Thanks to everyone who read and to Callisto's Moon and Ghostwriter for reviewing.

There was a light knock at his door, and Jamie curled further under his blankets.

"Come set the table, Jamie," Alex said. "Dinner will be ready in a few minutes."

"'m not hungry."

There were a few long moments of silence while Jamie hoped that Alex had gone away, and then, "May I come in?"

Jamie wanted that about as much as he wanted to go out and sit down with Alex, and never mind that lunch had been hours ago and Alex had already been here where he got home so he hadn't even grabbed any snacks from the kitchen before retreating to his room. It wasn't fair. They'd been getting along just fine without those stupid records and all of that shit that no one needed to think about or know or anything, and now Alex had them and Jamie hadn't even had a say in it and he hated his life.

"Jaim?"

"Fine." It wasn't what he wanted to say, but he still wasn't sure what Alex would do if he refused.

"Thank you."

Jamie heard the door open, and then a moment later the mattress behind him dipped as Alex took a seat.

"I don't suppose you could come out?"

"Why? I'm grounded so it's not like I can go anywhere."

"Well, it would be a little easier to talk if we were face to face. And if you didn't want to be grounded you shouldn't have been two hours late getting home last night. We both know that your grandmother's nursing home closed for visiting long before that hour."

"I forgot it was Sunday." And he really, really hadn't wanted to talk to Alex. Still didn't want to talk to Alex. Saturday he'd been able to slip in right before curfew and get in the shower and then bed before Alex could come out of his room and try to talk to him, and then yesterday morning he'd taken off early even though it had meant missing breakfast, but by nighttime he'd run out of options. Well, except not coming home at all, but that would have landed him in major trouble. He'd settled for coming in late enough that he'd hoped that Alex would be in bed since Mondays usually meant an early shift at the hospital for him, which had obviously been wishful thinking on Jamie's part, but at least it had been so late that Jamie had only gotten yelled at and grounded before being sent to his room. Except now it was today, and even if Alex had had to leave before he'd woken up this morning he was obviously home now and Jamie wasn't allowed to escape.

"You're more than smart enough to figure out what day of the week it is," Alex said dryly. "And even if you did mistake it for Saturday, you still got home an hour past when you should have and you'd still be grounded."

Jamie scowled into the blankets. Most adults believed him when he said he didn't remember things; Alex said he was smart and could figure it out. It was annoying.

"Come on, Jaim. You can't avoid me forever."

Probably not forever, no, but maybe until Alex got sick of him and got rid of him. Except that Jamie wasn't exactly sure when that was going to happen now since it wasn't like anyone had ever become a foster parent just for him before, and anyway Alex definitely wasn't going away right this second. After another long moment Jamie sighed and uncurled enough to poke his head out.

"Thank you." If Alex noticed his scowl, he ignored it. "I didn't get a chance to talk to you Saturday night, or even yesterday for that matter, but I did get Hank's message about you guys having a more exciting shift than you should have."

That wasn't at all what Jamie had expected him to say, and it took him a moment to recover. "It was fine for the first five hours or whatever, mostly nothing happened so we got a bunch of stuff from Brooke's list done around the station, but getting stuck on the side of the road with a pissed off gazillion-year-old at the end kind of sucked." Talking to Alex at this angle was weird, and he pushed himself into a sitting position. "I guess it was a good thing that the callout was more of a freakout than anything else or it could have been really bad."

"What do you mean?"

"Hank told the guy it was a panic attack not a heart attack, but he was old and he wanted to go to the hospital anyway so Hank said we'd take him. But then when the engine seized..." Jamie shrugged. "I think he probably came closer to a heart attack right then than anytime else. The backup squad ended up having to come pick him up and take him in."

"Great, there's a phone call I'm not going to enjoy. Although I'd better not hear that you referred to him as a gazillion-year-old to his face."

"Duh," Jamie returned. He wasn't a total idiot. Anyway, Hank and Val had done most of the talking where the old guy was concerned, Tyler had been the one in the driver's seat and Jamie probably knew more about engines than the other three combined so he'd been poking around in the wreckage.

"Good. Thank you." Alex sighed. "I'm curious what happened because that ambulance was just in for a regular service appointment on Friday morning and I'd have expected them to catch anything that serious then."

"There probably wasn't anything serious before then."

"Hm?"

"Whoever did the oil change put the cap back on crooked enough that almost all the oil drained out. By the time it started smoking on our way to the hospital there were parts welded together." It was kind of a surprise that no one had noticed the oil puddle in the garage, and there definitely was one, he'd checked when the tow truck had dropped them back at the station on the way to the garage, but then again whoever had parked the ambulance after the last time it had been used had backed it in, and as always they'd been in a hurry heading out.

For a moment Alex looked startled, and then he shook his head. "That's not good news, but you'd know better than me, I think. What does it mean for repair time?"

Jamie snorted. "No one's repairing that, you're getting a new engine if you want it running again."

"Great. I guess I'll check with the garage about that too because we don't exactly have spare ambulances lying around. Shouldn't there have been some kind of dashboard warning light about something like that?"

"Definitely, and it's not like Tyler would have ignored it if it had been on." Tyler wasn't exactly a car nut, even if he was way too attached to that half-go-kart thing his parents had bought him, but he wasn't stupid or careless either.

"Something else to check on, I guess," Alex said, and then paused. "You told me once that your dad was the reason you learned to work on cars. Is it...is working on cars something you actually like doing or did he...?"

Jamie went cold. "I like it fine, that's got nothing to do with him." Not that that would have mattered way back when how he'd felt, but who cared about back then anyway? It was something he was good at and there weren't all that many things he could say that about. He started to slide back down to pull himself back under the covers until a hand landed against his shoulder, at which point he jerked away automatically. "No!"

"Shit." Alex took his hand away immediately. "Jamie, I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"

"Just leave me alone."

"Jaim...kiddo, you can't hide in here forever." Something in the general direction of the kitchen beeped, and he sighed. "Will you please come have some dinner? We'll find something else to talk about, I promise."

Jamie shook his head and kept his back to Alex.

"Then how about I go get us both plates and we can eat in here tonight?"

Alex was usually picky about eating at the table except for when they got pizza, and Jamie hesitated.

"I'll be back in a few minutes."

Unfortunately, at least in Jamie's opinion, he kept his word, and as much as Jamie wanted to go back to hiding the chicken smelled really good.

"Sit up so you don't choke, please," Alex prompted as his traitorous stomach growled and forced him to roll back over.

"I'm not going to choke," Jamie said, but since Alex wasn't giving him the plate he sat up anyway.

"Thank you."

The plate was handed over, and it was the fancy kind of chicken with all the spices plus some carrots and vegetables to go with it, and his stomach growled again. It wasn't fair that Alex was nice to him, either.

"Your social worker pointed out something that I should probably have noticed before," Alex said after a few bites of his own meal.

Jamie tensed. "Like what?" This conversation had already taken one turn that he hadn't liked, and he'd managed to inhale half of the piece of chicken which might be enough to tide him over for awhile if he needed to try disappearing again.

Alex actually flushed a little, which was kind of weird. "Well, that you'd probably prefer a room that has some things that you picked out instead of my spare room collection."

"What?" he repeated, pausing over a forkful of vegetables.

"You could hang some posters up if you'd like," Alex said, gesturing around them with his fork. "I have no idea what's popular with teengaers these days, but I'm sure I've got thumbtacks somewhere. Or if there's a different color you'd like for the walls, we could do that too." A pause. "A different color within reason. And maybe you'd like some blankets and stuff that didn't come from JCPenney's two days before my parents' first visit I don't know how many years ago?"

"You don't—it's fine," Jamie said, shaking his head quickly. "It's nice." It was warm and not a porch or shared with three other random foster kids or whatever, and Alex hadn't even said anything when he'd pulled a couple extra blankets and pillows out of the trunk. Even thought it wasn't even that cold anymore.

"Really? I can't say that a random flowered bedspread would have been my first choice at sixteen. It's still not a particular preference of mine, for the record, but my mother would have been horrified if she'd gotten here to find a bunch of random blankets, so I took what I could get at the time and haven't thought much about it since."

"It's not...there's lots worse places I've stayed," Jamie said, looking away again. "And you shouldn't get stuck with a lot of stuff you don't want when..."

"When what?"

Jamie shrugged. He wasn't really looking forward to ending up back in some foster home where he got shoved in a corner and no one cared what he liked for dinner, but he wasn't stupid enough believe it wasn't going to happen either.

Unfortunately Alex was a lot smarter than most of his previous foster parents. "Jaim, I'm not planning to get rid of you anytime soon. You know that, right?"

He shrugged again. He'd been dealing with this whole system a lot longer than Alex.

"I'm not planning to get rid of you, kiddo," Alex repeated. "And you've got a couple years yet before you'll be old enough to be out on your own."

He scoffed. He'd done just fine for this long. Mostly, anyway.

"Fine, then, officially on your own. Not to mention that if you keep doing things that you shouldn't and getting yourself grounded, you might as well have a room that suits you."

Jamie finished off the other half of his chicken and made a face.

"Tell you what," Alex said. "I've got a shift at the hospital tomorrow evening, and I know you're working Wednesday, so why don't you and I go down to the department store Thursday night and see what they've got? I'm at the point where I ought to replace my pillows and pick up another set of sheets now that the weather is getting warmer anyway."

"But—"

"Do you really want to risk my taste?"