Thanks to everyone who read and to Priyanka for reviewing.
This takes place across Season of the Hexenbiest and Face Off, episodes 2.12 and 2.13, but given how compressed the television episodes make the timeline I ended up putting Nick moving in with Monroe a little before Season of the Hexenbiest and the majority of Natural Born Wesen (2.14) won't happen or get a mention until after Christmas. Not sure if anyone except me cares about that, especially since I'm not going into detail about anything, but timelines have been known to drive me a little crazy :).
"The volunteer coordinator does not think that you're going to give the other volunteers cooties," Roddy said with a grin, tucking an arm behind his head and stretching out a little further. His socks brushed against the panel by his feet, and he thought again about moving into Dad's room where there was an actual full-sized bed rather than just this jammed in mattress-on-a-platform that he'd been using since he was a little kid. But that was Dad's room, and…. He shook his head. It was fine. He was used to this space, and it wasn't like he was really tall enough for the shorter mattress to matter anyway.
Besides, this was the easiest room in the trailer to keep warm when the heater started acting up. Continued acting up. Whatever. He'd left messages for the landlord about both the busted pipe into the kitchen and the breaker that kept tripping, but the odds of anything getting done before the next set of holidays were pretty much nil. He'd be lucky if anything was done before next spring.
"You want to bet?" Barry asked, drawing him back to the present. "I see Mrs. Young when she's giving me my assignments, and occasionally the computer guy, Ben, when I'm clocking in and out, but that's it. I know there have to be other volunteers around somewhere, like that random Blutbad girl and her mom who turned up that one time, but mostly when I'm working it feels like the place is staffed by the ghosts of food banks past."
"Oh, starting on the Christmas movies early?"
"Shut up."
Roddy laughed. "Well, I'd offer to join you, but unfortunately I still have that stupid high school thing that I have to go to every day." Not that he was getting much out of it beyond the music classes, but once again no one cared what he thought.
A sigh. "That's okay. I'm sure I could fit you into a box, but I don't think boxed rat counts as a nutritionally complete meal for anyone anyway."
"I'm flipping you off right now. Just for the record."
Barry snickered. "So how'd your concerts go, anyway? Or ballets, I guess it was. Did your conductor survive?"
"Dr. Warren survived, the bass section survived...a couple dancers did miss a turn and just about leapt straight into the orchestra pit about halfway through the dress rehearsal, though."
"Seriously?"
"Yeah. They stopped themselves just in time—perk of being good dancers, I guess, although personally I'd kind of liked to have seen a couple of the trombones get squished—but Monroe said that their expressions were pretty hilarious while they were scrambling to get back into line."
"I bet. What about everything else?"
"It all went pretty well. I mean, there were a couple of missed cues, the occasional creepily polite 'discussion' between Dr. Warren and the ballet coordinator person about the transition timings, that kind of thing, but we're not exactly doing anything revolutionary with The Nutcracker. Oh, and some rats kept losing their ears, but I guess they must have fixed the headbands or just gave up and glued them to people's heads because it wasn't a problem at the first official performance on Sunday."
"Rats?"
"There's a rat army that shows up partway through. Or mice, in some versions, but I like the rats better. And whatever you're thinking, shove it."
Barry ignored him and laughed, because of course he did.
"Anyway, next weekend might get a little rough by the end since we've got five performances in three days and except for intermission it's a pretty solid two hours every time not even counting setup and tuning and all of that, but at least we're not the ones who have to run all over the stage. And then there's just the one more before the break. Of course, it would be nice if my other teachers would take a hint and stop trying to fit in 'just one last thing' before the semester finals next week, but there's no way I'm getting that lucky." At least with his math class being an independent study he could let that slide a little and then catch up over break. Not that he wouldn't prefer to put off his history paper instead, but hell would freeze over before Dr. Christen gave that option.
"Okay, I can understand starting out with two performances, but why is it five and then one? That's seems like really bad planning on someone's part."
Roddy snorted. "It is, but apparently so many of my classmates—my classmates plus the ballet school kids, too, I guess—have tropical vacations or ski vacations or whatever planned that they couldn't put anything on the schedule after the Friday before Christmas without causing an uproar."
"Tropical, ew. Skiing, okay, at least that involves snow, but who'd want to go where it's hot and humid and all of that?"
Sometimes just how different his and Barry's lives were showed in more than just the Rabes' insane house.
"But I guess it's good that you're done after that Friday," Barry continued, before Roddy had to figure out what he was supposed to say.
"Yeah, I guess I don't really mind having that Saturday and Sunday free. Does Saturday still—" His phone beeped, and he lowered it to check the screen and then frowned. "Hey, can you give me a minute? Monroe's trying to call." And based on past experience, that meant things like crazy Grimms running around town.
"Yeah, sure, not like I'm going anywhere."
Roddy snorted and switched quickly. "Hello?"
"Hey, kid."
Monroe didn't sound quite right somehow, and Roddy pushed himself up into a sitting position and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, pushing his blanket aside. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing." He apparently realized how ridiculous that sounded, because he sighed almost immediately. "Well, nothing that you need to worry about, anyway. Things are...they kind of came to a head between Nick and Juliette."
"Bad?" Not that Roddy had any idea what he could do if the answer was yes, but he liked both of them. Nick was nice to him, and Juliette had been too, especially when he'd been staying at their place right around Dad's funeral.
"I really don't know. It's not—neither of them are hurt or anything," he said quickly, "at least not physically, but the whole situation is a mess. Even more so than it already was. Plus the Hexenbiest who caused all the trouble in the first place showed back up and caused some trouble for Hank, and—"
"Is she nuts?" Roddy interrupted. Like, who pissed off a Grimm that much and then didn't keep running, Hexenbiest or no? And he was saying that as someone who, again, liked Nick.
"Jury's still out. But I was thinking, it's probably not a great idea for you to come over this Thursday, all right? Better to give things some time to settle down. Maybe I could pick you up some evening after school next week instead, and we can grab dinner? I fly out Thursday morning, but any day before that would work."
"Yeah, sure, that'd be great." Roddy still hadn't figured out how he'd been going to get his suit safely through two days of school before the ballet on Friday night anyway. Friday itself he didn't expect to be an issue, Dr. Kaplan usually had a spare classroom or teachers' lounge or something set up for people who didn't have time to make a run home after school, but Thursday would mean having it jammed in his backpack or locker for a while, and there was no way that that ended well. Even if the orchestra was down in a pit rather than onstage for these performances, showing up in a wrinkled suit was an open invitation to lecture hell.
"Okay, good," Monroe said. " I've got to go, but I'll call you sometime this weekend and we can figure which day works best, all right?"
"Sure, but we've got performances at two and seven both Saturday and Sunday, so it'll have to be before or after those," Roddy reminded him. Not that he'd have his phone on him during the ballet anyway. Forget lectures about a wrinkled suit, if a phone went off...no thanks, he planned on living to see nineteen.
"Ah, that's right. Well, I'll try to catch you, and if I don't, we'll text. Sound good?"
"Yeah. Tell Nick to...I don't know, be careful or good luck or whatever, would you?" He had no idea which of those applied, but it felt like he should say something. "And let me know if there's anything I can do to help?"
"I will, but 'whatever' is probably the closest to appropriate right now, and I'm not sure what anyone can do. Oh, and…." He sighed. "Just, if you happen to run into any Hundjagers, give them a wide berth, would you?"
Roddy couldn't come up with any circumstances in which he wouldn't give a Hundjager a wide berth—they weren't cats, but they were still predators, and while he'd never actually met one they were also assholes by reputation—so he nodded. "Yeah, course. I guess maybe you should be careful too?"
"I'll be fine. Talk to you this weekend."
"Talk to you this weekend," Roddy echoed. Monroe disconnected, and after a moment he tapped the button to reconnect to Barry. "Hey. You still there?"
Some rustling, and then, "Hey, yeah, was starting to wonder if you'd forgotten me."
"No, sorry, Monroe just called to tell me that this Thursday isn't going to work for me going over to his place and suggested that we go out for dinner next week instead. Apparently there's more stuff going on with Nick and Juliette, and I guess maybe since Nick's staying with him it's uncomfortable to be around? I don't know, I didn't get a lot of details except that the same person who caused it all is somehow now causing problems for Detective Griffin—Nick's partner—too."
"That's weird. He's not even Wesen."
"Yeah, well, neither is Juliette. Oh, and for more weird, he—Monroe—also says to avoid Hundjagers."
"What? Why?" Barry asked. "I mean, yeah, but...why?"
"I don't know. I don't even know where I'd meet a Hundjager." His neighborhood might be on the rough side, but it wasn't that kind of rough. Roddy blew out a breath. "You know, given some of Monroe's other warnings, we're probably better off not knowing."
Barry was quiet for a moment, and then, "You might be right."
"So inhabited by ghosts or not, are you going to keep taking shifts at the food bank?" Roddy asked, stretching back out on his bed.
"Tomorrow and Thursday for sure, and then maybe a couple days next week too. Although next week is our finals week too. I am going to be so glad to be done with calculus and just have a month where I only have to worry about English."
"I take back anything I ever said about Nick and Monroe being weird."
"Hey," Roddy said, accepting a hug from Rosalee when she climbed out of Monroe's car. "Is your aunt feeling better?" Monroe had said she was back when he'd called to pick an evening for dinner and ask if Roddy would mind her joining them, and he hadn't made it sound like a sad thing at the time, but he'd also sounded weirdly distracted. And when Roddy'd tried to ask he'd only said something nonsensical about Nick and processing and then excused himself.
"Much better, thank you," she said. "And I left her with plenty of supplies and the number for several services through the senior center, so hopefully she'll stay that way. Why she thought it was a good idea to try scrubbing the front steps less than a month after surgery…." She shook her head.
Roddy didn't think that his front steps had ever been scrubbed unless getting rained on counted so he just echoed her head shake and then slid the passenger seat forward, scrambling into the back with his violin and backpack.
"Any preference for dinner?" Monroe asked as Rosalee retook her seat, looking between them.
"Roddy?" Rosalee asked.
"Anything's good with me. We had steak surprise for lunch today, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't steak and very sure it wasn't the kind of surprise that anyone wanted." Usually the food at Von Hamelin was pretty good, probably because rich kids weren't going to put up with the same crap that they served at the schools in his neighborhood, but even if he'd taken a plate—he got free lunches and knew better than to turn down food—he'd have been a lot more leery if he wasn't aware that his stomach could handle almost anything that wasn't actively poisonous.
"Well, I saw something about a new Peruvian place in the paper the other day," Monroe said with a chuckle. "According to the article they've got some great vegetarian options, and from the rest of the reviews it sounded like everyone else enjoyed it too."
Reading the newspaper was kind of a weird thing to do considering that it was the twenty-first century, but whatever, Monroe was weird sometimes, and Roddy had been serious about anything sounding good. And since Rosalee seemed agreeable, he nodded quickly.
"So Monroe said that you just sold your dad's truck," Rosalee said, twisting to look back at him as Monroe started them towards downtown. "Out of curiosity, how much of a pain was it? Freddy's car has just been sitting in his parking spot since everything happened, and while it's a nice option to have, I'm really not sure I'd use it often enough to make it worth keeping."
"The paperwork was a major pain," Roddy said immediately. "I swear, the Portland Title Office is set up to give people headaches, so if you have to go there you probably want to do it when you've got a couple hours free. But other than that I didn't do a whole lot. I meant to, but then after Thanksgiving one of my uncles showed up saying that he wanted to buy it, and that was sort of it." It had hurt more than he'd expected to watch it roll away forever, but…. He clenched his hands quickly, out of sight of Rosalee and Monroe, letting the bite of nails into his palms distract him. A couple more months when he didn't need to worry about rent mattered a lot more than a truck that he had no use for, and Dad would have been the first to say so. "I was originally thinking I'd put ads online," he continued. "Like on Craigslist or whatever the Portland car selling sites are. And then I think you're allowed to meet at the police station for test drives and stuff, but I kept forgetting to ask Nick so I don't really know if there's someone that helps with that or if it's just supposed to be a safe place to meet. Sorry."
"Don't be sorry, that's more than I knew before. Thank you."
"You haven't had any problems with your uncles since then, have you?" Monroe asked.
Roddy scoffed despite himself. "No." Monroe had been right and Uncle Joseph had been the one to bring Uncle Michael to pick up the truck, and he'd certainly tried to be an ass, but no Reinigen was going to go head to head with a Blutbad without a lot more backup than a younger brother standing awkwardly by. He'd backed off pretty ridiculously fast when Monroe had come out of the trailer to say hello, coincidentally about half a second after he'd grabbed Roddy, and Roddy privately doubted that he'd see any of his relatives again for a couple months.
Which, all things considered, he was pretty okay with. Between Uncle Joseph's repeated declarations that Roddy was going to hand over Dad's truck for nothing because he said so, and Uncle Michael looking the other way when Uncle Joseph had gone after him...well, they'd been rapidly approaching the point that the only thing that Roddy might have willingly given either of them was a busted nose. And once Monroe's appearance had sent Uncle Joseph cowering away, Uncle Michael had handed over an already-completed check and signed the papers that Roddy had offered him without comment, so Roddy didn't even knew what the point of the whole stupid charade had been anyway. Just another attempt to screw with—or screw over—him, probably.
Monroe looked back at him again, and Roddy shrugged. "It'll be fine. Really, they're not going to waste time on me. It's not like it's a secret how we all feel about each other." He might be willing to be a little more tolerant of his non-Joseph uncles and his cousins if they'd stop demanding that he quit school and become a good little drone, but as long as they held on to that expectation not to mention let Joseph pull the crap he did, they could all fuck off.
He did miss Dad being the one to say that, though.
Monroe muttered something distinctly rude, and least in comparison to what Roddy was used to hearing from him. "And the check they gave you?" he asked in a more normal tone.
"It cleared on Friday. I was checking at the ATM every day on my way to school." Because that would have been a way for them to be assholes remotely, and he was just glad that the idea of stopping the check apparently hadn't occurred to anyone. Or maybe they'd just been too spooked to try it. He could live with that, too.
"Okay, good. But if they do bother you, you say something, all right?"
Now it was Roddy's turn to mutter. Not that he hadn't appreciated Monroe's support, because even if he had managed to bloody Uncle Joseph's nose it wouldn't have been anything like an even fight, but it wasn't...he could take care of himself.
"Roddy?" Monroe asked, turning to look at him directly when they pulled up to a stoplight.
"I guess," he finally relented.
"Do more than guess. If not me, then Nick or Rosalee. Or Frank, for that matter."