says, gleefully taking in his horror.  “We’re gonna rob Batman.”

Chapter Text

When Bernard wakes up the next loop, the first thing he does is paw at his phone.

He inputs the number Robin gave him, just so he doesn’t forget it.  Then he rolls back and stares at the ceiling.

Holy shit.  Holy shit.  Robin found him.  Without him going on weird forums and posting desperate calls for help, even! Or cutting a bat shape out of paper and shining a flashlight through it! Or screaming on the top of his roof for six hours until he got shot or someone showed up! Holy shit!

If this had happened to High School Bernard he would have been the absolute worst about this.  He would have texted Tim and Darla hey guess whose number i got >:D and face their inevitable disbelief and mockery.  He’s almost tempted to do it now, just to see the looks on their faces.

He doesn’t.  He’s grown enough now to recognize that’d be a dick move to Robin.  Also, he wants to keep Tim and Darla out of danger, as much as he can.

He screams into his pillow until his mom knocks on the door.

She says the exact same things she’s said every loop before.  The only deviation is when asks, distractedly, “Were you shouting something, earlier?”

“No,” Bernard lies blandly.

“Huh.” It must not be worth following up on, because she just moves on.  “Get up, you’ll be late for school.”

She shuts the door without checking to see if he actually gets up, just like she’s done every morning before.  Bernard stares at the closed bedroom door, his stomach swimming with an emotion he can’t identify.  It’s not like it matters.  He knows they don’t care.

He grabs his phone before he can stew in it any longer.  Hits the call button.

It doesn’t pick up for a long time, enough that Bernard’s mouth goes dry, and he scrambles to think of an appropriate voicemail to leave a vigilante asking them to call him back.  But it clicks through, and a low, crackly growl comes through the receiver.

“Seriously, B?” Robin’s voice snaps.  It’s thick with sleep and bubbling with anger.  “I don’t know what you learned in silver-spoon-stuck-up-my-ass school, but ‘fired’ means you don’t get to call me into work anymore.”

Bernard fumbles.  “... Robin?”

A pause.  Then, in a very different voice, “Who is this?”

“Uh- Bernard,” he says automatically.  He cradles the phone closer to his face.  “I have a- I’m supposed to tell you- that I need the blueberry special?”

That takes an even longer pause.  Bernard tucks his phone close to his ear and fiddles with his hands.

“... huh,” Robin says.  She seems genuinely caught off guard.  “Really?”

“Really.”

“Damn,” she mutters,  “Point to the big man’s prepwork, I guess.”  Shuffling on the other end of the line, like she’s getting out of bed and putting on shoes.  “Alright, where are you? Don’t tell me,” she adds before Bernard can say.  “I’ll be along, just keep your phone on for me.”

“I- sure?” Bernard says, thinking just like that?   “I mean- yeah. Sure.  Um, I’m supposed to tell you to not tell the big man?”

Robin whistles.  “He must really fuck up today, which- yeah.  That tracks.  Hey, are you in any immediate danger?”

The nonsequitar is quick enough that Bernard fumbles.  “What?”

“Imminent peril.  ‘There’s a vat of acid being slowly tipped onto my head,’ kind of thing.”

“Oh, uh, no.”

“Great.  I’ll be along in a little bit.  Try to not get kidnapped or murdered in the meantime.  Or if you do, can you leave me, like, a very detailed journal of everything you know? No cryptic hints written in blood on the floor.”

“I will not write cryptic hints in blood on the floor,” Bernard repeats, because it’s funny.

“Thanks,” Robin replies, because she understands humor.  “Be right there.”

---

True to his word, he does not write cryptic hints in blood on the floor.  He does find an empty notebook in the mess that is his conspiracy board storage, and starts writing down the bare bones of what’s happening, in case someone really does break in through the window and kill him.  Robin had a point there, he figures, no matter how sarcastically it was said; if something was going to happen, the least he can do is leave a paper trail.

No one breaks through his window, just like no one has done before.  After fifteen minutes, someone knocks on the glass, which, okay, he’s not sure why he was expecting anything else.

It’s a blonde girl with enormous sunglasses and a denim jacket, a giant travel mug in one hand.  For a second Bernard thinks holy shit she came out of costume, except she lowers her sunglasses with one hand to peer at him like a judgemental movie star, and she’s wearing the domino mask under her glasses.

It’s so ridiculous that it break through the stress-riddled mess of his brain and makes him crack a smile, impulsive enough to tease her.

“You look like a dork,” he tells her  as he opens the window.

“Thanks,” Robin says, and slides in.

It looks like she slung a jacket over the Robin suit and called it a day.  It works, weirdly; she stuffs the gauntlets into her pockets, and then the only thing really visible are the tights, which already look like yoga pants from a distance.  It’s surreal to watch her stand in his room, looking so much like a normal person, and see all the hints of Robin tucked away here and there; the metallic shine of her gauntlets peeking through where her sleeves ride up, the high-tech kevlar material of her pants, the way her boots are lined with green.

She glances around the room just in time for Bernard to remember the giant fucking corkboard of Batman theories.

“Oh, nice,” she says appreciatively, which does nothing to make this less mortifying.  Bernard almost lunges for it before realizing that lunging at all in the presence of a trained crime fighting vigilante is probably a bad idea, and settles for burying his face in his hands.  “Oh my god, is this the lab-grown Robins thing?”

Bernard is never going to recover from this, ever.

“Yeah,” he squeaks.

“I love that one,” Robin says, gleeful.  “Hey, can I take this?”

What can he say to that?  No?   “Sure!”

“Nice,” Robin grins, unpinning a printout of a reddit forum.  Bernard wants to die.  She tucks it into a pocket and then the travel mug somehow reappears in her hands.  “So, how many loops have we been through together?”

“Uh- this is the second,” Bernard manages.  He’s getting better at keeping up with Robin’s abrupt turns in conversation, the way she chatters casually and then blasts him with a loaded question, keeping him off balance.  Oh shit, it’s a questioning technique. She’s doing it on purpose.  

“Really?  Huh.” Robin takes a swig out of the travel mug.  “Did past-me tell you anything useful?”

“Um, that you- that your boyfriend’s birthday is in the summer, but you- the thing you wanted to buy was out of stock.”

Robin nods, pursing her lips thoughtfully.

“And- uh- and that we’re going to steal from Batman.”

Robin nods more enthusiastically, grinning at him.  Bernard finds himself grinning back, weaker but still present, her vicious mischief infectious.  It turns into a grimace as he remembers oh yeah, Batman.  Like, the Batman.  Like, Bernard’s gonna get disappeared into the shadow government’s underground science facilities and all records of his existence will be erased, Batman.

“Well, you won’t be stealing from Batman, I will,” Robin says.  Bernard slumps over in relief, just in time for her to follow up with, “You’re just distracting him.”

“Oh my god, no.”

“Oh my god, yes,” Robin says mercilessly, apathetic to the death sentence she’s casually dropping on Bernard’s head.  

“I’ll die.”

“It’ll be fine.” Robin waves him off.  Bernard is like, ninety percent sure she’s rolling her eyes under the stupid mask.  “Worse that happens is I have to break you out of custody.”

“That’s literally so bad, are you kidding me?” Bernard is this close to hysterics, because this is so fucking stupid, but that’s a slippery slope that’ll lead to a full meltdown.  He gestures wildly with his hands, unable to stop the sharp bark of hoarse, derisive laughter.  “How would I even do that? Why don’t I just paint ‘eat me daddy’ on my shirt and jump into Killer Croc’s mouth?”

Robin lets out a snort of laughter, caught offguard, but she bites her fist and forces it back.  When she speaks again, her voice is light, but calm.  “I mean, that would get Batman’s attention.”

“Oh my god, tell me you have another plan.”

“Sure do!” Robin sprawls on his chair, stretching.  “As a bonus, you don’t get eaten.  You’re just giving a USB drive to someone.”

Bernard can think of a hundred different ways a USB drive could get Batman’s attention, and none of them are good.  “Tell me the drive doesn’t launch a bunch of missiles.”

“The drive doesn’t launch a bunch of missiles,” Robin says obediently.

“Okay, now say it so I actually believe it.”

“The drive has a bunch of information on the criminal underworld,” Robin replies.  “Which, in the right hands, could overturn the current hierarchy.”

Okay, Bernard can see that.  Oh fuck, he remembers, he didn’t mention the shootout or Darla to this version of Robin.

“And in the wrong hands, could, you know, blow up Gotham,” Robin says cheerfully, which distracts Bernard from his current thought process because what the fuck.

“I- am I giving it to the right hands or the wrong hands?”

“Good question!” Robin winks and shoots him finger guns, which is not nearly as reassuring as she probably means it to be.  “Theoretically the right hands, but Batman won’t know that.  I’ll alert him, he’ll show up to scope out the exchange, and then chase you down to figure out how you got what you got, and when he realizes you don’t know anything he’ll let you go.  Probably.”

“Probably?”

“And while he’s distracted, I’ll break into his files,” Robin continues cheerfully like he hadn’t said anything.  “And get some contact information.  Like the wizard guy.  Or the Flash.  And I give that to you, and you call them the next loop.”

The Flash?  Like Star City Flash? Like the speedster who breaks the sound barrier on the regular and might literally have the highest caffeine consumption of anyone in the world?  “The Lightning McQueen gijinka hero??”

Robin can’t stop her laughter this time.  To her credit, she turns onto her side and buries her face in the covers so the shrieking is mostly muffled.  Bernard wishes for the ability to turn back time and yank his tongue out of his mouth, before remembering that turning back time is his entire problem.  He settles for burying his face in his hands.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, muffled, unable to look Robin convulsing on his bed.

She just laughs harder.  Just as Bernard is sure she’s going to choke, she wheezes something that sounds like, “Mcwe-en?” but its hard to tell.

“Listen, I-” Bernard wipes his hands off his face and juts his chin out, trying to salvage his pride and failing, “I’m a product of the internet age.”

“Oh my god,” Robin manages, mostly legibly, “Fuck, I have to text…”

She trails off before she can name anyone, but she shoots Bernard a grin, her eyes squinting at the corners.  “Please call him that to his face.”

Bernard imagines the ramifications of calling a superhero a gijinka in casual conversation.  His only saving grace would be they might not understand what he’s saying.  Then again, the Flash and all the Flash kids seemed more in touch with the internet age than most other heroes;  Impulse talked about Among Us on his Twitter account, so… there’s that.

“I would, but I’m trying to cut back on self-destructive behavior,” he says.

“Aw, but- well, no, cutting back on self-destruction is good.” Robin’s grin melts into something smaller and lopsided, still genuine but no longer in hysterics.  “They wouldn’t hurt you, though.  Not for that.”

She would know better than he would, too.  He shrugs at her.  Wait, why would she get the Flash’s phone number for this? Can the Flash control time? “Does the Flash slow down time for everyone else so everyone just thinks he’s fast?”

“I don’t actually know,” Robin shrugs at him.  “But he knows some stuff about time travel, so he’s a good place to start.  The wizard’s kind of shady, so if we can avoid him that’d be great, but if not, well.  Y’know.”

Bernard doesn’t know.  “Shady like might shank me or shady like might steal my soul?”

“Well, first of all, he’d buy it, fair and square.”

“Oh my god.”

“And second, he’s really not interested in human souls.  He might help you make a deal with the devil, though, if you’re into that.  Or maybe murder a lich? Or God? I think he fought God at one point.”

“God exists?”

“Well, no, now he’s dead,” Robin says.  Bernard has a brief existential crisis, but not a very big one, because his entire experience with religion is Christmas and his parents’ Catholic guilt.  Oh shit, and the cult of Dionysus, that might have counted.  “I think.  Anyway, he’s the last resort.  First you’re gonna call Lightning McQueen.”

“Oh my god.” Bernard pushes the heals of his hands up against his eyes.  Robin just cackles.  “Kill me.”

“It’s so fucking funny, are you kidding me?” Robin throws her hands wide, grinning.  The mask covers it, but her cheeks arc high in a way that suggests her eyes crinkling at the corners.  

“I’m gonna get murdered for defamation.”

“You’re way more likely to get shanked by my contact,” Robin says cheerfully.  She pulls her hands out of her pockets, holding a USB drive smaller than Bernard’s thumb.

Bernard covers his face again, whispers, “This is straight out of a spy movie, are you fucking kidding me?”

“You’ll be fine,” Robin soothes.  “Batman will be there the whole time, and he protects everybody, even if he’s suspicious of them.  He’ll let you finish the transfer, and he might not even corner you afterwards.”

“That’s not nearly as comforting as you think it is.”

“And even if he does,” Robin continues, reasonably, “He already knows and trusts my contact.  Any questioning he does will be cursory, at best.  Just tell him the truth.”

Bernard’s head whirls.  “That I’m stuck in a timeloop??”

“What? No.  That I gave the drive to you and told you to give it to my contact.  If you can get away with it, just say Robin instead of clarifying which Robin.  That might buy me some time.” she twirls the USB between her fingers.  “Then wander around the city for a little while.  I’ll find you, give you the numbers, and you can call them while I run away from Batman.”

She chucks the USB at Bernard.  He fumbles it and has to pick it up off the floor like a loser.  Something occurs to him.  “Does Batman even want your contact to have this?”

Robin hesitates.  Bernard cringes, but she’s already flapping her hands at him.

“He wants him to have it eventually,” she says.  “I’m just… speeding up the timeline a bit.  Besides, I was gonna give it to him soon anyways.”

“I deadass think Batman’s gonna kill me.”

“He thinks he’s too cool for murder.  You’re way more likely to get locked in his super-secret Batjail.”

“Oh my god.”

“Kidding!” Robin spreads her hands out wide.  “You won’t get in trouble.  If anyone’s gonna be in trouble, it’ll be me.”

“That’s worse,” Bernard says, but he manages to slam the lid on his encroaching mania, so it comes out as a half-hearted joke.  “I can’t pick locks, how am I going to break you out of Batjail?”

Robin lets out a bark of laughter, surprised.  She looks at him, considering, her mouth slanted in a grin.  “Aw, you’d do that for me?”

It’s a joke, obviously, but… she’s so familiar somehow.  Not just because he recognizes what she’s feeling, what it’s like to have a dad who treats you badly, who loves you and cares about you and still manages to do the emotional equivalent of running you over with a truck.  There’s something else, like he’s seen her before, from somewhere, he just can’t place where.

“Well,” he says after a bit.  “Yeah.”  He doesn’t know what to add, so he shrugs.

Robin studies his face, curious and open, waiting for him to continue.  Bernard struggles for a minute, not sure how to put any of this into words.

“Last loop,” he settles on, “You mentioned- Batman’s been treating you like shit.”

Robin stills her feet, her placid expression frozen on her face.  Then she starts kicking her feet again.

“Yeah?” she encourages him.  

“I just-” Bernard doesn’t know what to say here, because he doesn’t understand what its like to be a vigilante, of course not- “My, uh.  My dad’s been treating me like shit too.”

She relaxes a little, with mixed relief and resignation.  She watches his face for a moment, and then holds out her fist.  Bernard hesitates, and then knocks his own hand against hers.

“Hey,” Robin says.  “Whenever you get out of this, you should call me again.”

“Yeah?”  Bernard’s mouth is dry.

“I mean, I won’t remember you, obviously.  But I think we’d be good friends.”

It hits like a bat to the chest, but in a good way.  He’s confident that he wouldn’t blush in his adult body, but his teenager body is chockful of hormones and is screaming over the fact that Robin wants to hang out with him.

“Oh.” Bernard’s voice cracks embarrassingly high, because puberty fucking hates him.  He immediately deflects.  “What, are we gonna hang out with you in costume the entire time?”

“Dude, I go through the Batburger driveway on the Batbike on the regular,” Robin grins at him, graciously letting his cracking voice go unnoticed.  “I can’t wait to be older and see bars try to figure out how to card me.”

Bernard laughs, cracked and sawing, and it doesn’t feel as desperate as it has before.  Something about chatting with Robin as she casually kicks her feet, calm and in control and confident, settles the wasps’ nest in his stomach.

Robin seems to see it too, because she smiles at him, her face soft.

“Alright,” she says as Bernard winds down.  “You’ll be meeting my guy in Crime Alley.  You got any inconspicious clothes?”

“Something that won’t get me mugged?” Bernard asks.  He doesn’t fully remember what he has in his wardrobe, besides the godawful shortsleeved pop-collared jacket he thought was fashion in high school, but he thinks he remembers some old, frayed jeans.  “Probably.”

“Great! Get changed,” Robin says, and obligingly flops over in his bed and covers her eyes.  “Here’s what you’re gonna do…”

---

Bernard isn’t proud of his time in the Cult of Dionysus, of course not.  He regrets getting pulled into it, and would probably take a different path if he could reroll the dice.  But it wasn’t like movies or books, where the cult is immediately clockable as irredeamably evil.  It isn’t even like some survivor stories he’s read, where the people who got out described having an epiphany, where the horror of what they were doing clicked in their brain, like, oh yeah, I probably shouldn’t be isolating people from their friends and family and getting isolated in turn.

It just- it didn’t feel like that.  It still doesn’t feel like that.  it hadn’t felt bad at the time- painful, yeah, and awful- but also sickeningly good, like he was finally doing something right.  Like he was fixing the parts of him that had always been broken and hidden and hated, like it was breaking through shame and pride right to the heart of what Bernard was.

And Bernard likes the parts of himself the cult uncovered.  He likes having courage and self-confidence and not constantly checking the people around him to make sure he’s fitting an exact, niche identity he’s carved for himself in accordance to the kind of person he thought he was supposed to be.  He likes being weird without having to worry if he’s being too weird, or the wrong kind of weird.  He likes having a high pain tolerance- he understands from an academic standpoint that he shouldn’t like having a high pain tolerance, so he’s working on that, but it feels good to have, anyway, the feeling of flying high, knowing that something can try and hurt him but will never hurt him enough to matter.

(It’s what gave him the courage to ask Tim out.  He’ll never tell Tim that, ever, but Tim is smart and some part of Bernard is terrified that he already knows).

So his feelings on the cult are complicated.  This has literally nothing to do with anything, except that Robin’s contact is named Orpheaus.

“If I had a nickel for every time I got involved in shit ‘cause of a figure from Greek mythology,” he mumbles to himself as he trots through the filthy side street.   “I’d have two nickels.”

Luckily he’s moving pretty fast.  Talking to yourself in Crime Alley is a good way to get trafficked. He’s been to Crime Alley maybe once, during the We Are Robin movement, carried there by the flow of bodies to help move some kids to the free clinic there, and he remembers even with his torn jeans and ratty shirt he had stood out.  He still stands out now.  His hood is pulled far over his face, and his clothes are beat to shit, but there’s no hiding his healthy face, how he can’t quite get the flitting, swift walk, how he hasn’t grown up somewhere he had to be constantly on alert.

Somehow his luck holds all the way to the meeting place, a disused stairwell in what was once a parking garage but now serves as a homeless shelter.  People on the starving side of thin eye him as he comes in, but turn away as he scuttles to the stairwell, more interested in their own business.

The stairwell is dark and cool and completely encased in shadow.  Bernard hesitates at the bottom step, and that’s when he feels a cool circle press to the back of his head.

“I don’t know you,” a voice says, softly. 

That’s a gun, Bernard thinks hysterically.  That’s a gun pointed at my head and when they shoot me it won’t be like Darla because I’ll be alone, I’m going to die alone.

Bernard flaps his mouth, trying to make sound come out.  He manages a squeak.

“So who are you?” the voice says, conversationally.  It’s a male voice, warm and slow.  The circle of cold metal burns into Bernard’s skull until it’s all he can focus on, an icy star.

“R’b’n-” he chokes, remembers too late to not give away Robin’s name.  “P’st control, I got- I-I got a package from pest control!”

Silence for a long moment.  Bernard sweats under his hoodie.

The cool circle gets taken away.  Bernard just about collapses to the ground, scrambling across the concrete floor until he’s pressed right up against the concrete wall, and it’s like the basement and it’s like the altar.  He wheezes.

A tall man melts out of the shadow, dressed head to toe in metallic gray and black.  He has a small, rueful smile on the exposed bottom half of his face, warm and friendly on dark brown skin.  He has a glass bottle in one hand and no gun in sight, and Bernard should really be madder at that, but it is overshadowed by the full fucking Robocop thing the man’s got going, a smooth, reflective helmet covering the top half of his face, jutting out like a shark.  This is Orpheus, this has to be Orpheus.

“You look like a Pacific Rim jaeger pilot,” Bernard blurts out, because he’s a nerd.

“Thank you,” Orpheus’s smile widens, amused.  “The package?”

Bernard fumbles for his pocket, pries out the USB stick and holds it out at arms length.  Fuck, this is actually happening.  Somewhere, somehow, Batman is listening to this exchange; somewhere, somehow, Batman is going to track him down and shake him like a rattle until he answers all his questions.  He finds himself glancing up the dark stairwell, out the open door, like he can spot fucking Batman.

Orpheus takes the USB delicately from Bernard’s sweaty hands, holds it briefly up to his helmet.  Then he palms it and it’s gone, secreted away somewhere on the bodysuit, which should be impossible because it’s skintight.  Where is he hiding it?? Where does he hide anything?? He doesn’t even have a belt.

“Tell pest control I got it,” he says, simply.  He cocks his head, briefly, a small smile curled on his lips.  “Anything else?”

“No,” Bernard squeaks, and wonders how he’s never even heard of Orpheus before now.  Where is he in his time? Is he still alive? How many other heroes exist like him, quietly watching over Gotham’s underbelly, unheard of and never seen?

“I’ll see you around, then,” Orpheus says easily, and cocks his head toward the door in clear dismissal. “Good-”

There’s barely a sliver of a pause, the briefest hesitation.  And then Bernard is slammed backward, white-hot pain exploding across his back as he’s forced to the concrete, his head ringing and all the air leaving in him a rush.

He heaves, trying to regain air.  His nose is mashed up against something gray, his ribs numb, as he’s too weak to even struggle, paralyzed and drowning, trying to get the next inhale.

The gray is Orpheus’s back, his muscles straining even through the protective body armor.  He’s pressed Bernard into the wall, his hands holding something, straining to keep back a dark, hulking silhouette-

“Don’t worry about the kid, Orpheus,” comes a haggard, poisonous voice, a smoker’s voice, deep and wry.  “I’ll want him alive.”

That can’t be what Batman sounds like, Bernard thinks, dizzy, as he scrabbles against Orpheus’s back, still inhaling.  He’s heard clips of Batman’s voice, snatches of a dark, gravelly rumble, and it didn’t sound like this.  He shifts, and sees over Orpheus’s shoulder, something inky black, and a white glimmer of exposed teeth.

“Hey, Black Mask,” Orpheus says, passably casual except for the audible strain in his voice.  “I thought I was clear about the consequences last time I caught your goons in my territory.”

“Hard to take you seriously, Sharkboy,” Black Mask leers.  He can’t do anything but leer, because he’s Black Mask and his teeth glimmer in his exposed gums and his lidless eyes stare, bloodshot and bone-dry, out of the carved skull of his face.  Those darting eyes turn to meet Bernard’s over Orpheus’s shoulder and his heart stops.  “You,” the horrible, hissing voice says, sadistically amused, “Are gonna sing long and loud for me.  Maybe I’ll even leave you for the Bat to find.  If there’s anything left of you-”

Orpheus punches Black Mask in the throat, almost too quick to see, but Black Mask must have been waiting for that opening because Orpheus shouts, pained, and then they’re tangling on the ground, too fast to follow, while Bernard stands frozen against the concrete wall.

“Run!” Orpheus shouts, twisting to look at Bernard, “Run-”

Black Mask catches him around the middle and smashes him into the wall.  Something snaps like a gunshot, the sound of breaking bone, and that snaps Bernard out of it and he makes a bad decision.

(He’s been fighting the mafia goon for the past, like, six loops, okay? He’s not thinking clearly, whatever).

Black Mask catches his thrown punch by wrapping his huge hand around both Bernard’s wrists and heaving him up off the ground, and he’s-

He’s-

He’s tied to the altar, the rope biting into his wrists while he writhes and struggles until he bleeds because he can’t die here, he can’t, and a man is looming over him, eyes glittering, knife in hand-

And he’s in a stairwell in an abandoned apartment complex because he’s in a time loop and he can’t die here, he refuses, so Bernard howls and kicks because he’s scared and desperate and fuck he’s still in his dumbass teenager body, what the fuck is he doing?

Black Mask snorts, unimpressed.  “Smart move, retard.  What’s your next move?”

Bernard smashes his head into Black Mask’s teeth.

It works.  Black Mask howls, dropping him, and Bernard’s head is ringing like the inside of a bell or maybe a broken car engine, but he scrabbles and manages to crawl away.

“You sthit!” Black Mask screams.  His mouth is dribbling blood and a section of his nose is caved inward, wrong even in his skull face.  His voice comes out nasally and wet and almost unintelligible.  “I’ll kiw you for sthat!”

He lunges, snarling, eyes wide and bloodshot, as Bernard tries to scramble away across the floor but he’s too slow and Black Mask is going to snap his neck like a twig, except Orpheus drives his shoulder into Black Mask’s side and throws them both to the ground.  

“Run!” Orpheus shouts.  His arm is misshapen, broken, a bad twist in it. “Run-”

Black Mask grabs Orpheus’s bad arm and twists, and Orpheus screams, high and inhuman, and slams the palm of his good hand into Black Mask’s broken face, and Bernard’s head swims and he scrambles out the door and he’s running.  

The entire garage is empty, cans knocked over like people left in a hurry.  His feet slap against the concrete, his head throbbing.

“Batman!” he screams, because Batman is supposed to be here, where is he?  Where is he? “Batman!”

A shadow looms, expanding rapidly.  Bernard barely has a second to see the white-out eyes in that pitch-black shade before Batman passes him like a moving train, close enough to touch.

Holy shit.

Bernard stumbles to the side, and Batman is already gone into that dark section of stairwell.  Fuck.  Fuck, Batman looks like the kind of monsters people see in sleep paralysis, a tall, hulking shadow theoretically in the shape of a man, that tiny slice of chin and mouth the only sign of anything remotely human.

Now he’s disappeared into the stairwell, wordless, and there’s only shouting and gurgling and meaty sounds like bodies being thrown against walls, terrifying and shockingly quiet.

Bernard saw Batman.  Fucking Batman.

He stands there, stupidly, but someone screams from the stairwell, abrupt and animalistic with pain, and Bernard doesn’t know who it is and Black Mask said he’s make him sing, Black Mask is going to torture him, and he could help if he wasn’t in this stupid fucking body.

He runs.

---

Because he’s an idiot, it takes him all the way to the edge of the Bowery before he remembers that he has Robin’s phone number.

He didn’t bring his phone with him to Crime Alley, for the obvious reasons, but it does mean he’s stuck with no money and no means of communication.  The We Are Robin movement covered some of the options for situations like this- of course, they had all been prepared ahead of time, phonelines to call that wouldn’t be traced or tracked, places to hide and recover when necessary, people who wouldn’t ask questions.  But a handful of kids had taught the others how to open a car with a coat hanger, and cellphones usually had an emergency option that bypassed the password, so- so Bernard has options.

Where is he going to find a car with someone’s phone hanging out in plain view? This is Gotham.  He might as well be looking for a successfully rehabilitated Arkham patient, or, or, non-acidic rain, or a skyline that doesn’t look like puke.

He buries his face in his hands, but it’s too hot and too much, so he rips them away from his face and just squeezes his eyes shut, gasping.

He can’t just stay here.  Batman and Orpheus are fighting Black Mask, or maybe they already caught him, or maybe Black Mask killed one or both of them, or maybe he got away and he’s coming for Bernard just like the chaos monster did, looming and impossible to outrun, inevitable as a wrecking ball or the collision of planets.

He bolts.

---

By the time his brain catches up enough to let him breathe without puking, he’s out of the Bowery and into downtown Gotham.

He lets the memory of the streets guide him more than his brain, finds himself hopping the turnstile for the metro and rattling down the stairs.  People dart out of his way, reading his expression like the still air before a hurricane and deciding (wisely) that they don’t want to deal with that shit.  Bernard gets that.  He would also like to not deal with this shit.

He hops off the train, spinning through Gotham’s alleys like a leaf caught in an eddy, and ends up outside of Theodosia Crowne Public Library.  There’s a telephone in here, he remembers, and darts up on the stairs without much thought.

The lady running the front desk gives him a pitying glance when he asks for the phone, and leaves some pamphlets pointedly on the desk when she leaves to give him some privacy, but she also lets him use the phone with no charge, so Bernard honestly doesn’t care.

Robin picks up on the second ring.  “What’s up, homeskillet.”

She sounds a little distracted, but not out-of-breath, or even like she’s walking anywhere.  Bernard’s brain skips over this in favor of panic.

“I think we fucked up,” he says.

“Tell me,” Robin says, sobering instantly, and it shouldn’t help as much as it does, her calm and immediate response, how quickly she takes charge.

“Black Mask showed up,” Bernard says, fumbling, not thinking about whether or not he should say a villain’s name on a public phone line. Robin says, “Shit,” softly and Bernard keeps going, “Batman’s fighting him, but it sounded bad, it- he said he’d- he threatened to-”

“Hey.”

“He said he’d- he said I’d sing for him- he said-”

“Hey,” Robin says, gently, firmly, and Bernard appreciates that, he does, really, but he’s okay, he doesn’t need help right now.  Batman does, and Orpheus does, or maybe they beat up Black Mask and it’s all fine, or maybe he called in his gang because he’s a gang leader and why would he go anywhere alone?

“He doesn’t have eyelids,” he spews instead of any of this. “It’s so fucking creepy!”

“Right?” Robin says, like Bernard’s saying what everyone knows but no one will say.  Somehow this is more effective than her saying it’s okay or i need you to breathe. It’s just a casual teenager response, and its just out of place enough to make Bernard bark out a high laugh, clapping a hand over his mouth.  If she kept treating it like nothing he might snap, but she transitions smoothly back into something calm and firm and mitigating disaster.  “Where are they?”

“In- in the place you sent me,” Bernard says, “It’s been, like, ten minutes though-”

“Alright.  I’m gonna send a friend to you, okay? You’ll know them.”

For a moment Bernard panics, thinking that Robin has somehow gotten in contact with Tim and the younger version of his dorky, rich, completely useless boyfriend is gonna show up, but then he remembers that Robin deadass broke into Batman’s base to steal contact information for the Flash.  So it’s just the Flash.  Which is better? Probably.

“Should I meet them somewhere?” he asks.

“What? No.  Stay where you are.  Read a book or something.  It shouldn’t take very long.”

How did you know I’m at the library? Bernard almost asks, before remembering that he’s talking to Robin.  It doesn’t matter either way; the phone line clicks off in his ear, and he spends a moment just listening to the static on the other end.

Okay.  Just- stay where he is.  He can do that.

---

Two minutes after that phone call, someone casually bangs the library door open.

Bernard ignores them, because there’s no way Robin’s friend got all the way to the library in two minutes, except they’re coming towards him and oh yeah, Robin said she was stealing contact information for the Flash.

He jerks his head to look up just as they sprawl next to him on the bench.

They’re a short, lean boy, maybe Bernard’s high school age, maybe a little younger, with a mass of ginger hair and a toothy grin set in an impish face.  He slumps against Bernard with no respect for personal space, while Bernard tries not to flinch away, and smiles crookedly at him.

“Hey!” he says, cheerful.  “So, whose your favorite character in Cars?”

Bernard slips right over from on edge to mortified, burying his face in his hands.  “Oh my god.”

The kid- and he has to be one of the Flash people, but which one? Not the Flash, the Flash was an adult, and Kid Flash seemed a little too old, but Impulse was so new in high school, Bernard’s not even sure if he’s debuted yet- laughs brightly.  Everything he does is bright and beaming, like someone stuck an imploding star in a person.

“Don’t be embarrassed, it’s funny!!” the kid says.  “I thought Robbie was messing around and then shesaidthatand-I-laughedsohardsnotcameout-”

“What?” Bernard croaks, peering between his fingers.

“It’s funny!” the kid repeats, and cheerfully slugs Bernard’s arm like they’re old friends.  “Anyway, don’t sweat it! I’m here tohelp! We should probably talk somewhere more-” here, he makes a gesture too quick for Bernard to really catch the shape of, “You know! I don’t know Gotham reallywell cause Batdracula’skindareallysuper-” he scowls and drops his voice down a register and Bernard almost laughs, “‘No metas in Gotham.’  Which, like, rude! Ihavefriendshere! Anyway, we shouldheadbacktoyourplace, I cancarry you!  I mean not reallybutIcanpushyou! Just, notinhere, we have to startsomewherehidden, and youneedahelmet!”

Okay, he caught most of that.  He thinks.  Probably.  “What?” And then, “It’s a half hour car drive to my place,” and then, as his brain catches up with what’s probably going to happen, “Oh no.”

“Relax! It’ll be fun,” the kid says, beaming, “I just needtoget a helmet brb!!!!”

He skitters out the library door somewhere between a jog and a run, still slow enough to appear almost normal.  Bernard’s still sort of stuck on how he said ‘brb’ out loud, with his mouth.

A moment later the kid sticks his head back out.  He has a neck brace under one arm that he did not have before.  “C’mon, man!”

“I-” Bernard glances at the desk, but the librarian still hasn’t returned, and nearly all the people he’s seen have been entering the library or leaving it, not loitering in the lobby like a loser, and there’s no one to see him walk out with what is essentially ball lightning crammed into a human shape.  “Oh my god.”

He follows the kid out.  He’s even shorter than Tim, the kind of small, long-limbed, impish stature that belongs to spidermonkeys, or trickster gods, or the two-dimensional class clown sidekick characters in high school flicks.  It doesn’t help that he is slightly blurry at the edges, like he is vibrating too quickly to see, and walks like he is just barely tethered to the ground.

And then he is shoving a pair of goggles into Bernard’s hands.  “You’ll need these and theneckbrace. I just need todoublecheck theway.”

A rush of displaced air pulls at Bernard’s hoodie, and the kid is gone.

Bernard stares at the empty asphalt, his mouth open to say it’s fine, that they could take the bus or order an Uber or something.  Holy shit, he just disappeared.  Like straight up vibrated out of existence.  He’s seen videos, everyone’s seen videos, but it’s a whole different experience to watch a kid flicker out in a flash, to feel the wind pull hard at his clothes and hair as air rushes to fill the vacuum. Doesn’t the speed give him whiplash?  No, forget that, how does he not overheat? The friction alone should leave him blazing hot to the touch.  Even if his body is somehow insulated against cooking his insides, his shoes should be literally smoking.  Were they? Holy shit, were his shoes smoking and he just didn’t notice?  Wait, how is he going to get Bernard across Gotham without breaking all his bones against the sound barrier?

“I’mback!” the kid announces, blurring into sight.  He has a skateboard tucked under one arm and doesn’t seem upset that Bernard hasn’t put on the goggles in the 0.2 seconds he was gone.  “I got us a skateboard ‘causeI’mreallyweak but thiswillmakeit waaay easier!”

The skateboard looks familiar.  Fuck, it’s been so long since high school, but it almost looks like the one Tim had their junior year, the one with the boring gray diamond pattern.  It’s probably a mass-produced design, and also Bernard’s more focused on the fact that this kid has a skateboard, and presumably he’s going to put Bernard on the skateboard before he flash-speeds them.

“Will this break my spine?” Bernard blurts.

“Hah, what? Pff, no!” the kid says.  “I haven’t donethat in years! Put on your neck brace.”

Bernard puts on the neck brace.

The kid casually fiddles with his hands as Bernard snaps on the goggles, except he’s so fast his thumbs are a blur, and then the kid has put the skateboard on the ground and is helping Bernard step up onto it while Bernard wobbles like a newborn giraffe ‘cause he hadn’t got the hang of skateboarding even in the Adult Timeline, where he’s more aware of his own body and also Tim was helping the entire time.

“Okay, don’tthrowup!” the kid says, cheerfully.

“What?” Bernard says, and the world moves.

Bernard is dipped in ice water, then in lava.  His ears pop like cracking eggs.  Gray sky and gray concrete swim around him, an outgoing tide pulling him away from himself, leaving him floundering, and he doesn’t realize he’s fallen over until he feels a bony shoulder and side propping him upright.  He’s still not really sure which way’s up and which way’s down.

“You’re doing good, man,” the kid says, reassuring.  He says it at mostly normal speed, so either running took the edge off his energy or he’s consciously slowing himself down because Bernard is clearly on the edge of vomiting.  “Deep breath.”

He inhales, exaggeratedly, and Bernard realizes abruptly that he’s been gasping shallowly, the air whipped right out of his lungs.  He inhales, chokes, and wheezes clumsily.

His head is still swimming, but after a minute, long enough that the kid starts to gently vibrate, Bernard feels able to look up and around.

They’re in front of his house.  Holy shit.

Bernard stares at his front porch, the big, white fence, the stupid splintered wooden porch bench because his mom always put the cushions away when the weather looked like rain (which was always in Gotham).  They’re just- at his house.  They were at the library downtown a second ago.  Literally a second ago.

“It should pass in a minute. Maybetwo. Maybe now. How do you feel?”

Bernard looks up into the kid’s expressively concerned face.  His mouth feels like it is full of sandpaper.  “Uh.”

“It’sokay if you need a minute.  Could we do it inside though?” The kid bounces, jarring Bernard enough that he thinks he really will puke, but stops quickly.  “People might seeus out here.  Plus I betyourhouse is full of brandname candy! It lookslike the kinda place thathasthat. Ormaybe gross organicfood brands.  Eitherway!”

Bernard flaps his mouth.  Manages a dumb nod.

To the kid’s credit, he helps Bernard limp into the house at a normal speed, and sets him gently down on the couch before superspeeding away.  He’s back less than a second with a bowl of chips and the salsa container from the fridge, which he cracks open and starts shoveling food into his mouth at an almost human speed.

Bernard can’t handle this.  Being in the same room as this kid is almost as bad as a manic episode, his energy infectious and friendly and jarring.

He closes his eyes, just so he can have a two minute break without another world-altering interaction landing in his lap.  His head slowly stops swimming.  He takes off the neckbrace, and that helps, somehow, his sweaty neck cooling against the air, so he takes the goggles off, and then his hoodie because Bernard always heats up when he gets anxious, for some reason, and then his shoes because his mom hates it when he wears his sneakers inside.

Why does he care?  The thought curls viciously in his belly.  His mom sighed explosively when he apologized two-three- maybe four loops ago, when he woke up after punching her the loop before; she had no context but his distress and still thought of him as an annoyance.  She treats him like shit and he still can’t let go of it.

He scrubs the palms of his hands into his eyesockets until the dull pressure becomes unbearable, drops his hands into his lap.  Fuck. 

The kid has finished the chips and is now digging into his dad’s giant jar of trail mix.  Bernard didn’t even see him leave the room.

“Feelingbetter?” the kid asks, hopefully.

“Sure,” Bernard says, because technically he no longer feels like vomiting and that probably constitutes ‘better’.  “So who are you?”

He means the kid’s superhero identity.  The kid beams and says, “Bart!”

Bernard stares at him, blankly.  The kid continues to shove trail mix into his face, apparently unbothered.  “Is that- did you just give me your real name?”

“Yeah, duh.  Whatelse are you gonna call me?”

“I-” Bernard has no idea how to handle this.  “Are you gonna mindwipe me after this? Like Men in Black? Why would you give me your real name?”

Allegedly Bart shrugs, clearly not seeing what the big deal is.  “I mean, what are you gonna do with it?  It’s not like I’m real.”

“What??”

“I meanlegally!! I’mvery real.  But like, y’know, legally.” Bart shoves another handful of trail mix into his face and somehow speed-chews it.  “‘Sides, I know where you live now, so, uh.  Sell my identity and I’ll hunt you for sport? That’s a good threat, right?”

Bernard wheezes, but it’s an ugly-laugh-wheeze instead of a panic-attack-wheeze or -superspeed-punched-the-air-out-of-my-lungs-wheeze, so he thinks he’s doing pretty good.  Bart looks pleased, anyway.  What does legally not real even mean?

A moment later Bernard feels stupid for thinking it, because someone’s citizenship status is none of his business.  A moment later he remembers Robin saying the Flash knew something about time travel.

“Do you-” Bernard licks his lips, a nervous tick he can’t seem to drop, and asks the stupid question.  “Are you legally not real because you’re from a different time?”

Bart’s hands still.  It’s barely for a second, and it would be unnoticeable on anyone else, but on him the lack of movement is jarring, almost unnatural.

Then he starts fiddling with his thumbs again.  The smile he gives Bernard is still bright, but his eyes are sharp, assessing.

“Yeah,” he says.  “I’m from the future, actually! About fifty years.”

Holy shit.  So speedrunning and time travel are connected.  Did Bart run so fast he managed to go backwards in time? Are time and space connected in a way that Bart, whose relationship to space is so unusual just because of how fast he can traverse it, can somehow move through time, too?

Wait, he said he was from the future.  He’s come back into the past, like Bernard, but he hasn’t gone forward again.  Or he chose to remain behind.

“Can you make wormholes??” Bernard asks instead of any of this.

Bart laughs, surprised.  Then he stops abruptly, looking suddenly intrigued, staring wide-eyed at the table.  “Oh my god, can I make wormholes?”

Oh shit, he’s definitely kicked off Bart’s descent into supervillainy.  “Uh-”

“‘Cause when I hopped the timeline that was just gettingout of theforcewhich wasjustspeedbutifI’mgoingfastenoughdo-physicsand-mol-rr----ss--”

He speaks too fast to understand, and then he starts gesturing, his wide-flung arms generating a breeze as they try to keep up with his crackling fast-forwarded record voice.  Shit.  Fuck.  This kid definitely has ADHD.  No, wait, is it ADHD if his mind thinks just as fast as his body? Because then it’s not that he has trouble focusing on one topic, it’s that it takes him a fraction of the time it takes others to fully think through a concept.  He’s probably fully working out a PhD level thesis right now that would take anyone else six years of schooling.

“Bart,” Bernard tries.  He gives it a second before trying again.  “Bart!”

--ahd-- what? Oh,” Bart says, sheepishly.  “Sorry.  What werewe talking about?”

“Nothing,” Bernard says quickly, before Bart can get sucked into his own head again.  “I need- help.”

The same expression Robin had comes over Bart, the calm, steady focus.

“Yeah?” he says, encouragingly.

Bart isn’t masked or in costume.  He’s in a long-sleeved shirt and jeans.  He’s just some kid, except for the expression, the cool, clearheaded focus.  It hits just as hard as it did when Robin said she’d help, the creeping hope that he might get out, that he might get saved.  Fuck, he hopes this superhero can save him.

There’s something different about Bart, though.  Maybe it’s the fact that he traveled through time, too.  Maybe it’s the fact that he chose to stay.

“I’m stuck in a timeloop,” Bernard says, and gathers his courage.  Time to take a risk.  “And I want to leave, I swear.  It’s just- I need to save someone, first.”

Bart’s eyes feel like they’re cutting into his skin.  Surprisingly, it doesn’t make Bernard’s skin crawl; it doesn’t feel like alarm or wariness or even pity.  It feels like Bart gets it.  Maybe that’s why he came back.

“Who do you need to save?” he asks, gentle.

Hope is expanding in Bernard’s chest like sunrise, like the moment after throwing a punch but before it lands, the trust in your own skill and aim to keep you alive.  Darla’s dark eyes burn in his memory like black holes, alive, alive, alive.

“Her name is Darla,” Bernard croaks, “She’s a total bitch, and I love her, and she dies today no matter what I do.”

Chapter Text

The whole sordid, miserable story takes about an hour.

Shockingly, Bart stays still for all of it.  Mostly still.  He does lie down on the couch and throw his feet over the armrest, his index fingers pressed to pursed lips and his forehead furrowed thoughtfully, but he doesn’t superspeed away or get distracted, even though Bernard’s disjointed account has to be painfully slow.

“Huh,” Bart says, when Bernard finishes. “That explains why I’ve had deja vu all day.”

“What?” Bernard asks, head whirling.  Has everyone had deja vu? Or is Bart special because of his superpowers?

“I feel like I’ve lived this Tuesday a bazillion times,” Bart says, stretching his arms out like they could possibly hold the enormity of how monumentally repetitive this day has been for him.  “Like I wokeup this morning like ‘Ugh! Tues -day.’ And normallyIdon’t even know whatday of theweek it is.”

“Is that- good?” Bernard says, hesitant. “Like, you believe me? That I’m not insane.”

“Oh yeah, I believe you,” Bart says simply, and it shouldn’t cause bonecrushing relief to hear him say that, but it does.  Bernard slumps against the couch, head falling back with a thud against the cushions.  Then, in a complete nonsequiter, “Your friend’s name is Tim?”

Bernard wrinkles his nose.  That’s a weird question. “... yeah?”

“Huh.” Bart makes a series of faces at the ceiling, fast enough that he looks like he’s having a stroke.  “And you beat up his dad?”

“... ye-ah?”

“Huh.” Bart chews the inside of his cheek.  “... and he didn’t, like. Punch you back, or anything??”

This is a weird, weird series of questions.  Suspicious bubbles up in Bernard’s gut, but it literally can’t be true.  Adult Tim would have told him, he knows Bernard loves this stuff.  “... do you know Tim?”

“Huh? Oh, naw,” Bart says, and it sounds genuine, but wouldn’t a superhero with a secret identity be good at lying? Except Bart just told him his name, like, straight up.  Unless Bart isn’t his real name.  “So he didn’t punch you?”

“No.” He’d crawled away, eyes wide and flat with terror.  Scrabbled at Bernard’s hands.  Spat bloody spittle.  That was it.

“Huuh.” Bart chews his lip.  “Are you sure you punched him?”

“I was there,” Bernard replies snippily, unsure where, exactly, the confusion on this particular sticking point is coming from.  He doesn’t want to admit that Jack was essentially crippled, because Bart might get caught on the fact that he hit a disabled guy, because he doesn’t know how much of an asshole Jack is.  

Unless Bart knows Tim, and by extension, Jack.  Or maybe Bart knows of Jack, but not what Jack is like.  That seems the most likely.  Tim lives in Gotham, and Bart said that Batman was weird about metas in Gotham, so maybe he only talks to Tim over the internet, some layer removed from Tim, so he doesn’t see how Tim flinches away from contact, how skittish he gets when Bernard suggests coming over, how tired and drawn he seems at school.

If he knows Tim.  Which he shouldn’t.  Why would he know Tim?  Why would Tim be friends with a superhero?  Why wouldn’t he mention it?

He settles on, “It wasn’t exactly hard.”

Something flickers over Bart’s face, almost too quick to catch, a wide-eyed expression Bernard can’t quite read, either impressed or incredulous.  Then Bart pops his lips, blowing a raspberry.

“Wow,” he says.  “I mean, isn’the, like, an adult though? Imean obviously he’sanadult, butlike. Youknow.”

Bernard tries to decipher what the question is, exactly.  He shrugs.  “I mean, my dad’s bigger.”

He realizes a moment too late that reveals more about himself than he wants Bart to know.  Fuck.  Shit.  He needs help for the time travel, not for his dad, whose never even hit him.

Except he has. Two or three loops ago, when Mom triggered a flashback by pushing him gently back into the bed, and her silhouette was the Chaos Monster leaning over him, his hands restrained, and he screamed and lashed out and cracked his fist against his mother’s cheekbone.

So it happened.  It happened because Bernard hit his mom, who was just trying to help him, who wouldn’t let go of him, who trods over his boundaries like he’s a stupid kid throwing a tantrum, who loves him and has never treated him like a real person.

Fuck. He needs time travel.  He has time travel, but he needs it to only roll back a couple of seconds instead of the whole day.  He needs to save scum today.

Except Bart is nodding, calmly, like he gets that.

“Most of the guys I tangle with are bigger than me,” he says, and he’s back to speaking at a normal speed.  His voice is gentle, the same way Robin’s becomes gentle when he panics, like Bernard is a victim.  Bernard is a victim, from the outside, someone trapped in a magic spell or dimensional travel or something, someone to be saved, and it’s worse because the slowed down voice helps.  “I know it’s not the same, though.  I’m sorry, man, that fucking sucks.”

His stomach jerks, and the anger comes flaring up like a rocket.  Bernard slams the lid on it as fast as he can, but the churning, lava hot anger bubbles in his throat.  Oh, he so does not want to have this conversation.  

“I don’t live with him anymore.” He snaps, then bites back the cutting remark that comes clawing at the back of his teeth and changes the subject.  “How do I escape the infinite time travel loop?”

If Bart is hurt by Bernard’s tone, he doesn’t show it.  The ease with which he lets the subject go almost makes Bernard angrier.  “Oh thatdepends on whether its magicor somethingelse.  Do you remember what happenedbefore the timeloop?”

“Uh-” Bernard closes his eyes, partly to block out the sight of Bart, earnest and calm, partly to help shoulder past the anger so he can actually concentrate.  

The details of that night are still blurry, at best.  Bernard fumbles, tries to extract the details.  It had been date night, with Tim, the first one in almost a month, and Bernard had been excited… except Tim got a call, in the middle, and had to leave, and Bernard couldn’t even be mad because Tim looked so miserable.

“I was- I was walking home, except there was a fight, I think.  I didn’t really see.”  He hadn’t, he can just barely remember the flash of a silhouette, someone bolting past him.  Then tingling in his fingers.  “I got hit with something.  I didn’t really see what, but it had to be important, ‘cause Robin stopped to check on me- I couldn’t really tell what he was saying- and then I woke up here.  In the timeloop.”

“Hm.” Bart thinks for a minute, which must be an eternity to him.  Then he pops up off the couch and scratches under his chin rapidfire.  Bernard leans away.

Bart is so weird to watch, to notice how casually he trembles, a supernova barely restrained.  It strikes Bernard now how unbearably bored Bart must be.  He has to slow himself for every conversation, every interaction; he thinks at a thousand miles an hour but has to speak at a glacial pace, his lightning brain bottlenecked by the snail’s pace of other people’s lives.  Isn’t boredom classified as a kind of torture? Like, if you put someone in an isolation cell, the lack of mental stimulation can drive them insane? 

 What is almost worse is when Bart is still.  He is still now, his mouth quirked into a tiny, resigned grimace, his eyes half lidded and tired.

“It’s- it’s possible, right?” Bernard can’t quite stop himself from asking.  “To save Darla and go home?”

Bart is quiet for a minute, eerily still.  Then he moves again, his pinky coming up at superspeed to squeegee around in his ear, a comedy in a person, the two-dimensional class clown.  Joke’s on him, Bernard invented that move.  He spent his entire time in middle and high school learning how to be a joke so no one read below the surface.

“I gottacheck some stuff,” Bart rattles off.  “Gotalk to theSpeedForce, magicshit, youknow.  Will you be okay by yourself for a while?”

“What? No,” Bernard says, instinctively, desperate to keep his first real chance of help within arms reach.  Then, as he realizes that Bart probably wouldn’t ditch him for no reason, “How long is a while?” and then, as he processes the rest of what Bart said, “Holy shit wait, are you magic?”

Bart shoots him finger guns with a grin and a wink, answering exactly nothing, and vibrates out of existence.

Literally out of existence.  Like, he’s no longer there.  Bernard’s heart jumps into his throat, and he almost lunges at the couch like he can somehow make Bart reappear, grab him and pull him back into the world.

He can’t, obviously.  He stares at the empty couch, waiting for a superpowered teenager to reappear, magically (apparently actually magically! Neat! Fuck!).  About two minutes drag on like this.  How long is ‘a while’ to someone with superspeed?  It can’t be that long, comparatively, right?  Like five minutes, maybe?

Five minutes pass, agonizingly slow.  Bart doesn’t reappear.

“Fuck!” Bernard shouts over the sickening anxiety, throwing his hands up.  “Fuck, fine! I’m getting a snack.”

---

Bart has, tragically, eaten all the good food.

Bernard shuffles through all the shelves, pushing aside Mom’s disgusting dried cauliflower crisps in search of something edible.  The poptart box is empty on the counter (Bernard didn’t even see him take that), the chips are gone, and the stash of chocolate granola bars is devastated.  Bernard morosely considers his options and finally gets a bowl of cereal.

The milk is out, too.  Bernard doesn’t actually know if that was Bart or if it was empty this morning.  Fine!  He’s not above the classic college depression meal.  He pours dry cheerios in a cup and starts eating them morosely.

He feels weirdly not hungry.  He feels weirdly not here.  This morning he called Robin, dropped some super-secret bat code that he just got the loop before, and then he went and did a drop for an underground vigilante he’s never even heard of and was attacked by fucking Black Mask.   He saw Black Mask this morning.  

He saw Batman this morning.

Bernard rubs his arms.  Then he punches his bicep, just to feel something, does it once, twice, three times before his mind summons Tim’s face, Adult Tim, quiet and frowning, his eyes searching Bernard’s, because Bernard keeps hurting himself like a habit he can’t quite quit.

Fuck.  He wants to be better.  He was doing so well before this, he was.   He was going to the school’s shitty free counseling, he was using the dumb little stim toys Tim bought him, he was trying.

It’s all rolled backwards.  Bernard buries his face in his hands, feels the memory of pain from fighting the mafia goon, the memory of his throat from that first fight, then his head, his ankle, his chest, his back as he was thrown from the second story balcony and cracked against the floor like cheap pottery.

He likes pain.  He likes pain like he likes cigarettes and alcohol, something soothing and pleasant that takes the razor edge off, something that finally makes his brain shut up.  It feels like addiction, a need like a constant, mild hunger, a biological necessity like food or water.

He had been doing so good.

He sits back down on the couch in the living room, slams the mug full of cereal onto the coffee table.  Fuck this.  If Bart doesn’t come back with a solution Bernard’s gonna smash his head on a rock.

Luckily, Bart shimmers back into existence just as he finishes stuffing the last of the cheerios into his mouth.  The relief in Bernard’s chest just from seeing him return almost hurts.

Bart doesn’t seem happy, though.  His mouth is pressed into a thin line, his impish little face otherwise carefully neutral.  Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Fuck,” Bernard says, out loud.  “Is it that bad?”

Bart, to his credit, drops any pretense and grimaces.

“Yeah,” he says, and flops down on the couch.  “It’s pretty bad.”

Bernard’s chest has been scooped out, and in the hollow of his chest the memory of Darla burns like living fire.  No, no, no, he doesn’t want to do this again, doesn’t want to be faced down with Darla’s death like a guillotine.  He stares Bart down.

“So time is usually like a…” Bart trails off, wrinkling his nose.  “Ugh, I hate this metaphor.  Like a thread.  And space is like- cloth.  And usually time can weave in and out of space, no problem.

“But you- whatever happened to you- it made, like, a knot in the thread.  And time keeps trying to pull forward through space, through the cloth, but it keeps getting stuck.”

Bernard waits for the explanation to make sense.  But Bart is just looking at him helplessly, making a vaguely questioning gesture with his hand, like he’s asking if Bernard gets it.

“So…” Bernard tries and fails to wrap his head around what Bart is talking about.  “So time’s tangled?”

“Yeah.”

“Around me?”

Bart chews his lip.  “Yeah.”

Okay.  Cool.  Bernard thumbs the bottom of his chin, trying to piece together what that means exactly without getting caught up on how he’s apparently tangling all of time and space, holy shit, what the fuck?

Bart is watching him, his mouth pressed together.  Like Bernard is unpredictable, like Bernard could snap or explode or burst into tears. 

“... how do we untangle it?” Bernard asks.

Bart’s eyes slide away.  “Well, we can’t.”  Bernard’s heart just about drops out of his stomach and plummets into the floor, but Bart continues, “I mean, sort of.  It’s like- we can’t unknot the string, y’know?”

Bernard doesn’t know.  “Sure?”

“But we can pull the knot tight enough so it shrinks,” Bart continues, like anything he’s saying makes any sense.  “Like, you know how, if you pull a knot tight enough, you can kind of pull it through the cloth?”

Bernard has never sewn in his life.  “Su-ure?”

“So you just have to- you have to get close enough to how the timeline thinks it's supposed to be so it can pull through and keep going.”

Bernard sees the conclusion oncoming like a speeding car, something that should be horrifying, but just feels dreamily unstoppable, a sullen dread too big for his body to process all at once, swimmy denial already lapping at the back of his mouth.

Bart doesn’t explain it further, just watches him.  It reminds him of the way Tim looks at him sometimes, face neutral, eyes intense and assessing.  Like Bernard is a puzzle to be solved.  On his bad brain days, it feels like Tim watches him like he’s a rabid animal.  Today’s a bad brain day.  This entire sequence of loops has been bad brain days, or the same bad brain day on repeat, if he wanted to get technical.

“What,” he says, the word thick in his mouth.  He clears his throat and tries again.  “What.  Does the timeline think.  It is supposed to be?”

The neutrality on Bart’s face breaks.  He’s clearly too expressive a person to keep a stony facade up for long, and the sympathy underneath could not have been worse if it had been pity.

“No,” Bernard says, and then louder, “No!”

Bart doesn’t say anything, and that’s worse, somehow, and Bernard realizes that he’s shouting but can’t lower his voice.

“You’re wrong, Darla’s already died! It can’t be that!  She’s died every time! No matter what I do! Is that not good enough?   Does it-” his voice breaks.  “Does it have to be exactly like last time, does she have to die at the exact right second in the exact right place, do I have to fucking- live through a hundred loops until I get every fucking detail right?”

Bart is watching him, infuriatingly calm, the precursor to telling him to breathe, to slow down, to not panic.  “Hey, man.”

“Fuck you,” Bernard spits, and feels ravenously triumphant when a tiny crinkle appears between Bart’s eyebrows.  “Fuck you, I’m not doing this! I can’t fucking do this!”

“Hey-” Bart is standing, now, arms outstretched but hands empty and open, like he’s getting ready to catch Bernard if he falls over.  The worry seems more pronounced.

“Why isn’t it good enough?” Bernard shrieked.  “I held her while she died! I held her again! Why isn’t that good enough?”

Bart’s mouth is moving, and he’s saying something, gentle but firm, trying to catch Bernard’s eyes, and Bernard is wheezing and his throat is raw, and his heart is jackrabbiting in his chest and he can’t get enough air to spit out everything he needs to scream.  He can’t watch Darla die again, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t, he can’t go back to that nurse’s office, he can’t watch Tim leave again, wild eyed and steady in his abandonment, he can’t hold Darla’s hand until it cools, he can’t do this again.

The walls are breathing.  His face is too hot, he is dripping sweat, and there are gray spots in his vision, and-

Bernard! Someone is saying, distantly.  It has to be Bart.  Except no, it’s not, Bernard doesn’t know Bart yet.  Look at me!

Bernard’s vision swims.  He can’t focus on anything.  He can’t do this, he can’t-

---

“Bernard!”

Bernard jerks his head around, away from the screaming, away from the flood of students.  The thundercrack of gunfire pounds at his ears like a living thing, his heart in his throat.

Tim is holding Darla upright.  She is gray, gray, gray, her eyes rolling in her head, her shirt and jeans dark with blood.  

“Bernard!” Tim snaps, and Bernard’s head jerks away from Darla.  “Help me!”

Bernard is already moving towards them, his hands coming up, and Darla is sticky, and tacky, and cold, and he flinches away from her, nearly drops her.  Tim grunts, and Bernard surges forward, wraps his arm around Darla’s ribcage, and she is trembling and sticky and there’s blood on his jacket.

He’s numb with terror.  His mouth is bone dry, and somehow the sweat is pooling in his hairline, dripping into his eyes, and it stings but it doesn’t really hurt.

“Help carry her!” Tim all but shouts, impatient, and Bernard realizes he’s just holding her listlessly.  He jumps, helps prop her up, all deadweight and bloated corpse, and she moans as they jostle her, carrying her down the hallway.

Blink. The hallway changes, lined with lockers.  Blink.  The hallway is the pale, unmarked passage to the administration offices.  Blink.

Tim drops Darla and Bernard nearly goes to the floor, just barely manages to keep her and him upright.  The floor beneath them is tile, white with red splotches.  Blood drips off the hem of Darla’s pants and the splotches get bigger.

“... on the cot!” Tim is saying.  Bernard stares at the blood.  “Bernard!”

Bernard jerks.  “What?”

Tim is already shouldering him aside, taking Darla.  For about half a second Bernard feels the sickly embarrassment of not being good enough, of being the two-bit joke who can’t actually do anything, and then the obscenity of that thought drops on his head like concrete.  Tim isn’t shoving Bernard aside because Bernard is useless, he’s shoving Bernard aside because Darla is dying.

Darla is dying.

Bernard stares at her graying face, her eyes rolled up into her head, her chin flecked with pink spittle.  Her black lipstick is smeared so her mouth is a blackened pit, like the dying goth teenager in a metal music video, like the monster from a horror film.

“Bernard!”

Tim is holding his shoulders, shoving him down.  Bernard goes sprawling into the nurse’s rolling chair, moved towards Darla, and his heart lurches like he’s being shoved towards a monster.  He is being shoved towards a monster.  The monster is Darla, dying.

Tim grabs Bernard’s hand and shoves it tight against Darla’s abdomen.  It squelches, bloody and swelteringly hot.  Distantly, Bernard thinks about handling raw pork chops, and how they’re always cold because they just came out of the freezer, and this is different, this is blazingly warm.

“Keep pressure on the wound,” Tim says.  He is across the room from Bernard and Darla, picking something up.  “I’m going out.”

Faintly, Bernard feels alarmed.  “I- where?”

Tim turns.  In the shadow of the half open door he is just a dark, skinny silhouette, the overhead light catching in his eyes and reflecting an alien, frozen glimmer.  He is wild-eyed, a dark smudge across his cheek.  

He is holding a bat.

“Out,” Tim says.

The door is closed.  Tim is gone.  Bernard stares at the empty space, uncomprehending, Darla’s blood hot and spurting against his fingers, trying to get out.  Why did Tim have a bat?  What is he going to do with a bat?  He’s going to get shot and he’ll be gray and dying, choking on nothing, his eyes popped out and blood spilling out.

Bernard lurches upright, accidentally pushing his hand further into the bloody, warm swamp.  Darla moans.

He stares at her stupidly.  She’s lost more of her color, edging out of gray and towards white.

He has to stay here.  He has to keep pressure on the wound.

He blinks, and he is sitting back down again.  His hand is sunk deep into Darla’s side. His palm is soaked, and his long shirt sleeve is itchy against the inside of his wrist.  It is because it is wet.  He is thinking, idly, of dykes in the Netherlands, and some inscrutable fun fact he read somewhere, of how a tiny hole in the muddy barrier has to be filled immediately, or the water pressure will rapidly expand it and collapse the entire wall.

There is a clock mounted on the wall.  Blink.  The hands shift.  Blink.  The hands shift again.

There is a crack beneath the clock.  It splits the white plaster painted thinly over the brickwork, a thin, ponderous, dark line.  It looks like a lightning strike, or maybe a jagged river.  It looks like a crack in the wall of a public school, illuminated by humming, white lights, old and never repaired, just like the “temporary” buildings that have been there for decades, just like the broken sound system in the theater, just like the ancient computers in the library, the broken plastic chairs, the foul, rotting cafeteria, all part of the classic public high experience, right down to the shooting.

He shifts, and beneath his hand, Darla groans low in her throat, drags his gaze towards her.

Her pallid face is strained, her mouth drawn down, her eyebrows high.  Her eyes flicker beneath her closed eyelids, unseeing.  It occurs to Bernard that she’s scared.

He used to think that she was never scared.  She was too bright with anger, too quick to snap insults and scathing remarks.  It has only been recently that he’s realized how much that rage covers her up, how she uses it as a shield to hide how afraid she is.

Now, there is no anger in her expression.  Just pain, and terror.  She looks so fucking scared.

A dull ache pulses in Bernard’s stomach.  She shouldn’t feel alone.  He takes her hand with his free one, laces their fingers together.  Darla’s hand twitches in his, clenches his fingers, weak, desperate.

He stares at the crack on the wall.  The sounds fade to background noise, the clock ticking, Darla’s breath rattles in her ribcage, his own impossibly loud pulse.  His mind quiets until it is pleasantly empty.

Blink.

The clockhand moves.  A sharp pain blossoms across Bernard’s face, unexpected, and he doesn’t quite know why it is there.  It doesn’t fit there.  There is no pain, there is just the crack in the wall, and the ticking of the clock, and Darla’s slowing breath.

Blink.

Hey man.  Hey, hey, you gotta come back.

Blink.

Come on.  Darla’s breath is quieter, almost whispery, now, and that’s not right.  He hadn’t noticed that before.  It had just been Darla, whimpering, and then Darla, silent, with no inbetween.  He hadn’t even noticed her die last time.

Bernard frowns down at Darla’s empty corpse.  She turns her head toward him, her eyes open and blue, which isn’t right either.  Darla’s eyes are brown.

Come on, man, she says from the cot.  Come back.

“What?” Bernard croaks.

You’re in your house, with me.  You’re safe here.  Come back.

“Bart?” Bernard says.  He doesn’t know anyone named Bart.

Yeah, it’s me.  You with me?

Blink.

---

“That’s it. Big, deep breaths.  Come on.”

Bernard is lying down.  He’s cold.  More than that, he’s wet, his whole face and neck damp and sticky, itchy where it is pressed against the carpet.  His shirt is damp against his back and under his collar.  His arm is going to sleep, pinned under his ribs as he lies on his side, off the couch, one leg kicked out to balance him.

He’s in the living room.  He is in his parents’ living room.  Where’s Darla? He has to keep pressure on her side, on her bloody torso, where’s Darla?

“Hey, hey, it’s okay.  You’re safe,” someone is saying.  They’re kneeling next to him, to the side so he isn’t trapped against the couch, not touching him.  “It’s safe.  Do you know where you are?”

“D’rla,” Bernard slurs, but the world is slowly sliding into place; Darla, Tim, his parent’s house, Robin, the timeloop, Bart.  “Fuck.”

“Well, your parents’ house, but fuck works too.”

Bart’s gently joking tone drags against Bernard’s nerves like sandpaper.  He snarls, wordlessly, and buries his face into his hands, tries to shove back the rage that has suddenly boiled into existence beneath his ribs.  He imagines punching Bart right in his stupid, teenage face.  No, no, Bart is a child.  A superhero, yeah, but a child.  Bernard’s not punching a kid, he’s not his dad.

He digs his fingernails into his hipbone, just to feel the ragged pain.  A moment later he thinks of his Tim, and yanks the hand away, because he can’t even have this.  Thanks, Tim.  He feels guilty for thinking that a moment later, and this pulls at the rage, turns it more intense but less directed, a burning ball of poison with no outlet.  Fuck this.  Fuck- fuck everything, why does he have to deal with this? Why did the universe bring him back to the worst day of his entire fucking life?  And he doesn’t even get to fix it.

Bernard’s breath hitches.  He doesn’t get to fix it.

“Hey, man,” Bart says, softly.  “Don’t fall away again.”

“I’m-” Bernard’s voice cracks. “I’m not.  I’m-”

His heart is breaking, and the rage is pouring into it, and it’s just a fucking mess, and Bernard laughs, miserable and desperate and there has to be a way to save Darla.  There has to be, it can’t- it can’t just be this.  He can’t- he can’t go to school and watch Darla die, again, he can’t fucking do it.

Darla’s gray corpse floats up in memory and Bernard chokes, because she’d stayed gray, even after she was resurrected.  She didn’t become vampire white, thank fuck, but she hadn’t ever looked healthy again, just- gray, and wrinkled around the edges like her skin was rotting, like her body was dead but a cold, red light had slid inside and kept her going.

“I don’t-” spittle frothes in the corners of his mouth, and he wants to wipe it away but can’t pull his fingers from his hair, knuckles digging into his scalp.  He laughs, high and crackling, and he senses more than sees Bart tensing beside him and can’t bring himself to care.  “I don’t know why I’m even trying! It’s not like she stayed down!”

“Wait, what?”

“She came back!” Bernard shrieks.  “She came back fucked up and then she just- she just fucking left me again! I-” he laughs, shrill and horrible, “I’m spending all this fucking time trying to save her and it’s not even about her! She’s fine! She’s a fucking superhero, she doesn’t need me!”

“Like-” Bart’s forehead is wrinkled, comically bewildered. “Like, the Darla inyour timeline?”

“Yes! I mean, no, I mean both! She- she comes back in like- three months, maybe, and kidnaps Tim and-”

“Heywhat-”

“Just fucks off again like it doesn’t change anything, she- she only came to see me to fucking ask about Tim, can you believe that? We were friends! She was one of my best friends, and she died and came back and suddenly I’m not worth shit!”

“Hold on, roll back.” Bart has both his hands out in front of his face like he’s trying to frame the enormity of what Bernard is saying.  His eyes are narrowed.  “Why’d she kidnap Tim?”

“I don’t know!” Bernard explodes.

Except he has a suspicion.  Darla had a crush on Tim in high school, and that left Bernard feeling strangely bitter, even long after he stopped feeling anything for Darla.  He knows now that he was jealous, but he didn’t know then, just knew that sometimes the way Darla talked about Tim or looked at him made his hackles rise.  It had never gone anywhere.  Bernard faintly suspects that Darla had asked Tim out, tried to call bullshit on his imaginary girlfriend Stephanie.  Except Stephanie was real, and Tim wasn’t interested, and Darla spent a week being more moody and morose than usual and Tim spent the same time acting awkward.  They’d been fine after a week, figuring themselves out, but the incident had stuck in Bernard’s head.

And then Darla came back from the dead, and she wanted only one thing, with terrible, red-eyed purpose.  Bernard swallows, mouth dry.

“She…” he trails off, struggling to figure out how to voice this, scrabbling to defend her, scrabbling to figure out if she deserves any defense. “She came back- she came back wrong.  Fucked up.  She liked Tim in high school.”

Bart is deadly quiet across from him. Bernard whips his hands away from his face, meets Bart’s eerily blank expression.

“Not this Darla,” he stresses, almost spitting the words. “This Darla wouldn’t.  She wouldn’t.”

Bart breaks first, looking away.  Bernard’s heart feels like it’s going to slam out of his throat, but he feels like he’s won something anyway, relief making him almost sick to his stomach.

“I’m sorry, man,” Bart says. His voice is strangely flat. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”

“I shouldn’t have!” Bernard repeats, relieved, and the words keep falling from his mouth, a waterfall.  “I shouldn’t have, and I can’t- I can’t do that again, and I-” he trails off with a miserable, coughing laugh.  “I’m not even- I’m not even doing it for her.  How fucked up is that? Of course she shouldn’t have to die and then coming back, she shouldn’t have to deal with that, and it- a part of her still died, and she shouldn’t have to lose that but that’s- that’s not even why I’m doing it.  I’m doing because I’m fucking selfish, I can’t get-”

His voice breaks, and he rubs his face.

“I don’t want to get left behind, again,” he says, his voice sore.

Bart is quiet for a minute.  Then he gets up, and sits down next to Bernard, leaning into him.  His weight is warm and heavy and for a minute too much, making Bernard’s hair stand on end, and then suddenly it’s not enough, and he turns and buries his face into Bart’s hair, crying.

Bart melts into the contact and throws his arms around Bernard.  It occurs to him that Bart’s a kid.  A superhero, yeah, but a kid, a kid, just a baby.

They stay like that for a while.

---

After a while, Bart starts to gently vibrate in place, buzzing against Bernard’s skin.  It rouses Bernard from his wallowing half-stupor, because it’s gonna make his whole side fall asleep, and that sounds like hell.

“Okay, okay,” he mutters, leaning away from Bart.  Luckily he takes the hint and darts up and off the couch, casually bouncing on his toes, giving Bernard some space.

Fuck.  The last thing Bernard wants is space.  No, the last thing he wants is to be alone, and that’s not the same thing as space.  He wants Bart to be here.  He wants Bart to talk.  He doesn’t want to think about the horrible, bloody future Bart laid at his feet, the miserable flashback he has to live through again in real time, in hypersaturated color and sound.

Darla doesn’t deserve to die again.  But she also doesn’t deserve to be- stuck like this, an endless loop of deaths she doesn’t remember.  It’s like a fucked up philosophical question: does the pain matter if you won’t remember it?

It probably matters to Darla.

Bernard scrubs at his face and takes a deep breath.

“I need another way,” he says, plainly.

Bart gives him a sympathetic look.  Bernard, with incredible self control, does not snap.

“I’m serious,” he bites out.  “I’m not doing this.  Help me.”

Bart must see something on his face, because his sympathetic look becomes a grimace.  He chews the inside of his lip.  “It doesn’t work like that,” he says, and Bernard snorts, disgusted, turning his head away.  “I’m serious, man, alternating timelines is hard.  Trust me.”

“You managed!” Bernard points out, throwing up his hands. “You said you’re from forty years in the future, but you’re back here, and you’re not stuck in a timeloop-” it occurs to him that Bart might be stuck in a timeloop.  “Are you?”

“I’m special circumstances,” Bart says, infuriatingly, but before Bernard can lunge at him, “Also, I paid for it! Eternity in the Speedforce is notajoke, dude-”

“And I’m not paying for it?” Bernard snaps.

Bart grimaces, holding his hands up. “Okayokayokay. Poor choice ofwords.  But our situations are different.  I speedran into the past, I slipped in, y’know? But time’s caught on you.”

Something scratches at the back of Bernard’s head, a strangely jagged thought, chilling calm.

“What if I’m not there?” comes out of his mouth.

Bart’s quick on the uptake.  He doesn’t need Bernard to ask him what he means.  He hesitates for a fraction of a second, and that’s all Bernard needs.

“Holy shit,” he says, blankly.

“Waitwaitwait,” Bart says, moving forward, arms held out like he could stop Bernard from climbing to the roof and jumping face first into concrete.  “Okay, hold on, letsjust- lets think about this foraminute.”

There’s not much to think about.  Here’s the solution, glorious in its terrible savagery, and also, like, really super predictable.  Like cinematically predictable.  He should have seen this coming.

“I die, and time unsnags,” he says, in what he thinks is a perfectly reasonable tone.

“We don’t know that,” Bart snaps, really snaps, suddenly and jarringly out of character for the spaztic front he puts on.  He scowls, rubs his mouth, manages to relax his face into something less angry and more concerned, sitting next to Bernard.  His hands hover like he’s ready to restrain Bernard if he makes a move, but he lowers them into his lap instead.  “And it seemslike, y’know, areallybig leap, like, a reallybigrisk to takeon a maybe.”

“But you suspect it’ll unsnag,” Bernard says, almost giddy.  He feels miles and miles away from himself, like he’s watching his body from a distance.  “And if- if the changes I made remain- then I could time it so I save Darla, and then die, and time keeps going-”

“Okay, stop,” Bart says.  

He deliberately slows his voice as he says it, hands held out, and Bernard wants to gloss over his insistence but there’s something sharp and jagged under the firm smoothness of his voice.  It catches on Bernard’s eardrums, and he finds his mouth closing.

“Whatif-” Bart takes a breath and says, slower, “I think you should ask Darla what she thinks about this.”

Oh, absolutely not.  Bart is not poking this plan with fucking logic.  Bernard huffs a bitter laugh, tries to redirect with a joke.  “What, what she thinks of timeloops?”

“What she thinks of you dying for her.”

Okay.  So maybe he is.  Bernard takes a breath, and then another, faster, and then catches the next before it can spill over into hyperventilation, strangles it into obedience, until he is breathing slow and even.  How can Bart ask that?  How can Bart sit there, eyebrows furrowed with concern, and gently poke gaping holes in the solution, in Bernard’s chance to save Darla?

He needs a counterargument.

“... she would hate it,” Bernard crosses his arms, rubs his bicep, and cuts right over Bart’s smug ‘see I told you’ look.  “Right up to the point where the bullet shreds her guts.”

“Dude.”

“I’ve seen-” Bernard’s voice, horribly, incredibly annoyingly, hitches in the middle of the sentence.  He forges on anyway.  “I’ve seen her, okay?  I’ve watched her- go.  She was fucking terrified.”

Bart is quiet.  He sits down beside Bernard, again, and for a second Bernard thinks he’s winning the argument, but he looks at Bart’s face and gets sucker punched with his quiet sympathetic understanding.

Bart’s a superhero.  How many people has he seen die?  How many does he blame himself for?

“It’s- I’m not like you!” Bernard barks, panicked.  “I can’t watch people die like that, I can’t just watch- I can’t pick myself, okay? I’m not a superhero, I’m not important!”

He realizes distantly that he might be crying, for the nth time this loop.  A headache is starting to creep into his temples from the dehydration.

“You are important,” Bart says, with the same gentle tone as Robin did, the calm, factual assurance that he meant something, but under it there’s something frustrated, or maybe stressed.

“Okay, but not like s uperhero important.”

“Dude, I risk my life for not-supers all the time.”  Bart’s voice stumbles a little in the middle, a crack like a kid going through puberty.  Bart is a kid going through puberty. “You gonna tell me that’s, what, pointless?  That I shouldn’t risk my neck for strangers literally every day just ‘cause I got hyper zoomies and they don’t? What do you think ourjobs are?”

Bernard’s so mad he skips right over ‘hyper zoomies.’  “You’ve got a net gain, you save hundreds of people every day! I’m just one person!”

“So’s Darla.”

Bernard doesn’t punch him.  His fist balls up until his nails dig into his palm, almost enough to draw blood, but he doesn’t punch Bart.  Bart’s a child.  Bart implied Darla was ‘just one person,’ and yeah, he said it because that’s what Bernard called himself, he’s trying to make a point, but the boiling fury bites deep into his belly.  Darla isn’t just anything, she’s so much more than that, and Bernard’s not.

He knows that he is.  He knows he’s important, he knows he’s loved.  He knows.   It’s just- he feels like he’s standing at the edge of a long fall.  If he does this, he won’t have his Tim, anymore, and not just because Bernard will be dead.  His actions will spiral out in the future and completely shift the course of Tim’s and Darla’s lives; Future Tim will never have dated him, Future Tim will never have taken him out to bougie restaurants and cheap arcades and the beach, shoving each other into the ocean, laughing, Tim will never have pressed his soft mouth to his and made a disgusted face at his morning breath, Tim will never laugh at Bernard’s jokes again, Tim will never smile the small, secretive smile he shows just to Bernard.

And Darla will never have to die.

Bernard unfurls his fist again, burying his face into his hands.  Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

“It’s not-” his voice cracks. “I don’t want to die, Bart, I just- I’d rather die than have to live that day again.”

Bart’s quiet for a long time.  Bernard finds that he doesn’t mind.  Behind his hands, the world is dark and warm, and he can pretend that he’s okay, for a minute, just a minute.

“I think-” Bart’s voice splinters.  He clears his throat.  “I think I’m, like, vastly underqualified for this.”

A shriek of laughter tears its way out of Bernard’s chest, caught offguard by normal Bart’s response is.  Guilt falls hard on its heels, because holy shit Bart is a kid.  Bart is a baby.

“I’m sorry, man,” Bernard giggles, why can’t he fucking stop laughing, but Bart shakes his head before he can continue, hands up.

“Nono! No, I’m- I’m gladI’m here, yknow?? Ijustthink-” Bart pauses, biting his lip.  “I thinkI’m nothelping, exactly.”

Ah, fuck, he’s making a superhero feel bad. He bites his fist until he thinks the hysteria won’t come out if he opens his mouth.  “Bart, you- you’re fine.”

“Yeah, but you aren’t.” Bart kicks his feet, thinking, his brow furrowed.  Bernard tries to think of a non-crazy way to respond to that, but its hard.  Giddy exhaustion is lapping at his brain, making it hard to focus on anything but the bright, ruthless glow of his solution.

Bart nods like he’s thought of something.  “What about a party?”

A what?  “A what?” 

“I’ll get Robin,” Bart says, gathering steam, like anything he’s saying is making any sense, “And- and you get- Tim and Darla- and we’ll talk this through, as like, as a team.”

What the fuck? Bernard is briefly touched by the idea that Bart would consider him part of a team, like a superhero team, but its quickly overwhelmed by Bernard’s desire to not talk about this to Tim, ever.  “Um, no??”

“Dude-”

“They’ll all just tell me- literally what you just told me, and-” Bernard’s voice cracks.  “Darla’s dead by now, anyways, I have to wait for the next loop.”

That stalls Bart, but not for long.  “What about just Tim, then?”

What is this? Why won’t he drop it, this is insane?  Why would he want to pull in two more civilians?  Why Tim?  Darla, at least, is the centerpiece to this entire mess, but Tim has nothing to do with anything.

“He’s- Darla just died ,” Bernard says.  “Tim’s probably fucked up right now, he just- he doesn’t deserve this.”

Except… Tim hadn’t been fucked up after Darla’s death.  Oh, he had been shut down and strange, everything held down under iron control, but he hadn’t dissolved into mourning or even lethargy.  Instead, he had been all cold, ruthless action, and walked right out of Bernard’s life on a quest he would not elaborate on, and… and Bernard’s still mad about that, to be honest.

He still doesn’t want to talk to Tim about this, though.  He’d rather die.

Bart’s face is pinched, but his eyes are large and suspiciously wet.  Bernard swallows.

“I- I really think you should talk to Tim,” Bart says.

It’s so weird that it scratches at Bernard’s skull, starts to wiggle in his ears.  Why Tim specifically?

Bart must read his hesitation, because he lights up, hopeful, kicking his feet faster, and… Bernard could use this.  He can go back, if only he could fall asleep, and then Bart wouldn’t remember and wouldn’t be able to stop him, and he could- he could have space to- to think about what he wants to do.  He doesn’t think he could fall asleep with Bart right there, trying to keep him awake, but- but maybe if Bart left- maybe he could.

“Tim doesn’t-” his breath hitches, and he lets it, because it helps sell the lie.  “I don’t want to involve him.  He doesn’t deserve that.  But- Robin.”

Bart beams, all glossy, earnest hope, and Bernard feels like a piece of shit.

“We could- get Robin,” Bernard says, fumbling.  “I think, um.  I think she’s hiding from Batman right now, though.”

“Notaproblem!!!” Bart spews, excited, already on his feet and jittering.  “It’lltakeus alittlewhile toavoidBigBats butI’llbebacksoon! Don’tdie!”

“Uh-” Bernard says, and Bart is gone.  

He stares at the empty space Bart occupied a second ago, and the guilt gnaws at his chest, but mostly he’s just impressed with himself at how well that worked.  He didn’t expect it to.

But it worked.  He’s bought himself some time.  Not a lot, certainly, with Bart on the loose, but maybe enough.  He just has to have enough to roll the wheel back, to undo everything Bart learned, to unspin Darla’s death like rewinding an old VCR.  He just has to- he just needs to fall asleep.  That’s all.

He lays down on the couch.  Wonders how the hell he’s going to fall asleep, his heart thundering in his chest.

Fuck this, he thinks, and gets up.

He takes the stairs two at a time to his room.  The window is still cracked open, the faint impression on his covers where Robin had laid down and laughed, an eon ago.

He lays down on his bed.  After a minute, he picks his phone up off the nightstand.  His faint reflection on the screen is drawn, dark circles under his bloodshot eyes, a bruise forming over one temple.  Fuck, this day’s been so long, and it’s only- it’s still early.  Fairly early.  He turns the phone on and is greeted by his clock reading 1:07, eight missed calls, and twenty-seven text notifications.

Bernard stares at that, uncomprehending.  Opens his text messages.

A few are from Darla, asking if he’s skipping school.  One is the city-wide alert of a gunfight breaking out.  Three are from his mother, saying that they’re on lockdown and can’t reach home and is he alright and please pick up the phone.  One is from his father, with much the same message.

Nineteen texts are from Tim.  Bernard stares.  Scrolls through them, slowly.  The first few are asking the same thing as Darla, if he’s skipping, if he’s sick, gentle teasing that he’s going to miss pizza day at the cafeteria.

The last five catch in Bernard’s brain like something catching fire.

[Sent 12:35 P. M.]: Something’s happening, stay at home

[Sent 12:41 P. M.]: Are you okay? Please text me

[Sent 12:48 P. M.]: Berns

[Sent 12:55 P. M.]: berns this isn’t fucking funny, please pick up the phone

[Sent 1:02 P. M.]: Bernard, please.

The last one was only five minutes ago.  Bernard thinks of Tim, panicking, not knowing where he is, and his hands swipe the call button automatically, his heart in his throat, his eyes burning.

The phone rings.  Tim doesn’t pick up.

Bernard stares at the ceiling.  He imagines Tim with the baseball bat in his hand.  He imagines Tim, hand pressed into Darla’s torso as she bled out, because Bernard wasn’t there to keep the pressure on.  He imagines Tim watching Darla die, not knowing where Bernard was; he imagines Tim, wild-eyed when he had both friends accounted for, and tries to imagine what Tim would do if he didn’t know if Bernard was alive or dead.

He imagines him leaving, bat in hand, and never coming back.

Bernard cries, softly, as the recorded voicemail comes online, asking him to leave a message after the click.  What can he say?  What apology could possibly come close enough to covering what Bernard’s fuck-ups, what Bernard is thinking of doing?

“I’m sorry,” he says, into the phone, even though he’ll roll back time before Tim ever hears it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  I’ll do better next time.”

The adrenaline is wearing off.  He feels dizzy and faintly nauseous and exhausted.

He closes his eyes.  He lets the phone keep running next to him, listening to his breathing, in case Tim somehow picks up before he falls asleep, so Tim can hear the evidence of his life, can listen to Bernard’s breathing and know he hasn’t lost him, too.  Not yet.

Just as he drifts, he thinks, vaguely, that he hears a click, and a Tim’s tinny voice, saying his name, relieved.  But it could be his imagination.  

Chapter Text

Bernard wakes up on his shitty twin mattress with a mouthful of spit, staring up at his popcorn ceiling.

He screams.  After about ten seconds footsteps thunder up the stairs and his door slams open.

“What? What’s wrong?” his mom shouts, wild-eyed.  Her hand is clenched around his dad’s old college football trophy like a bat.  

Bernard stares at her, nonplussed.  He knew she would be in the house, he’s seen her every loop, but somehow he didn’t expect her to bust into his room, scared by his yelling, with his dad’s prized trophy in hand because it was the only thing she could grab on short notice.  He was so fucking anal about that trophy, so Mom was too, and it’s jarring to see it held like a bat, ready to brain some unknown assailant.

Irrationally, he’s annoyed.  Why couldn’t she just not care, all? Why does she have to do this?  Every time he thinks he might have come to terms with the fact that his parents don’t care about him, he finds out that they do care about him.  Sometimes he wonders if he made everything up, if he really is overdramatic.  Then he remembers, like, literally everything about them.

“Nothing,” he says, too bewildered by her panic to find a good excuse.  Also the dumb animal rage biting deep into his belly.

His mom stares at him.  Her fear slowly ebbs away, replaced by fury.  “What the fuck, Bernard?”

Bernard shrugs, just to piss her off.  It occurs to him that he probably inherited her anger issues, which is infuriating.  Not even his anger is his own.

“I thought you were dying!” she snaps, lowering the trophy.  “You can’t do that!”

“Okay, I can though,” Bernard says.

“Bernard Llowell Dowd,” she scowls, heaves an exasperated sigh, gesturing with the trophy. “God, now there’s fingerprints on this thing.  Your father’s going to go apeshit.”

“Hey, I didn’t ask you to touch it.”

“Now see this,” his mom snaps, gesturing at him.  “This is why your father never wanted children.  Can you try to be grateful for once in your life?”

She marches off, slamming the door.  Bernard’s chest is on fire.

“For what?” he screams after her, but she’s marching down the stairs, her footsteps like thunder, and doesn’t care to reply.  Fuck.  Fuck.