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Barry sat up with a choked-off shout, alarms blaring in his ears and iron bars and concrete walls looming large in front of his eyes. He was shaking and soaked in sweat, and it took him a few minutes to recognize his own bedroom. And even after he did he could still smell the prison around him.
He made himself take deep breaths anyway, flattening his hands against his blankets and waiting for his heartbeat to drop back to a reasonable pace. He was home. It had just been a stupid nightmare.
He wasn't sure how long he waited before he was something approaching calm again, but he couldn't help but be relieved when he was finally able to focus on his clock and discovered that it was already half-past eight. He'd had the same nightmare a couple nights ago, and while he'd had plenty of practice locking down his cries, he hadn't even considered the time when he'd headed for the shower. Running water at two in the morning had been enough to wake Dad and bring him knocking, and since nightmare or no Barry was never going to tell his father any more than he absolutely had to about that place, the whole thing had been awkward.
Eight-thirty on Thursday meant that Dad was safely off to work, though, and his own alarm was only fifteen minutes away from going off.
He killed it and rolled out of bed, heading for the shower. He didn't have much of a day ahead of him since there hadn't been any openings on today's community service rotations, but he wasn't real interested in lying around in bed, either.
After showering and starting a load of laundry, Barry went downstairs and grabbed some leftovers for breakfast before continuing down to the game room and opening up the computer to his current in-progress opinion paper. Thus far Writing for the Humanities had been his favorite of the three college courses he was taking, but that wasn't saying all that much. He hadn't been paying very close attention when he was choosing his classes in the first place, just selecting ones that he was both eligible for and that were listed as providing qualifying transfer credits to four-year universities on the vague assumption that that was going to matter someday, but next semester he should probably pick classes that were actually working towards something.
Of course, it would help if he had some idea what that was. He was still pretty lost on the whole future thing, and he was a afraid to bring it up with Dad when it was almost guaranteed to trigger one of those terrifyingly sad looks.
He'd seen quite a few of those since he'd gotten home, and he had no clue what to do about it.
With a shake of his head, he forced himself to turn his attention to his work. It wasn't...he'd never been a bad student. As and Bs for the most part, with the occasional midterm C thrown in for Mom to fuss about but never seriously worry either parent, but unlike TB who'd gotten weirdly interested in chemistry after their sophomore year or Jason who'd been almost as big a fan of history as Mom, he'd never found any classes that he was really into. There were certainly some that he'd liked more than others, but he'd always been happy enough to go along with suggestions from Mom and his counselor since they'd matched well enough with the path that he was headed down anyway.
So much for that.
There was a thousand word limit on his paper so soon enough he had nothing left to do except wait for it to upload to the decidedly-clunky web portal, and then he spent the hour after that redoing some calculus problems that he'd gotten wrong on his last assignment. He managed new answers this time around, although he had no idea if they were any closer to correct, and then he couldn't take it any more and pushed himself to his feet to take a lap down to the end of the driveway. It wasn't anywhere near the equivalent of a run through the forest, but it wasn't a prison track with armed guards standing above it either, and a mile and a half in each direction at least let him get his blood moving.
He'd actually spent some time after community service on Monday getting his bike fixed up thinking that going trail riding would be a good outlet for some of his energy—his lack of friends and the hours Dad worked basically guaranteed that he was going to be spending a lot of his house arrest alone—but Dad had been less than enthused about the project when he gotten home from work. He hadn't forbidden Barry from going riding, but as he'd pointed out Barry had never had restrictions on where he went before, and it wasn't like the boundaries of their property were all that well marked. Barry knew where their border with the Colberts' land was because Jagerbars showed respect for each others' territories even when the families in question were friends with standing leave to come and go as they pleased, and where the driveway met the road was an obvious boundary marker in the direction of the city, but he'd always been able to treat the national park as an extension of their land when it came to roaming, especially since there were no accessible hiking trails for a good ten miles. When Dad had pointed out how easy it would be for him to violate his parole completely accidentally...
He shivered, despite himself. He could still hear his parole officer's warnings, and restlessness was a beyond stupid reason to risk that. At least for now he was sticking to driveway runs.
It was still a little early for lunch when he got back to the house with the mail so he tossed the advertisements into the recycling, put the few pieces that Dad would care about on the table, and then headed back up to his room. Dad had agreed to let him order a weight set after his hopes for time-killing rides had been dashed, and his current plan was to rearrange his room to make a spot for it since while their house had plenty of space in general, it was a kind of specific layout. There were the two loft bedrooms for himself and his parents, obviously, the main floor with its open plan through the kitchen and living room plus Dad's office tucked away at the back since before Barry's grandparents had passed that had been the guest suite and Dad and Mom had shared the basement office, and then the basement with the game room, utility-and-storage room, and Mom's office.
Barry had originally thought to put the weight set in the game room, but with the pool table and desk and game cabinet and couches it was already pretty full, and while he figured that Dad would let him take one of the offices if he was willing to clear it out since they weren't being used for anything else anymore, Dad's was where they'd been storing all the artifacts they'd taken down. And to use Mom's office for anything, even storage...there was just no way. He still couldn't bring himself to open the door.
He'd thought about putting the weight set in the garage too since then he might be able to get away without ordering any mats, but that would have meant getting rid of one of the cars—Mom's being the obvious choice since he and Dad both needed theirs—and...yeah. Another thing he wasn't ready to deal with, and obviously Dad wasn't either considering that it was still sitting there gathering cobwebs.
Barry didn't bother doing any measuring, as much because he didn't know where a tape measure was as anything else, but none of the furniture was heavy enough to bother him and after a few false starts he got his bed shoved off to one side and swapped his dresser around with a taller bookshelf that made the now-bare walls in the corner his bed faced considerably less obvious. That left the dresser with a weirdly blank space above it on the other wall, but the weight set would be going on the empty floor in front of it, and he kind of figured that he could put a small television the dresser for ambient noise while he was working out. Mom would never have allowed him to have a television in his bedroom, if it had been up to her they would never had one in the house at all, but Dad had never been as picky about things like that.
After all of that the smaller of his two bookshelves was without a home, and he tried it in a couple different locations as well before settling on a place on the back wall, and then spent some time sorting out the books that needed to be added to the pile in Dad's office. He had a stack of clothes that no longer fit him as well, but even if Mom had always kept tubs of things he'd outgrown, Barry figured that Dad would be just as happy to drop those off at the thrift shop.
With that accomplished his stomach drove him down to the kitchen to heat up a couple slices of pizza before heading back to the basement, and while neither pool nor darts were all that much fun to play with no one to play against, he had a couple video games that he hadn't beaten yet.
He heard the garage opening before he'd changed that fact, and he didn't hesitate to shut it down and head upstairs to greet Dad. Dinner was apparently Greek from the smell of things.
Dad smiled and handed the bag over to Barry as soon as he reached the kitchen. "Hey. How was your day?"
"All right." Because there was no point in bringing up 'boring as hell' when it was still a million times better than the hell he'd spent the last year in. "How was yours?"
"The usual. I'll be back in a minute, I'm just going to put my things away."
Barry nodded and set the table, and Dad came back down sans jacket and tie while he was setting out the food.
"Did you get that English assignment that you were talking about finished?" Dad asked.
"Finished and submitted," Barry agreed. Unfortunately the only other assignment that he had due this week was the redo of that set of calc problems which didn't exactly leave him a lot to talk about, and Dad couldn't say very much about his clients at work either so most of the rest of the meal was pretty quiet. It was something that Barry had never really thought about before, and they hadn't exactly had enough time in their limited conversations at the prison for it to come up, but while he loved Dad and would never in a million years doubt that Dad loved him, the two of them didn't actually know each other all that well. Sure, they'd had plenty of meals together, Mom had insisted on dinners as a family even if that frequently included the twins since both Mr. and Mrs. Colbert worked in real estate and couldn't always keep regular hours themselves, but in those cases she'd been around to keep the conversation flowing. Just in general she was always the parent that he'd spent the most time with.
"I talked to Detective Burkhardt today," Dad said as both of their plates approached clean.
Barry was suddenly just as glad that he'd already eaten most of his meal as his appetite disappeared. "What did he say?"