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Frank braced the bag of takeout on the seat beside him as he made the turn up into the driveway. He still wasn't sure if this was a good idea, a bad idea, or a completely insane idea as his son seemed to think.
Well, he was fairly certain that it wasn't the last. They were modern Jagerbars in the twenty-first century, whatever his wife's hidden beliefs had been, and if they were going to live in a city with a Grimm it only made sense to be on good terms with the man. Or at least civil terms, especially since the Grimm seemed willing to be on civil terms with them.
Frank had fully expected to find Detective Burkhardt lurking around after Barry's sentencing hearing, either checking that Diane was truly too injured to pursue any kind of vendetta or looking for some kind of assurance that Frank wasn't considering the same. Or possibly preemptively preventing Frank from doing the same, and as much as Frank hated to think about those dark days, there had been a point immediately after Diane's passing where he'd almost have welcomed it. He'd kept himself going by clinging to the thought that Barry needed him, but it had been touch and go when he was only able to see his son from behind glass and at most every other weekend. Especially after what had happened with the twins. Jason had always been a hothead, but TB was a lot like Barry, and Frank had spent more sleepless nights than he cared to remember convinced that his son would find himself in similar circumstances.
To his knowledge the Grimm had never come anywhere near the house again, though, and on the couple occasions that he and Frank had crossed paths at the courthouse all he'd ever done was nod. When Frank had made some cautious inquiries, it seemed that that was his typical modus operandi. He wouldn't let something like the Roh-hatz pass, but when it came to Wesen living their lives, he wasn't inclined to interfere.
It was completely contrary to all of the horror stories that Frank had heard growing up, and granted that this Grimm was as much a product of modern times as they were—at a guess he was at least a decade closer in age to Barry than to Frank—those stories still had their roots in bloody history. For someone to ignore them so thoroughly was something that Frank had a hard time wrapping his head around.
But since he believed in getting ahead of trouble if at all possible, now that Barry was home and the Grimm knew that Barry was home it seemed best to have everything out in the open.
He pulled into the garage and shut off his car, collecting their dinner and his briefcase before heading into the house. As usual Barry came to greet him as soon as he entered, and Frank smiled at his son and handed dinner over.
And also as usual he did his best to keep his anger hidden when he saw the shadows in his son's eyes, echoes of pain and fear that hadn't been there before he'd gone to prison. Before his mother had died. Frank wasn't angry at Barry, or at least mostly not at Barry, but at his wife and the stupidity that had left their son motherless and a shell of the cheerful boy that he had been. And at his own blindness because Diane had never shared her true beliefs with him, not in over twenty years of marriage, and he'd never noticed, and now a pointless tradition that should have been left to their ancestors had cost their family almost everything. The money didn't matter to him, not the second mortgage on the house or the extra hours he was working to cover all of the favors he'd called in or any of that, but Diane's life, Barry's future...
"No messages, so I guess we've got fifteen or twenty minutes until he's supposed to show," Barry said, setting the bag on the counter.
Frank nodded and turned the stove on to low, unbagging the takeout boxes and putting them inside to keep warm. He knew how to do that much, at least. He'd meant to do more while Barry was away, take a class or watch some videos or whatever so he could manage something more than boiled pasta when they didn't feel like takeout for dinner, but somehow he'd never gotten around to it. The kitchen had always been Diane's domain.
"Do you think he'll come?" Barry asked, looking out the window.
"I hope so." Detective Burkhardt had seemed surprised by the invitation, but he'd accepted willingly enough. With the caveat that if he and his partner were assigned a case he might end up with a last minute conflict, but that was entirely reasonable given his profession. Frank had debated inviting the other detective over too, but to his knowledge the man was Kehrseite, and under the circumstances the last thing he wanted to have to do was spend dinner couching their conversation in euphemisms. "I'm going to put my things away. Would you set the table, please?"
Barry nodded, and Frank picked up his briefcase again and headed upstairs. He'd rearranged the room shortly after Diane's death, but even now he still felt a vague sense of wrongness every time he entered. For a little while he'd considered moving his bed down into his office and making this place the storage area for artifacts that he no longer had any interest in displaying, but his office had been where Diane's hospital bed had been set up for the few weeks that she'd been able to be home, and he hadn't been in any position to deal with that immediately after she'd died. By the time he had been...well the setup here was good enough, especially with his desk wedged into the corner. It probably wasn't all that healthy to have his workspace only a few feet from his bed, but being alone in the house had made him prefer to keep things close when he could.
He'd briefly thought about selling the house entirely, moving somewhere without memories attached, but that had been more than he'd been willing to do without Barry's input.
Frank hung up his jacket and tie and moved the files that he needed to finish reviewing from his briefcase to his desk, taking a quick flip through to make sure that he hadn't forgotten anything, and then headed downstairs again just in time to hear the chime of the bell.
Barry looked at him, and he waved his son back before going to answer the door himself. "Hello, Detective."
"Mr. Rabe," he said, shaking the hand Frank proffered with no hint of reticence despite the fact that while he might be marginally taller than average for a human, he was still several inches shorter and correspondingly lighter than either Frank or Barry. "It's Nick. Thanks for inviting me."
"Frank," Frank said, echoing his correction and accepting the bottle of wine he offered with a nod of thanks. "I'm glad that you were able to make it. Barry?"
Barry had attended more than enough of his mother's fundraisers and parties with Frank's business associates over the years to know how to behave, and he stepped forward and offered a polite greeting and a handshake as well before Frank drew them all towards the table. If Diane was here there would be other things first, pre-dinner drinks and trays of hors d'ouvres and all of that, but if Diane was here they likely wouldn't be doing this at all.
"I'm afraid that I'm not much of a cook so we've got takeout," Frank admitted. "Bergerac's, I hope that's all right."
"That sounds great," Nick said, with no indication that he was lying. "But honestly, I'm still a little confused about what I'm doing here. I mean, I appreciate the invite, but you know that you don't owe me anything, right?"
Frank would disagree on that point considering that his very-much-alive son was standing beside him, but he let it go. "Mostly we just wanted to talk to you." He was probably overstating the matter a bit where Barry was concerned, but Frank wasn't willing to leave him out of the conversation either. "Neither of us has met a Grimm before."
"Oh."
"There aren't precisely a lot of you, and fewer, I think, who would accept the invitation even if I did know where to find them."
A flicker of a smile crossed his face. "I guess, it's just that 'let's talk' isn't the usual reaction I get from people."
Considering that he referred to Wesen as people with no hesitation Frank would make the argument that Nick was the unusual one, but he let that pass as well. "Perhaps we've simply had more time to get used to the idea."
"True." He shrugged. "I suppose I've never met any Jagerbars before, either."
"Then why don't you have a seat?"
Barry had put out serving utensils when he'd set the table, and Frank moved dinner from the oven to the table as the others sat down. Now that he thought about it, he probably should have put the entrees—a variety of family-style dishes since he had no idea what the detective's preferences were—on proper serving plates, but table settings hadn't been foremost in his mind. And he wasn't entirely sure where the serving plates were, anyway. "I suspect that I already know the answer, but what is the usual reaction?" he asked as he took the last place at the table.
"Mostly a lot of shouting and insistence that I'm going to kill someone." Nick shook his head. "Obviously, that's the last thing that I want to do, and you'd think that the badge would be a hint, but somehow it never is."
Probably because an unwillingness to kill wouldn't be at all obvious to a Wesen unexpectedly confronted with a Grimm. Certainly his badge had been the last thing on Frank's mind when he'd seen Nick's reaction to Barry's involuntary woge.
"Anyway, after a year I've gotten a little better at getting 'I'm not here to hurt anybody' out before everything goes to hell, but that kind of relies on people believing me."
"A year?" Barry asked, and if Frank was a little surprised that his son had spoken without prompting, he was curious about the specific timeframe as well. Even if he'd been a new detective when he'd been brought in on the case that had lead to Barry's arrest—and he had been, Frank had checked—surely he would have run into the same issues as a patrol officer prior to that.
"To make a long story very short, I only found out that I was a Grimm a few days before I met you. I only found out what a Grimm was a few days before I met you."
"For real?"
Nick tilted his head at Barry, and Frank added a bit more context to the astonishment in his voice. "Wesen children typically woge for the first time somewhere between five and thirteen." It generally happened younger for the smaller prey species and older for the larger and more predatory, and of course there was always individual variation, but certainly no Wesen made it anywhere near full adulthood without knowing who and what they were. "I would have assumed that Grimms would be similar."
"Ah. Well, with the caveat that there's a lot that I don't know since my parents were in a car accident when I was a kid and the aunt who raised me after that showed up just in time to tell me that her cancer was terminal and in the next sentence asked if I'd seen anything unusual recently, my understanding is that older is typical for us."
"It must have been a shock."
"That is an understatement. And people I'd never met screaming about how I was out to kill them certainly didn't help." He shook his head. "I mean, as much as I'd rather not be threatened, however politely, I'll still take your reaction over almost anyone else's."
Frank caught the curious glance that Barry aimed in his direction, but then Barry hadn't been there when the two detectives had come back to the house the second time. When Frank would have fought to protect his family if if had come to that, although he was just as glad that it hadn't. He was still a Jagerbar and would never cower from anyone, doubly so if his wife and child were threatened, but the fact was that he spent far more of his time in a courthouse than a forest. "Head to head a Jagerbar tends to last a bit longer against a Grimm than most which I expect makes us slightly less inclined to panic," he said after a moment. "But if you'd just learned about being a Grimm, may I ask how you knew about the Roh-hatz? Even among our kind it's...out of favor." Which was considerably nicer than anything that Frank would have liked to have said about it, but he would never denigrate his wife's memory in front of their son.
"Aunt Marie didn't die until literally right after everything, as in I went straight from your place to the hospital, so I did have time to ask her a few questions before that. And I've got a friend who knows a little about a whole lot." A pause, and he turned his gaze to Barry. "Plus I was pretty sure that you were lying through your teeth about when you got home, but that was a cop thing not a Grimm thing because Hank felt the same way."
Barry flushed and ducked his head.
"I assume that Hank would be your partner, Detective Griffin," Frank said, drawing Nick's attention back to him. "Does he know about Wesen?"
"Uh..." He rocked a hand. "Working on it. He's seen a few things—kind of a given working with me, I'm afraid—but there hasn't really been a good time to go into any details."
"There rarely is." And in Frank's admittedly limited experience humans would go to extreme lengths to explain away interactions with the Wesen world anyway. Just witness what had happened with those two that had broken into their house. "How do you handle it yourself?"
"Handle what?"
"Being a Grimm and a cop."
He sighed. "Cop first, Grimm second, and Portland is a big enough city that I stay plenty busy without randomly harassing total strangers. And it's not like I see a lot of value in terrorizing the refrigerator repairman anyway." One shoulder twitched. "The majority of the Wesen that I run into are involved with cases we're investigating in one way or another, and while there are plenty of times that I wish that I had more information than I do—actually I almost always wish that I had more information than I do—people are still mostly people." He paused. "If it's rude to ask just tell me, but how do you handle being Wesen in a majority-human world? There are a couple Wesen I spend time with, but for the most part they're loners."
The only reason it wasn't considered rude was probably because no Grimm had ever asked before, but he had answered Frank's question, and Frank considered it seriously for a moment before answering. "I can't say that that definition doesn't fit us in a lot of ways as well. We've learned to blend in, certainly, but most forms of socialization are perhaps perhaps a bit more superficial than they might appear." It was one of the things that Diane had emphasized when they and the Colberts had made the—admittedly entirely necessary, at the time—decision to separate their boys from the other children that they'd been friends with once they'd reached puberty and started coming into their own: Jagerbars rarely kept close ties outside of their immediate family groups.
"Two of the partners at my law firm are human," he continued, leaving any mention of the Colberts aside since saying that things were strained between himself and Kenneth and Margaret was a distinct understatement these days, "but while we've certainly entertained them as part of our professional relationship and they've done the same in return, it's never extended beyond that. And..." He hesitated. Terrance was a Steinadler and Andrew was a Weten Ogen, but it certainly wasn't his place to reveal that sort of information to a Grimm, even a seemingly-friendly one.
Nick seemed to realize where he'd almost gone and held up his hands. "Not asking."
Frank nodded. "Thank you. I suppose you could say that at a high level we don't typically socialize with other Wesen a great deal beyond business purposes either."
"But you really hang out with Wesen?" Barry asked Nick.
"Sure." He smiled. "Honestly, it's nice to be around people that I don't constantly have to watch what I'm saying in front of. Even after a year I still have trouble with that sometimes."