Bernard Dowd - Blog Posts
“What do you want?” Barbara asks, voice crackling with static.
It’s a silly question. Tim wants crime rates to go down. Tim wants Gotham to be a safer city. Tim wants to be a part of making that happen.
“A code name that isn’t stupid.” he says instead.
Barbara sighs. It doesn’t sound like a sigh though. It just sounds like the static’s getting louder.
~
“Bernard Dowd, scholar of the ages.” Tim laughs, arm slung round Bernard's shoulder. “I thought you were meant to be the fun one?”
“I am.” Bernard groans, “as soon as these exams are done I’ll be back to the usual student life. Getting drunk, going on dates, Gotham won’t know what’s hit it.”
“Going on dates?” Tim asks jokingly, even as a well hidden part of him turns slightly panicked. “Any successes an old friend should be hearing about?”
“Not really.” Bernard shrugs, jostling Tim’s arm. “Just a couple of girls I was better off friends with.” He pauses, thinking, before continuing with his voice involuntarily going a little higher. “Couple of guys too.”
“Huh.” Tim suddenly becomes very aware of all the places where his arm is touching Bernard. He doesn’t move it. “Better luck next time.”
Huh.
~
Tim’s been avoiding Dick. He’s been awkward around him lately, Tim thinks that Barbara must have said something. He’s not stupid enough to have done something to send Dick spiralling without noticing it.
“What do you want?” Dick asks, curious, without warning.
Tim wants to ask if Barbara put him up to this but he knows it’s a genuine question. Dick isn’t manipulative like that, not with family.
What does Tim want? Isn’t it a little late for Dick go be asking that question? All the things that happened after Bruce’s death put a canyon of distance between them. It’s slowly been growing smaller but it hasn’t disappeared. Neither of them have had time enough to spend together for that to happen.
An awful, bitter part of Tim that hasn’t stopped screaming since Robin wasn’t his any more wonders if Dick would even be asking if Damian wasn’t out of town right now.
“For us to go train surfing.” Tim says. Petty. Just so Dick will say no and his anger can feel righteous instead of ill-deserved.
“Okay.” Dick says instead. Easy and confident. Himself.
“Oh.” Tim’s anger fizzles into non-existence. “Okay.”
The canyon grows a little smaller.
~
“We should go to a skatepark.” Bernard says, a little giggly from the beer in his hand.
There’s a matching beer in Tim’s hand although it’s still practically full. If there’s an emergency he’ll be of no use drunk. “What? Why?”
“Why not? You were so good in high school! And you had fun doing it.” Bernard’s tone turns a little less giggly. “You should do more things you find fun.”
Tim is surprised enough that the “Okay.” slips out of his lips unbidden.
So maybe the beer bottle is a little less full than he’d like to admit.
They borrow a board from one of Bernard's flatmates and catch a bus to a skate park Tim remembers using when he was younger. As they go Tim tries to remember why he stopped. He tries to remember when he stopped. He can’t recall the answer to either question and annoyance rises in his chest over it.
Then Bernard is saying something and it has Tim snorting with laughter and he forgets his irritation.
Once they arrive Bernard settles himself at the top of one of the ramps like it’s a throne. “Entertain me!” he calls, “Impress me with your wheel-board magic.
Tim manages a kick-flip on his first attempt and Bernard makes a loud noise of approval.
A lot of stuff comes back to Tim fairly quickly. Most of skateboarding had been muscle memory for him and that’s something that being a vigilante hadn’t exactly hindered. As things return to him he regains some faint memories of why he’d stopped. Nothing specific, just that feeling of not having enough time. Of thinking that going to the skatepark wasn’t a particularly useful way to spend his hours while there was still real work to be done.
Tim’s always been a vigilante first, but he thinks there must have been a point when that wasn’t the only thing he was. Well, when it wasn’t the only thing he was that mattered.
“Come on!” Bernard shouts, teeth flashing white against Gotham’s grey-black sky. “I was promised entertainment!”
Tim laughs. He seems to do that a lot around Bernard these days.
He starts moving on the skateboard, deciding to leave the existentialism for another day.
~
First Dick and now Bruce. Tim’s family has really been making a habit of being weird around him lately.
He would normally think that the Bruce was worried about him, that Dick had passed along some bullshit about his mental health and Bruce was practicing some silent vigil. The problem with that theory is that Tim’s been getting better recently, so there wouldn’t be much point. At least he thinks he’s been getting better. It’s difficult to tell sometimes.
Bruce has definitely been acting weird around him though, so maybe he isn’t getting better. Maybe Bruce spotted something Tim didn’t and he’s on the road to insanity.
“What do you want?” Bruce asks one day as they’re both working in the cave. Not Batman. Bruce.
It’s a far stupider question than it was when Barbara or Dick asked it. Bruce is the person who made Tim’s desires what they are. He’s the one who took Tim’s obsession and carved it into a goal.
“What?” Tim asks, loud and confused and maybe a little angry. “What do you mean ‘what do I want’? I want the mission! What else am I supposed to want?”
Bruce stays silent for a moment and Tim imagines him turning the words over in his head. “Nothing else?” Bruce asks. He sounds sad and it makes the anger drain from Tim’s body. “Just the mission?”
“I don’t need anything else.” Tim says hollowly.
Bruce just nods, thinking. It makes Tim want to scream even as satisfaction rises in his chest.
It’s always been a point of pride that he can to lie to Batman. He’s hardly going to change his mind about that now.
~
“People keep asking me what I want.” Tim says, sat on Bernard's bed. “I don’t like it.”
Bernard's turns away from the laptop on his desk so he can look at Tim. “You ever tell them the truth?”
Tim shrugs. He isn’t sure what else to do. “Ish?”
Bernard smiles. “Anyone ever tell you you’re impossible, Tim Drake?”
“Only everyone I’ve ever met.”
Bernard barks out a laugh before sobering up and looking at Tim with ill-disguised curiosity. “Do you want to tell me the truth about it? Or did you just want to say the thing out loud?”
“I’m not sure.” Tim admits, and he has to stop himself from acting taken aback by the fact he actually said that. Tim never says when he’s uncertain. There isn’t room for it. Bernard must know that too because he looks at Tim in surprise, then scoots his chair closer to the bed so that he and Tim are almost touching.
Bernard looks very cautious. “You know that’s okay, right?”
“I-“ Tim starts, because is it? Is uncertainty the kind of luxury he can afford? “I want to want things. But it feels like I’ve forgotten how.”
“You’ve had a rough couple of years.”
“How do you-“
Bernard smiles knowingly. “You’re not as hard to read as you think, Tim. Well you are. But it’s not difficult to tell that some bad things must have happened since I last saw you.”
“Yeah.” Tim says hoarsely, thinking back to the burn of his muscles as he dug up Kon’s grave, the stinging of desert sand in his eyes, the moment of confusion when he woke up in a league of assassins base unsure if he’d had to die to get there. “Yeah. Bad things happened.” He shakes himself a little, because those aren’t the thoughts he wants lingering. He focuses back on Bernard who’s closer than Tim had realised, worry creased between his eyes. “What about you?” Tim asks, trying to exert some measure of control over the conversation. “What do you want?”
“Thought we were talking about you?” Tim might have let it go with that if not for the note of nervousness in Bernard's voice and the red creeping up the back of his neck.
“We can talk about both of us.”
“It’s not important right now.”
Tim reaches out then. He takes Bernard's hand in his because Bernard makes him laugh and he looks so nervous and Tim wants to. Bernard looks down at their hands in surprise and Tim doesn’t actually feel worried. Just expectant that Bernard is going to squeeze their fingers together more securely. He does. “You sure?” Tim asks.
Bernard just looks at him. Mouth parted with shock. He seems to come back to himself though and his expression of surprise turns into something more confident. More familiar. “What if I wanted you?” he asks, hesitancy and confidence rolled into one voice.
“Give me some time to remember how to want things, and I think I’ll want that too.” Tim replies, just as unsure and utterly certain.
Bernard tangles their fingers together a little more firmly in response and Tim feels more hopeful than he has in a long time.
timbernkon halloween au
guys help i can't stop
i think my favorite thing about tim and bernard is just how in love tim is with bear. usually in civilian x hero relationships the civilian is always way more in love with the hero than vice versa. but with tim and bernard, tim is sooo fuckin gone for bear, it almost stops being cute and borders on lame. pathetic even.
one of those tiktok gotham university reporters approaching bernard on the way to one of his bio classes: thoughts on red robin?
bernard, mildly sleep deprived, and knowing full well what tim’s night life is like: smash [proceeds to walk away like nothing happened]
bernard is an intern at a search lab or something like that, and tim is just trying to steal cloning projects idk (watch bernard lose his internship)
A rose by any other name (dp x dc)
Bernard Dowd was freaking out. In large part because he had just discovered his name might not in fact be Bernard Dowd. Or at least, it hadn’t always been? This whole thing was very confusing, not too mention highly distressing.
It started like any day, really. He didn’t know how it had gone so wrong.
Oh and what was he going to do about Tim?
Tim, his boyfriend, who very much was Robin even if Bernard had been pretending he didn’t know about that. Though really, there were only so many times you could walk in your boyfriends appartement to find a domino mask hanging to dry before you put two and two together.
Oh my god, what was he going to tell him? He wasn’t Bernard anymore, was he? Or at least, not just Bernard. Not when half his mind was insisting his name was Danny and he had two sisters and no brothers and he had died and then lived long enough to die again and again and-
Without quite realizing it he had dialled Tim’s number. As the tone sounded, he came back to himself but by then, Tim had already answered.
“Bernard?” His boyfriend voice was hoarse like he’d just woke up and in the back of his mind, somewhere that wasn’t going in full panic mode, there was a bit of guilt over disrupting his boyfriends already terrible sleep schedule.
Bernard opened his mouth, ready to just explain everything to his boyfriend and then he took a quick breath and-
“Would you still love me if I wasn’t blond?” Bernard blurted out.
“What?” Tim mumbled. Then there was a slide of fabric as Bernard cursed himself in every language he knew how to curse. “Is this like the worm thing?”
“Uh,” Bernard faltered. “Um, sure?”
Tim sighed. “Yes, Bern, I would still love you if you weren’t blond.” He yawned, and then there was a bit of silence. “Was there anything else?” Tim’s voice finally said.
“No,” Bernard answered, wishing he could punch himself. “Nope, that- that was it.”
“Great,” his boyfriend mumbled. “I’m going back to bed." Then, "love you.”
“I love you too,” Bernard answered and the line cut.
Bernard slid down the wall until he was rolling himself into a ball, his hands in his hair as his internal screaming reached decibels never recorded before. What the fuck.
hal trying to sneak into bruce’s room late at night: 😬
bernard, sneaking out of tim’s room at the exact same time: 😬
You think you're strong? I always end up liking the most unnecessarily hated character/person.
And i WILL fight for them.
Finally I can share this! A mini comic made as part of a Timber fan anthology. Hope you guys like it!
don't have the time to go any further with this, take it as it is, amen <3
Welcome back, Bern!
Good morning!
It's technically not valentines yet but like, here have a valentines gift <3
Sleepover with two puny mortals that you're in love with (and everything can go right).
Lowkey based on a fanfic I was writing, but as usual I haven't the confidence to post it! Yeah~
Had this in the drafts for months,,,, figured I'd finish it up now so it's done. I like to kinda have some Finished art on the page hahahaha