Nightmares

Tim had a lot of nightmares. He suspected they all did; on the job they saw a lot of the kinds of things that, when seen even once, caused nightmares. But they never talked about them. Of course. Not even when the screams in the middle of the night kept others up. And of course they couldn't talk to anybody outside of their "family" about them. Nobody else dealt with what they did. Tim had always been quiet, though. He never woke with a mouth hoarse from screaming and angry people banging at his door. But when he had a nightmare (and some of them were more memory than nightmare, which somehow only made it worse) he woke in a disaster zone, anything within reach of him mauled and thrown across the room.

When he started sleeping with Bernard, he never actually slept, never allowed himself to sleep, contenting himself with the catnaps he'd used while he was still Robin. But Bernard was more observant than he was given credit for, and noticed. And that was nice, having somebody who cared whether he got enough sleep, but if he described his nightmares Bernard would try to comfort him by telling him they were just nightmares, and he couldn't explain that they weren't, that they were things that he'd seen, and not just the usual kind of bad things that everybody saw if they were there for No Man's Land, but the sorts of things that sent hardened, cynical cops running for the bathroom or a bucket or a piece of alleyway that wasn't part of the crime scene, and the reason that he knew that's the sort of things they were is because he saw them running and swallowed down his bile and repressed and now the images only came up in his nightmares or if he heard something on the news that triggered a memory. Which was why he didn't watch the news, because he could imagine what even the worst crime scenes looked like from the smallest, driest description.

And then one night he was with Bernard and he fell asleep in Bernard's arms, and that showed the level of trust he had of Bernard because he couldn't fall asleep in the presence of just anybody, he was too alert around them. He could barely fall asleep in his father's presence, only after making an effort and maybe meditating a little, but with Bernard he fell asleep when he didn't even want to, when he knew he shouldn't, that Bernard was too close. But he couldn't stop himself, and when he woke up he'd had another of his nightmares and Bernard's room was trashed and he had a black eye. And Tim couldn't stand it, couldn't stand knowing that he was the reason Bernard got hurt, couldn't even stand to look at Bernard, so he threw on some clothes without even looking at them and ran from the room.

Bernard found him hours later on the roof of the library. He stayed far back from the edge, where Tim perched, and tried to talk to him.

"I've been looking everywhere for you," Bernard said, and Tim recognized that voice, it was the same one he used to talk down suicides. And Tim might have found that almost funny if he didn't know how it looked that he was standing with his toes over the edge of the roof. "I looked in your room and you weren't there."

"I'm not going to jump," Tim said, and he could tell that Bernard jumped, a little, even though he was looking out over the campus and not at Bernard.

"I wasn't afraid of that," Bernard said a little too quickly. He would make a terrible suicide negotiator. Tim did a cartwheel, because he could, and to hear Bernard gasp, and then he turned around and looked at him.

"So what are you doing here?" he asked, like they were talking about the weather or something, instead of breaking up, and he'd be a lot more pleased with himself if he didn't know he could keep calm in situations a lot worse than this. Situations he had nightmares about.

"I'm here because I want to see what I can do to get my boyfriend to come back to bed," Bernard said, and he looked like he wanted to get closer to Tim but was afraid that Tim would take a step back and go over the edge. And Tim knew he was trying to make peace, to show that he didn't mind the black eye, but he didn't understand.

"I. I'm not," Tim said, and started looking anywhere but at Bernard. "I can't hurt you again."

"Who says you're going to?" Bernard asked lightly, but he wasn't as good at concealing his feelings as Tim was, and Tim thought that maybe he was remembering the thing with the mugger.

"The nightmares. I have them a lot," Tim said, and he wished that Bernard would just accept that and go, but he knew he wouldn't.

"Maybe I could tie you up," Bernard said, and Tim could feel himself twitch as he remembered all the times he'd been tied up, all the jokes about the "boy hostage", the fact that the ropes wouldn't be any help at all to Bernard because he'd trained until he could literally untie himself while he was asleep. And the nightmares about being tied up. "Hmm, maybe not," Bernard continued. "And I'd really rather save separate beds for plan C. So I guess you'll just have to teach me to defend myself."

And that was a good idea, one Tim should have thought of before, because it wouldn't be too difficult to teach Bernard enough to keep from getting hurt by Tim's sleep reflexes, at least for long enough to wake Tim up.