Thanks to everyone who reads, and as always reviews are appreciated.
Rating is because Barry is just getting out of prison a year after the events of Bears Will Be Bears, and it's left a mark on him. This chapter is set mostly in the prison.
This eventually ties into What Strange Creatures, but they can be read separately (and that one starts earlier in time, although sorting out the timeline for Grimm is a little shaky anyway).
No idea why I'm on an early-season Grimm kick at the moment, but apparently I am :)
"Rabe!"
Barry stepped forward at the sharp bark, keeping his face blank and meeting the guard's eyes just long enough to acknowledge him without indicating any kind of challenge. It was a balancing act, like a lot of things in this place.
He hadn't realized until the day he'd been unloaded from the prison bus and led into Processing, handcuffed and shackled with Jason and TB and fifteen or twenty others, just how sheltered he'd really been. Jail had been scary enough even with most of his mind tied up worrying about Mom; at least there Dad had been with him whenever he wasn't at the hospital and his lawyer had been in and out as well since Dad was the wrong kind of lawyer for the charges he'd been facing. Prison...
The fact that he'd been barely a month past his eighteenth birthday and utterly terrified no matter how much he'd tried to hide it hadn't earned him any leeway, either. Kidnapping and attempted murder were serious charges regardless of what his final plea deal had said or how little he'd really understood what he'd gotten into. Or at least how little he'd understood until he'd had it shoved in his face by a Grimm and a judge and even his own father, anyway. There was a price to be paid for what he and the twins had done, one that they were still paying and would be for a while.
In this place you had to show respect—to the guards, to the other inmates, all of that; none of the casual smart-mouthing he'd always managed to get excused with a quick smile at home or school—but you couldn't let anyone push you around either because that led to a whole other kind of trouble. He'd messed up a few times early on in his sentence, and he was lucky that even if he was still a few years shy of what his adult weight was likely to be, he was still a nearly full-grown Jagerbar with all that that implied. If he hadn't been...well, things could have gotten ugly. Uglier. He'd never had to fight for real before, not when only a few guys at school besides Jason and TB had been anywhere near his weight class and none of them had been stupid enough to bother him, and that specific night was still pretty high on the list of things that he tried not to think about. And there were a whole lot of things that he didn't like thinking about these days.
He hadn't seen Jase or TB since they'd gotten split up in Processing, and it hadn't been for lack of looking on his part.
The guard took him into one of the side rooms and removed his handcuffs before ordering him to turn and strip for a search, and he forced himself to stay passive even though his instincts screamed. A fair number of the guards in this place didn't consider him—him or any of the other inmates; it wasn't a human-Wesen thing or anything like that—a person, and he'd learned the hard way that he had no recourse if they decided to make his life unpleasant. That was the last thing that he wanted to risk today.
Because this time when he was finally allowed to turn back around he was handed his own clothing. The clothing he'd been wearing when he was arrested. Well, mostly, Dad must have added the shirt and jacket at some point, but it was denim and leather and worlds away from the thin cotton jumpsuits he'd spent the last year in.
Judging from the light he could see through the slit passing as a window it had to be mid-afternoon by now, and he wondered how long he'd been left sitting on the bench after lunch. He couldn't bring himself to care, though. There was a lot of waiting in this place, and as long as he was out by the end of the day it didn't matter.
As long as he never had to enter a cell again, it didn't matter.
"Think we'll see you again?" the guard asked as he pulled the clothes on.
"No, sir." The shirt was a little tight across the shoulders, kind of surprising since even if he'd worked out some, he hadn't been able to push himself the way he would have if there weren't humans everywhere, and he tugged at the hem.
The snort from the guard in the observation room above them was audible through the speakers. "You'll be back in six months. At most."
Privately Barry thought that he'd rather die first, but he recognized the voice of the guard up there and he wasn't one of the good ones, so he kept his mouth shut and let his shirt go, shrugging into his jacket. He didn't need it, it wasn't much past summer out there and still plenty warm in here as well, but the weight of it felt good.
Once he was dressed he was handed a bag containing the rest of the things he'd been arrested with—his wallet, his keys, even the claw pendant his mother had given him for his sixteenth birthday—and a familiar pain twisted in his heart when his fingers tangled in the leather strap. Even if he was getting out of here some things could never go back to how they were before because Mom had passed away barely a month into his sentence, her damaged organs finally failing despite all that the doctors could do.
A part of Barry still wondered if she'd even wanted to live, as much as that was at the very top of the list of things that he tried not to think about. She'd been paralyzed from the waist down from the fall into his pit trap, on a whole cocktail of drugs to control the pain and the internal damage left by the spikes that had impaled her, and as much as he'd wanted to believe that she'd push through it, the twice she'd been to visit him she'd been barely a shell of herself. Seeing him in an orange jumpsuit separated by a glass shield obviously hadn't helped, but he'd hoped...
His jaw tightened, and he forced his expression to remain blank despite the lump in his throat. He'd nearly missed her funeral despite all of Dad's arguments, and in the end he'd only been allowed to attend handcuffed and shackled between two guards and kept well back from the other attendees. Not that it had really mattered to him except for the part where he hadn't been able to be by Dad; he barely remembered anything except watching the coffin sink into the ground.
That, and the feeling that it hadn't been a traditional Jagerbar funeral and she'd have hated that even worse than dying.
The guard in the room cleared his throat, and Barry hastened to fasten the pendant around his neck and then shoved everything else from the bag into his jacket before sitting down where he was told.
As soon as he was seated two more men entered. One of the conditions of his early parole was six months to a year of house arrest, monitored and enforced by ankle bracelet, before he was allowed to transition to more standard parole restrictions, and he made himself stay still as they fitted and activated the thing.
The men left again after getting radio confirmation that the tracking system was working, and then the guard signaled for Barry to follow him up to the Admin office where a bag of the paltry few possessions he'd acquired in prison was waiting. That and a stack of papers to sign.
When it came to his possessions Barry would be just as happy burning everything associated with this place, but he took them with a quick thank you and initialed where he was told anyway, continuing to keep his mouth shut while the corrections officer behind the desk lectured him about the conditions of his parole. What house arrest meant, the required check-ins with his parole officer, his community service minimums, all of that. In another lifetime he'd have let all of it go in one ear and out the other and trusted that his parents would take care of the official boring shit, but that was another area in which he'd gotten some harsh lessons over the course of the past year.
He did tune out a little when the corrections officer switched over to warnings about gang contacts since whatever this guy thought Barry didn't have any of those, but he still had better sense than to make it obvious and continued to make noises of agreement whenever it was appropriate. He had been approached by one of the gangs in the beginning—maybe not a surprise; even if he was young he was big—but even if he'd been a lot more sheltered growing up than he realized, he wasn't stupid enough to want to spend time with assholes with a swastikas on their faces. And he suspected that his own tattoos had confused them anyway. They weren't exactly tribal, but they weren't exactly not, either, and even in the Wesen community Jagerbar initiation rites weren't common knowledge so no one had quite known what to make of him. But they hadn't messed with him, either, at least not after that first creep, and since he spoke the wrong language and had the wrong skin color to be of interest to any of the other big gangs he'd been left mostly alone after that. Which had been fine by him.
Eventually the lecture wound down and he was allowed to sign the final papers, and then the guard who'd been waiting in the background accompanied him through the series of locked doors and gates and everything else that had kept him apart from the real world for the past year until he was finally, finally standing outside the prison gates again.
Dad was waiting there, and Barry's eyes burned when Dad ignored the guard and wrapped his arms around him as soon as he was in range. For the first eight months of Barry's sentence they'd been separated by a glass barrier when Dad had visited the prison, and even in the last couple months when they'd been allowed to meet in the visiting room they hadn't been permitted any physical contact. Barry hadn't realized how much he'd missed it and hugged back just as hard, burying his face in his father's shoulder as rough fingers tangled in his hair and pulled him in closer. "I want to go home."
