Thanks to everyone who read and to MelsieR for reviewing.

Jamie stepped off the bus with a sigh of relief and headed up the street to Alex's house. Free, and free for almost two whole weeks at that. Well, he was on the schedule for a couple days at the station, but that wasn't a big deal. Not having to go to school was the important part.

It was still cold, but the roads were finally clear of snow, and the lack of snow in the forecast for the next couple days meant that he could get his bike out tomorrow and head down to Crossville for a visit. And maybe Alex would let him keep it in the garage afterwards. It wasn't that the buses were horrible, but they were nowhere near as convenient as having his own wheels, and there was plenty of room in the garage without even having to move anything. Adults didn't always like motorcycles, though, and he had a feeling that it was the kind of thing that Alex would be picky about.

He saw Alex's car coming from the other direction as he was turning up the driveway, and he waved and stepped aside as Alex pulled into the garage. Some meeting must have been canceled because Alex didn't usually get home this early.

"Hey," Alex greeted as he got out of the car. "How was school?"

"Done. Finally. And no, I don't have any homework." Which was true, although even if he had had some he probably wouldn't have admitted it. Lately when he admitted that he had homework Alex made him do it, and even if Alex was good at math and science and all of that crap and could usually spot whatever stupid mistake Jamie was making and show him how to fix it, it was still homework and he didn't see the point most of the time. He usually did well enough on tests to pass, especially since his teachers didn't expect him to do more than squeak by anyway.

Alex smiled and shook his head, shutting the exterior garage door before following Jamie inside. "Fair enough. Do you have any plans for the evening?"

"Nah, everybody is busy with family and holiday planning and whatever." Everybody he'd seen, anyway. Kenny hadn't been at school today, but considering that it was the Friday before a break that wasn't really a surprise. "I was thinking about going to go down to visit my grandma tomorrow, though."

Alex nodded. "That's a good idea. Can make it on your own, or do you need a ride?"

"I'll be fine, I was planning to grab my bike since the roads are all clear now. Clear down there too; I checked."

"All right." He took off his coat and hung it up in the closet. " You'll be back by eleven?"

"Oh, yeah, visiting hours don't last that long anyway." Jamie usually just tossed his coat on the chair in his bedroom, but since Alex was holding out a hand he dropped his backpack to the floor and shrugged out of it, handing it over for Alex to hang up too.

"Okay."

"I..."

"What?" Alex asked, looking back at him as he trailed off.

"Would it be okay if I brought it back here afterwards? My bike, I mean."

"Sure, there should be plenty of room in the garage. Where have you been keeping it, anyway? I can't imagine that the school lets you leave it parked in their lot."

Jamie shook his head. "My grandma has a storage unit up here. From before, when she thought the nursing home was temporary and she'd be able to move back into her own apartment sometime. Dad said he wouldn't pay for it so she set up some kind of automatic transfer thing that's still in place." Jamie still wasn't sure how that worked, but he wasn't looking that particular gift horse in the mouth too closely, either. Mostly he just hoped that whatever arrangement she'd set up lasted until he turned eighteen. "She doesn't have a lot in there, just a couple pieces of furniture and some boxes of clothes and whatever, so I made some room for my bikes for when I haven't got anywhere else to keep them." Plus his gear and guitar, but those just got stacked on top of other things so they didn't really count, and he definitely wasn't going to mention that he sometimes slept there in better weather.

"Bikes, plural?" Alex picked up his briefcase again and turned down the hall towards his room, waving at Jamie to follow.

Jamie looped his backpack back over his shoulder and trailed after him. "I ride motocross. Not too often," mostly since spare parts and tires and that kind of thing didn't come cheap and he sure as hell didn't have the money to travel to the big competitions, "but I try do at least one or two races a year."

"Oh, that's right. Your friend took a nasty fall earlier this year when you guys went off somewhere that you shouldn't have."

Trust Alex to remember that. "Yeah."

"When did you start?" Alex asked, putting his briefcase on the dresser and taking off his suit jacket. "I imagine there's probably room for two bikes here if you'd like to bring them both."

Jamie shrugged. He was probably right about the space, but there was no reason to bother with the dirt bike. He wouldn't be taking it out again until mid-spring at the earliest, and he'd be long gone from here by then. "For motocross, one of my foster brothers awhile back gave me his bike and gear and stuff when he joined the Navy. He and his dad used to ride and he managed to hang onto it somehow when he got dumped into the system, but then it wasn't like he could take it with him to basic training, and he didn't have anyone else to give it to. It took a couple years before the gear really fit right, but it works pretty well now." He'd replaced the nameplate, but that was all it had really needed.

"And your other bike?"

Tie and shoes were hung up neatly alongside the jacket and set aside on a closet shelf respectively, and Jamie made himself refrain from rolling his eyes. Alex didn't like eye rolls, but there was neat and there was obsessive and Jamie was pretty sure he knew which one Alex was. "The foster family I was with last spring...well, they didn't exactly want me hanging around the house too much or anything, but the neighbor who lived behind them had an auto shop. He let me work there sometimes and I had enough by the time they got rid of me to buy my bike and get it ride-able." Fortunately his foster parents had never actually talked to the neighbor or learned that Jamie had been getting paid or they'd have confiscated the money 'for his own good.' "His shop is kind of out of the way now, but I still do jobs for him sometimes when I can." Having to work at the station on top of school made it tough, but he'd try for more again next summer.

"Were you even sixteen at that point?" Alex asked with a frown. "How did you get a license?"

"I was a couple months shy, but Sonja helped me fill out the paperwork for a hardship permit. And I'd been riding motocross enough by then that it wasn't hard to pass the road test after the forms were okayed. Nobody's ever asked to see it, though. I'm a good rider." He felt his shoulders come up at the sound of a belt slipping through loops, but Alex was only putting it with the rest of his dress clothes, and he made himself take a slow breath and hoped Alex hadn't noticed.

"You have a helmet?" Alex asked, turning back towards him.

"Yes. And yes I always wear it."

"Good. And no one rides with you without one?"

"Got a spare for passengers," Jamie agreed. He wasn't stupid; getting pulled over would be a good way to lose his license. It might not matter as much now that he was sixteen, but everyone knew that tickets were expensive.

"Good," Alex repeated. He sighed and flipped his briefcase open quickly before nodding and shutting it again, waving at Jamie to precede him back into the main room. "You just got home so I know you haven't had a snack, and I can't say that I feel much like cooking tonight. What do you say we have an early dinner? Get a pizza delivered and find a movie that looks good?"

"For real?" Jamie asked, turning to look at him. They'd had takeout once or twice before, or Alex had picked something up on the way home from the station or the hospital or whatever, anyway, but he was usually pretty picky about sitting at the table and didn't watch much television at all outside of the news and the occasional documentary from what Jamie had seen. Once in awhile he'd come out and join them if they were all watching something at the station, but that was pretty rare.

"For real. You find a movie that looks good and I'll see about the pizza? There are some DVDs in the cabinet under the TV if there's nothing on television."

"Okay."

"Is there anything in particular you want on the pizza? Or don't want?"

Jamie shook his head. "I like everything." He might think Alex bought weird things at the grocery store sometimes, especially when it came to vegetables—he hadn't actually known what a whole radish looked like until last week—but he had better sense than to complain when the food was in front of him. Especially since Alex let him have as much as he wanted.

"All right."

Jamie headed for his room to drop off his backpack and boots and then returned to the living room and grabbed the remote. Alex didn't get that many channels, and he had no idea what might be on tonight. A quick flip through didn't show anything that he was interested in: Christmas crap, news, more news, more Christmas crap, football crap, and some romance thing that was probably set at Christmastime given his luck. Not that he was very interested in romantic comedies when it wasn't Christmas either.

He dropped down in front of the television and opened up the cabinet. History movie, history documentary...ah, that was better. Alex actually had some books he liked, and he never said anything when Jamie borrowed one—well, as long as Jamie remembered to put it back when he was done, anyway—so it made sense that he might have a few movies that were watchable.

Jamie didn't recognize the comedian on the front of the next DVD he pulled out, but the jokes on the back looked funny, and when he looked he found a few more by the same guy so presumably Alex liked him.

"Did you find something?" Alex asked.

Jamie held up the DVD.

"That's a good one. The pizza should be here in twenty minutes or so."

Jamie put it in and then moved back to sit on the couch. And then stretched out on his side since Alex took the recliner and no one else was around to claim it. "Isn't it kind of early for you to be home?" he asked as the warnings started to play.

"Third Fridays are usually town council meetings," Alex agreed, "but they went into special session early to deal with some budget issues, so there was no reason for me to stay."

"Are there always budget issues? I mean, it seems like it," or at least Alex spent a lot of time muttering over spreadsheets, anyway, "but the EMT service can't just go away, right?"

"Well, for once it's good budget issues. That doesn't happen very often, but this time of year you've got a lot of people making charitable donations, either for the holidays or for year-end tax purposes in general, and some of that filters down to us. It's just a matter of arguing about how to portion it out, because you're right, the rest of the year we usually do have the other kind of budget issues. They can't remove ambulance service entirely, but they could try to shift us out to the county level, they could hire out to a for-profit service, they could cut our supply budget even further..."

"Wait, how could they hire someone when they're talking about cutting the supply budget?" Jamie asked, tilting his head back to look at Alex. "That doesn't even make sense."

"Welcome to politics." Alex shook his head. "The idea is that contracting with a for-profit would mean involving people with more experience and and a network of suppliers that runs across a wider area than we ever could, therefore they could be more efficient and keep costs down despite having a higher actual overhead. In my opinion that's exactly as stupid as it sounds and the costs will at minimum double, but I have a slight conflict of interest that means that some of the council members don't pay as much attention to me as I would prefer. These donations are actually a good thing in that respect because if it was a for-profit service everything would have to come out of the city budget and most people recognize that, but then you've got other city programs that would be just as happy if that happened since their donation allocation would go up.

"That sounds like a headache." Not to mention that Jamie had a hard time imagining people ignoring Alex—he knew firsthand how well that didn't go for him—but adults were weird.

"That is an understatement, and I get to have the same argument almost every month at the council meetings when the budget reviews happen."

Jamie shook his head. No wonder Alex got grumpy sometimes.

The DVD finished its run through FBI warnings and boring credits and the comedian launched into his first spiel. And Alex grabbed the remote off the arm of the couch and stopped it.

"What?" Jamie asked, tilting his head back again.

"I forgot about that. You do not need to be listening to that kind of language."

Jamie did roll his eyes at that. "Alex, I was listening to worse than that before I started school. I could probably out-swear you without breaking a sweat."

"That sounds like an excellent way to get yourself grounded for a very long time, and whether you know the words or not, that does not make it something acceptable for you to be watching."

"Come on."