Tim Drake

"They're loans, Dad," Tim repeated. "Bruce isn't giving me anything."

"I know that," his father replied. "I just wish we could afford to send you someplace more prestigious. I know you could have gotten in anywhere you wanted to."

"And Gotham University is where I want to go," Tim insisted. Their conversation had the comfortable feel of points covered before. "They have some of the best criminology and abnormal psychology programs in the country."

"And you think you'll learn a lot?" Jack asked. "I thought you learned enough of that before." Before you quit being Robin was the thought neither of them expressed. It had stopped being solely Jack's decision a while ago, but he didn't quite believe it.

"I did," Tim said. "But I can't exactly tell anybody where I learned it. And if I get a degree from GU they'll listen to me." "They" was unspecified. Even Tim didn't know who "they" were. "Besides, Bernard's going to GU too."

***

Tim enjoyed college and took to it like a fish to water. Every semester, he had to coax his academic advisor into letting him "overload" his schedule with "killer" criminology and psychology courses, a feat made much easier by the fact that he sailed through them with straight As. On the side (or perhaps most prominently, since he didn't spend much time studying), he hung out with Bernard and tutored him. It wasn't long before they began dating.

They graduated at the same time, Bernard with a bachelor's degree in English and Tim with a doctorate in criminal justice, and they moved in together. Tim got used to Bernard's snoring, and Bernard, in turn, got used to the nightmares that made Tim attack anybody who touched him while he was having them. Tim never talked about them, but after he woke from one of them he clutched Bernard like a dying man, so hard that his hands left bruises. He never talked about his scars either.

Tim joined the university faculty and wrote a couple of books which quickly became the defining texts in criminology. Bernard wrestled with his novel and worked in an office. "They really were right about an English degree not being good for anything!" he would joke, and Tim would smirk back at him.

Tim loved Bernard more than he could remember loving anybody, but secretly he was glad that Gotham didn't allow gay marriage. He didn't know if he could bear to be married to somebody that he had to lie to by omission, and many of the secrets weren't his to tell. And then one day Bernard proposed anyway, and he froze. He wanted it so badly, but he couldn't.

"I- I can't," he said.

"Are you secretly married already?" Bernard asked mockingly. "Darling, I don't care about your secrets, as long as they're about the past."

They got married in the spring, and Bernard never asked about the wedding guests he didn't know, even though some of them looked vaguely familiar.