Thanks to everyone who read and to a guest for reviewing.
Alex sighed and returned whatever he'd been looking to the box in front of him, flipping the lid shut before he turned to look back at Jamie. "Are you getting hungry? I think I'm going to heat up some soup for lunch before I go through any more of these."
Jamie wished that he'd thought to pretend to be asleep or something—that had been why he'd stretched out on the couch in the first place, after all—but too late now. He settled for a shrug and a shake of his head. "I'm okay."
As soon as the words were out of his mouth he knew they'd been the wrong thing to say since he pretty much never turned down food, and Alex frowned and then pushed himself up from the floor with a wince, turning to sit on the coffee table facing Jamie. "Are you still breathing okay? Feeling sick at all?"
Jamie shrugged and then shook his head. Being sick would have been a good excuse too, except for the part where Alex was a doctor and would probably want to poke at him again.
"Words, Jamie. Mind reading is not one of my skills."
"No, it's...I"m fine."
He tilted his head. "Are you upset about earlier?"
Jamie shrugged again. "I don't know." Which was complete BS, and Alex would have to be an idiot not to know that it was complete BS, but it wasn't like he could come out and say 'yes.'
Things had been going pretty good up until half an hour or so ago, too. It still seemed really, really bizarre to him since he'd been here for two weeks and Alex still hadn't shown any sign of being ready to kick him out, but his room was warm, he was allowed to eat as much food as he wanted to the point that he didn't even need to save the applesauce cups from lunches at school, and yeah, Alex could be strict about stuff, but it was manageable. It wasn't much different than dealing with him at the station, really. Alex also sat at the table when he was eating, vacuumed on Tuesdays, did laundry on Thursdays, all of that, so it wasn't like the rules were Jamie-specific.
Alex didn't like being crossed, and Jamie had figured that he was in trouble when he'd lost track of time and come in late the other night, but even then all Alex had done was yell and ground him so it wasn't so bad. A little bit of overkill since he'd gotten back fine eventually, but he was used to that kind of thing.
The chores today had been reasonable too. Jamie would have helped with grocery shopping and getting boxes down out of the attic and whatever even if he hadn't been in trouble. He owed Alex at least that much for letting him stay here. Sure, the lunatic with the spritzer bottle hadn't made him happy, but that wasn't Alex's fault. Alex hadn't liked what she'd done either. And the dust and his stupid asthma that wouldn't up and vanish wasn't anyone's fault.
He touched the inhaler in his pocket. He hadn't even thought about asking Alex when his last one had run out, which was pretty stupid now that he thought about it. While Alex had made it clear that even if IV bags and crackers and juice boxes were fair game to take from the station when they'd reached their expiration dates, any kind of medication was out of the question, he'd also made allowances for allergy cream and antiseptic gel and that kind of thing before as long as it was cleared with him first. He'd have said okay to an inhaler.
Except then after Jamie's asthma attack Alex had wanted to do an actual medical check. It made sense, and Jamie wouldn't have cared except...
His fingers tightened a little on the inhaler. In the end Alex hadn't made him take his shirt off, which was at least something, but he wasn't stupid enough to believe that Jamie had refused without reason. When it came to foster parents Jamie knew they got a file, even if he didn't like it, so he already knew they knew the bad stuff. Alex wasn't exactly that, though, and he had no idea what Sonja might have told him. Or not told him. Or what he was supposed to say now.
Alex sighed, bringing him back to the present. "Look, Jaim, it's your body. You get to decide what happens. As long as you're a minor there's a 'within reason' attached to that and a few things you're going to get overruled on—you weren't going to get away without letting me do at least a basic exam—but outside of that it's your call. I can't say I'm not curious, but I won't ask for something like that again unless it's absolutely necessary. And you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. Okay?"
Jamie risked a quick look, but Alex seemed serious enough, and he still didn't say things that he didn't mean. Maybe they could just pretend it hadn't happened.
"Come on," Alex said, pushing himself up and gesturing for Jamie to stand as well. "Come have some lunch."
Jamie nodded slowly and pushed himself up from the couch.
"Cut us a couple pieces of bread, please," Alex said as he opened the can cabinet. "Do you want chicken and dumplings, beef stew, or vegetable?"
"Dumplings," Jamie said immediately, taking the loaf of bread from the fridge. Not that he'd have argued with one of the others, but even if the dumplings themselves had no nutritional value like Alex insisted, he still liked them the best. When the bread and bowls were on the table he grabbed the glasses too. "Water?" It wasn't exactly a shot in the dark since that was about the only thing that Alex drank besides coffee...Jamie still thought it was a little weird to be in a house that didn't even have coke in the fridge, but there were worse things.
"Yes, please."
Jamie nodded and put the drinks with the rest of it before taking his seat and waiting for Alex to bring the soup over. It didn't take long, even when he was heating it up on the stove, and Alex poured a bowlful for himself and then handed the ladle to Jamie.
"What's in all those boxes, anyway?" Jamie asked after a few minutes of near-silent eating. He didn't have to talk while they ate, they'd had plenty of meals in total silence, but the quiet had started to feel awkward to him. Once in a while Alex talked, mostly questions about school or homework or comments about work or the station, but the lack of noise seemed to bother him less than it did Jamie.
"Some things my mother sent me after I moved out here," Alex said. "Don't ask me why, most of it's from back when I was in middle and high school and I didn't want it then, but she always hung onto that kind of thing. I suspect it's going to be a lost cause, but I'd feel bad just throwing everything away without at least flipping through it."
He must have looked curious—which, he was, but he'd never in a million years have said so—because Alex nodded to the stack of boxes.
"You're welcome to look too, if you want. I'm sure there's something worth a laugh in there. You've got your inhaler?"
Jamie wasn't sure where he could have lost it since he'd only been on the couch and then in the kitchen since the attack earlier, but smarting back at Alex got him looks so he just pulled it out of his pocket and held it up.
"Good. There's quite a bit of dust mixed in with everything." He scraped his bowl clean with a piece of bread and then nodded to the soup pot. "Are you going to want another helping?"
"Not right now," Jamie said, echoing his action. "Maybe later." Almost certainly later depending on when they had dinner, but being allowed to raid the fridge whenever he wanted had definite advantages.
"All right. Rinse the dishes, please."
Rinsing dirty dishes and putting them in the dishwasher immediately after eating was one of Alex's rules, and the dishwasher was full enough that Jamie started it when he was done while Alex was finishing putting the leftovers away. "Where did you move here from, anyway?" he asked curiously. Every once in a while Alex would say something that sounded a little off to Jamie's ears, but it wasn't anything like an accent that he could place.
"Wyoming."
Jamie looked over at him in surprise, and he smiled.
"I'm serious."
"Isn't that all cow farms and whatever?"
"They generally call them cattle ranches, but outside of a couple cities, yes. Although my family mostly raises goats."
"Goats? Like, things that go 'baa'?"
"That's more a sheep thing, but you've got the general idea."
Jamie tried to imagine Alex on a farm and totally failed. Not that he'd ever been to a farm himself so he didn't have a lot to work from, but he still thought it was weird when Alex wore jeans on the weekends when he wasn't going into the station. Him standing next to a cow or goat or whatever...no. "I can't really see that," he admitted.
"Believe me, that makes two of us, and that's despite the fact that one of my mother's hobbies is photography," Alex said dryly. "In fact most of my family would agree that I was switched at birth, except for the part where we lived in the middle of nowhere and there was no one to be switched with." He nodded towards the couch. "Go have a seat and break another open and I'll be there in a minute. I need to see if the minutes from last night's meeting have come in yet."
Since Alex was encouraging it, Jamie headed for the couch and cut the tape on the next box. And then sneezed at the cloud of dust that came up when he opened it. Maybe making sure that he had the inhaler with him wasn't the worst idea after earlier. It looked like the box was full of binders, and he pulled the first one out and flipped it open.
"Jamie? Can you come in here for a minute?" Alex called before he'd done more than glance at the first page.
"Yeah, sure." Alex's room wasn't exactly off limits although Jamie didn't go in there unless invited, and he wasn't surprised to find Alex sitting in front of the laptop open on the desk. "What's up? Did you get what you needed?"
"Received and forwarded to Jennifer like she asked, but it looks like I've got an email from your social worker, too."
"Oh." Jamie hadn't figured that Sonja had a prayer in hell of finding a new placement for him before the holidays, but maybe a spot had opened up in a group home or something like that. "Where am I going?" It wouldn't take him too long to pack, at least; Alex had said that he could use the dresser and closet and everything, but he was used to living out of his duffel and hadn't bothered with either. Among other things it kept said duffel from getting lost and him being stuck with trash bags again.
"Nowhere anytime soon from the look of things," Alex said. "I think you're probably going to be here through the holidays."
"Oh," Jamie repeated. Right, he'd assumed that much, but obviously no one had thought to tell Alex before this. "I don't—I mean, I can find somewhere else if—"
"Jamie, I said it was fine if you stayed here until she found another placement, and I meant it," Alex interrupted. "But personally I don't celebrate Christmas so if there's something you want to do, you're going to have to tell me. And there's some form here she wants you to fill out. Angel Trees?"
Oh. That. Jamie scoffed. "No point, and I hate Christmas so I'm pretty fine doing absolutely nothing." One of the reasons he wasn't totally one-hundred percent against being grounded, even if he still thought it was unfair, was because unlike most of his friends' houses Alex's place was mercifully free of pine needles and candy canes and Mannheim Steamroller. Well, Catie's was too, obviously, but hers always had people everywhere even without Hanukkah about to start and with it he was even more in the way.
"No point?" Alex asked.
"You ever looked at an Angel Tree?"
"I'm not even sure what they are," Alex admitted.
That kind of made sense for someone who didn't celebrate Christmas, and Jamie sketched one vaguely in the air. "They're these stupid fake things that get set up in supermarkets and malls and places like that around the holidays. Foster kids—foster kids and some other kids whose parents don't have money for presents, I think—fill out forms for what they'd like, that gets printed on ornaments, and then the idea is that people who are already out shopping pick an ornament and buy something and donate it so kids who wouldn't otherwise gets a present."
"Well, that sounds like a decent thing to do," Alex said. "What's the problem?"
"Nothing if you're young enough. People like buying stuffed animals and balls and wind-up cars and whatever. Once you're old enough to start asking for things you actually need like new shoes or a decent jacket or something like that, though? Forget it. And once you're a teenager, definitely forget it. Take a look at the trees on the final donation days and just about every ornament left will be for a kid ten and up. Well, that or a baby who's parents were stupid enough to ask for something practical like diapers. Maybe a couple ten year olds will get picked up, maybe the baby will, but the ornaments for teenagers? It's not even worth the taking the time to fill out the form. And Sonja knows it, even if she has to send it out."
"Are you sure?" Alex asked. "It couldn't hurt to write something down. Maybe you'll be surprised."
Jamie shook his head. His clothes were holding together okay, and since Alex was letting him use his coat, the only things he could really use were gas cards. Why even if he'd realized how late it was getting on Thursday he still would have finished up the job at the shop since that was about the only way he had to get gas money. There was no chance that anyone would ever buy him those. "The one year I got anything was the first year I was in foster care," he said. "A baseball. And never mind that my arm was broken in like three places at the time and I don't even like baseball. There's really no point."
"All right, if you're sure," Alex said with a frown. "But if you think of something you want to do for Christmas, you let me know. Got it?"
"I'm good."
Alex seemed to accept that, pushing himself to his feet and flipping the laptop shut. "Then let's go see what my mother sent me."
"I think this one is from art class," Jamie said, dropping back down on the couch and indicating the first binder he'd opened. "Is that supposed to be a skull?" He turned the binder sideways, frowning at the image on the first page, but skull was still the best he could come up with. Not that that was saying much. He flipped a little further. "And if that's supposed to be a person, they've got three arms."
Alex shook his head and put the rest of the binders from that box on the coffee table before taking the one out of Jamie's hands and tossing it back in. "Trash. My art career lasted even less time than my music career, and that's despite the fact that I think my brother fed my recorder to the goats."
"All recorders should be fed to goats." They weren't even musical instruments, they were plastic torture devices in the form of whistles. He and Faustus had 'accidentally' thrown Faustus' little sister's off the roof last summer just to make the bad noise stop.
"Can't argue with you there," Alex said, and then looked over at Jamie. "Don't you play the guitar?"
"Sometimes," he admitted after a minute. He wasn't sure how Alex knew that, except that a lack of guitar picks had led to him being stupid and getting sentenced to community service at the station in the first place. Maybe it had been on a form somewhere, although why that would come up and not the fact that he was in foster care he had no idea.
"I don't remember seeing one with your things."
"It's with my bikes." Not that a freezing cold storage shed was a great place to keep a guitar, but he hadn't had a lot of choice at the time. "My last foster parents didn't like it and I didn't want them to..." He trailed off with a shrug, looking away. Good guitars—any guitars—weren't the kind of thing you found at the thrift shop very often and he hadn't wanted to risk them taking it from him. Technically they weren't allowed to do that, at least not permanently, but if it had disappeared while he was at school it wasn't like he'd have been able to do anything about it. He'd lost other things like that.
"You could bring it here," Alex said. "I wouldn't mind. You can't possibly be worse than I was on a recorder."
Jamie shrugged again and opened the next binder, and to his relief Alex he heard Alex doing the same. "Ick. Math."
"Math is not 'ick,' it's important for your future."
"Uh-huh." Alex had been good at it, from the look of things, which just about figured. "Oh, hey. Pictures." The old Polaroid kind, and he pulled them out of the back flap of the binder. One of three children in a row, one of the oldest boy in the first picture alone, and then one of someone's foot that had to be a mistake. "Is that you?" he asked, pointing at the picture of the single boy. The hair and eye color looked just about right, although the features were thinner than Alex's. Then again, Jamie didn't figure the kid in the picture was any older than he was so he may have just grown into them.
Alex leaned over. "No, that would be my older brother." He indicated the picture with three children in it. "The one on the right is me, then that's Pete again on the left, and Cathy is our little sister."
"You all look alike." And Alex—even a mini-Alex—in overalls was even weirder than him in jeans, not that Jamie was going to say that out loud.
"That would be the other reason that the switched at birth theory doesn't work out," Alex said. "And never mind that Pete and Cathy both got married right out of high school and are very happy raising another generation in middle of nowhere Wyoming with no idea why I wanted to go away for school at all, never mind go to medical school."
"Your brother's name is Peter?" Jamie had to ask.
"Yeah. Peter, Alexander, and Catherine and I'm just very glad that my parents never got around to changing their—our—last names like they kept threatening to. We got enough 'Great' jokes anytime all three of us were together as it was."
Jamie snickered despite himself. "Sorry."
"It's fine. At least Pete, Alex, and Cathy are all perfectly reasonable nicknames."
"Peter's my brother's name too," Jamie admitted. "Although I don't think anyone has ever called him Pete in his life."
"Huh. Small world." Alex set the two pictures with people in them aside and tossed the one of the foot in with the binders and then looked over at Jamie with a frown. "Is your name Jamie or James? I could have sworn that one of your forms said James, but then I've never seen it since. Or heard you use it."
"I don't like James." Sonja must have put it on something because he sure as hell never would have. So far Alex had stuck to Jamie even when he was in trouble—well, that or Jaim which was a little quicker but fine too—and he'd just as soon it stayed that way.
"Okay," Alex said.
Jamie opened the next binder and made a face. "More math." There weren't even any interesting pictures in this one, either.
Alex must not have found anything useful in his last binder either, because it went back into the second box with the rest and he moved on to the third box. Jamie took the fourth—less math, more science, not really any better—but he couldn't help looking over when Alex pulled out a couple more pictures.
"And there are the goats."
"What do you even do with goats?" Jamie asked, leaning over to look at the pictures. "I mean, you can't ride them or anything, right?" Alex was in one of the pictures here too, this time with what had to be a baby goat in his arms, and while it was cute, it didn't look any bigger than a small dog.
"Well, I can't say I didn't try a few times when I was little," Alex said. "Mostly my brother's fault, for the record. But no, they're way too small for that." He shook hid head. "It's sort of a cross between having sheep and cattle. Like cattle you can get meat, milk, all of that. Butter is near impossible, but I'm guessing you've seen goat cheese or goat's milk soap at the store before."
"I didn't realize that stuff came from actual goats. I thought it was just a name, like buffalo wings."
"Surprise. And then you can get fiber from them too, like sheep, although trying to get ours sheared was always a fight and a half. Anyway, they're cheaper than most other animals, can eat quite a bit that other animals can't, and they're a little easier to handle even if they are demons about breaking out of any pen you put them in. Most of the people in town thought my parents and their friends were crazy when they were first starting out, but it worked out okay." He put the goat pictures with the others that Jamie had found.
The last two boxes didn't yield anything useful, and Alex stacked them with the rest with a sigh. "More work than half a dozen pictures really deserved, but at least it's done. Thank you for your help."
"Want me to take the boxes out to the trash? Or I could just keep your math notebooks," Jamie said. Although that would really only be useful if they were still using the same book and homework assignments as Alex had been in way-back-whenever Wyoming so probably not much use in the end.
"If you need help with your homework, you come talk to me," Alex said. "You don't copy it. Are you still breathing okay?"
"Yeah."
"Then yes, please."
Alex was gone by the time Jamie got them all out, probably back to his room, and he went and heated up another bowl of soup. It'd be at least a couple more hours before it was time for dinner.