Thanks to everyone who read and to Ghostwriter, Callisto's Moon, and MelsieR for reviewing.

"Jamie?"

Jamie blinked and looked up at Alex standing at the back of the couch. "Hm?"

"Hey. How about you get up and come help me with dinner? If you sleep much more this afternoon you're not going to sleep at all tonight, and I don't think your teachers would appreciate that."

Jamie blinked hard and sat up, trying to remember why he'd fallen asleep on the couch in the middle of the day in the first place. Alex's shows were sometimes kind of boring, yeah, but they weren't that bad. And then Sonja's visit came back and he froze. All it would take was one phone call and Alex could get rid of Jamie as easily as everyone else, and even if he didn't think that Alex had meant to remind him of that, it didn't exactly make the whole situation any better.

"Jaim?"

Jamie shook his head, pulling his arms against him automatically.

Alex sighed and came around to sit on the arm of the couch. "Kiddo, I know you're upset, but I promise you're not going to get sent away. I'm sorry I scared you. It didn't even occur to me that you wouldn't already know that Sonja would want to talk to you."

Jamie shrugged and fiddled with the bandage on his wrist. "I wasn't scared." He knew how to start over in a new place. He knew how to start over even when there wasn't a new place. He just...

"Well, you don't need to worry, then," Alex said. "No one is going to send you away. Will you come help me with dinner?"

"'m not hungry."

"Do you think you might be later? I was going to make spaghetti."

Jamie scowled. He liked Alex's spaghetti. Alex made fancy sauce that didn't come out of a jar.

Alex pushed himself to his feet again. "Come on, kiddo, I can't make both spaghetti sauce and meatballs by myself at the same time. You can stir just fine with your left hand, and you can decide when it's done if you want any."

Alex always made extra so even if Jamie wasn't hungry by dinnertime today there would be some for him later. Or tomorrow. He sighed and got up to follow Alex.

"Heat up a couple tablespoons of oil first, and then add the onions and garlic after it gets hot," Alex directed as they entered the kitchen, gesturing at the stove. He'd obviously been getting things ready before he'd woken Jamie up because there were already a couple cans of tomatoes open and lots of vegetables chopped.

Jamie did as he said, and even if he didn't really feel like talking he didn't mind listening while Alex talked. Especially since Alex was mostly talking about his mom teaching him how to make spaghetti sauce and wasn't making Jamie reply. By the time Jamie got to the point of adding the peppers the sauce was smelling really good, and the meatballs that Alex just finished looked even better. So maybe he was a little hungry.

"Scoot to the left for me for a minute, would you?"

Alex had the pot of water to boil the actual noodles in his hands, and Jamie shifted quickly. It was usually better if he lifted stuff instead of Alex, especially heavy stuff, but now it was going to be a couple weeks before he could even be helpful again. Stupid wrist.

"Do you think you'll be hungry enough to eat at least a bowl?" Alex asked as he opened the box of spaghetti.

"Maybe one," Jamie admitted.

"A couple meatballs, too?"

"I guess." They were right next to him and he could smell them and it wasn't fair if he didn't get a couple.

The sauce came off the stove at about the same time the spaghetti was finishing up, and Alex shifted it to one of the other burners. "Go set the table, please. Do you want milk or water to drink?"

Jamie hesitated. "Can I have hot chocolate?"

"With dinner?"

It wasn't a look so Jamie put on his best innocent expression. Which probably wasn't very effective if Alex's raised eyebrow was any indication, but he did pull down the carton of chocolate.

"Hot chocolate with spaghetti sounds pretty horrible to me," Alex said, "but it's your call."

Chocolate went with everything in Jamie's opinion, but grownups were weird sometimes so he just nodded. By the time the table was set his chocolate was ready too, and Alex handed him a bowl to dish his own portion of spaghetti into. He still wasn't hungry hungry, but...well, it smelled good. Maybe one bowl.

Alex dished himself a bowl as well and then followed Jamie to the dining room table. "I know you've been catching up on sleep, but is all of your homework done for tomorrow?" he asked as they sat down.

"Mostly, I guess."

"What's the mostly part?"

Jamie shrugged. The Great Gatsby was even worse than Shakespeare, but he already knew that Alex expected him to get his homework done. He wasn't about to get into an argument about it—it or anything else—right now.

"Jaim?"

"Just English. I'll finish after dinner."

"Is there anything you need help with?"

Jamie shook his head quickly. It was stupid and boring, that was all.

Alex nodded. "Well, if you change your mind, let me know. You've got a shift tomorrow after school, right?"

"Yeah."

"All right. We'll have to figure out what light duty is with that wrist, at least for this week, but I'll be at the station by the time school lets out so we can do that then. And I expect I'll be there long enough that you'll have a ride home."

He could ride his bike just as well as do his job if Alex wasn't being picky, but... He shrugged again and pushed one of the meatballs against the side of his bowl.

"Kiddo? Are you sure that chocolate goes with spaghetti?"

"Yeah."

Alex sighed. "You don't have to eat if you decide you're not hungry. You can always have some later."

"A billion and one bandages, a billion and two bandages, a billion and three bandages..."

Val laughed, but Val would be allowed to go out on call if they got one tonight, so Jamie wasn't exactly appeased. He was stuck on 'light duty', which apparently meant counting things and filling out stupid forms, for the whole week. Which, okay, technically that was only today and Thursday because he was still hoping he could convince Alex that he was fine by the squad's shift on Sunday, but still. Forms.

"At least it's just twisted," she offered. "I broke my wrist falling off my bike when I was just a little younger than Brooke, and I was stuck in a cast for practically that whole summer. And since I wasn't allowed to get it wet I couldn't go swimming or play in the sprinklers or anything. Worst summer ever."

"I guess." He'd had casts before too, some of them around that same age, and while he vaguely remembered them being awkward to deal with, it had been long enough ago that he hadn't exactly had a bike or a job or whatever to worry about. And it wasn't like sprinklers or pools had ever been a big part of his childhood anyway.

"Well, anyway, bandages one billion and four through one billion and nineteen coming in," she said, dumping the contents of her partially-filled box into the one Jamie had been counting into a moment ago. "And hey, look at it this way. With you focused on this, maybe we'll finally get through the whole station spring cleaning list so Alex and Brooke can stop complaining about how behind we are."

"Oh, yeah, there's a bright spot. You know that'll just be an invitation for them to haul out their summer cleaning lists, right?"

She paused. "Is there such a thing?"

"You've worked here longer than me, but I wouldn't bet against it."

Val laughed again and shook her head, moving on to the next partially-filled box of bandages they'd pulled down, but after a minute she looked back at Jamie with open curiosity on her face. "Does Alex have that kind of list at home? I mean, I know Brooke doesn't, even if she is way too organized for an eleven year old most of the time, but it does seem like the kind of thing he might have."

"Brooke is way too organized?" Jamie had to ask. "Maybe I missed it, but I don't think I've ever seen Brooke so dedicated to a list that she wrote it on her arm."

"Oh, shut up. Besides, if it had been Brooke trying to handle all of that, it would have been a color-coded checklist, and it would have been on a clipboard, not her arm. She'd totally win the organization contest over me any day."

It was just barely possible that she was right about that, even if it was still pretty much a pot-kettle-black situation in Jamie's opinion given that he didn't keep lists anywhere.

"I was asking about Alex, though," she continued.

"Like does he have a spring cleaning checklist for the house? Nah. I mean, he's big about cleaning the kitchen after cooking and hanging up coats and putting things away when you're done with them, stuff like that, but there's really nothing happening that would make the house get that dirty anyway. Every once in a while he decides he wants to deep clean something, but mostly that just means some extra dusting or moving furniture to vacuum under it or whatever." Alex didn't even bother trying to make it a chore when Jamie was grounded given how quick the jobs usually were...heck, Jamie's room was probably—well, definitely—the messiest place in the house, and even it wasn't that bad since Alex expected him to make an attempt to clean it up at least once a week. And trying to vacuum around clothes on the floor got him looks.

"Huh."

"What?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it's still weird to think of Alex having a life outside the station. I mean, I know he does, obviously, but it's kind of like seeing a teacher at the grocery store."

Jamie echoed the shrug. It had been weird for him at first too, but now he was mostly just glad he had a place to live. That he didn't want to mess up, this past weekend notwithstanding. Alex hadn't said anything else about Sonja's visit, which he was just as glad about since he'd rather forget that it had happened at all, but it still...

"Jamie?"

She frowned. "You looked like you zoned for a minute. Are you okay?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry, just double checking my count. Thought I missed one." Complete BS since he hadn't even started on the next partial box in front of him, but he wasn't about to go into the mess this weekend had been with her, either.

"Well, I guess if there's a summer cleaning list we'll find out soon enough," she said, tossing a handful of bandages into their consolidated box. "There's another plus six, and I think that box you have is the last one."

Jamie added nine more and then flattened the latest now-empty box and tossed it onto the pile of other discarded boxes soon to be banished to recycling. A quick check proved that Val was right, and he labeled the combined box, signed the form that went with it, and lifted it one-handed back onto the shelf. At least he could still do that much. "All right, next on the list are b—"

He was cut off by the alarm, and she smiled sympathetically and patted his shoulder. "Look at it this way, maybe it'll be another escaped tiger and you'll be glad to have missed it."

"Yeah, sure."

He turned back to the other supplies they were reorganizing as she hurried out of the room to join Hank and Tyler. As he'd been about to say, blankets were next on the list, and he counted and re-stacked those—they didn't squash down into a single box quite as well as the bandages had—and then stick-on bandages, and then he gave up and went to find Alex because the others still weren't back yet and Brooke wasn't working tonight and he was bored.

"Hey, Jaim," Alex said, looking up from his computer. "What's up? Is your wrist okay?"

"It's fine, but can I please do something else? At least for a little bit?"

Alex smiled. "I want that storeroom cleaned up and the extra boxes gone by the end of this week, but I guess you might as well take a quick break and give me a hand with this write up. Why don't you pull a chair in?"