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"Gentlemen, we'd like a word," a voice called from somewhere behind Barry.
Something nagged at Barry's memory as he took a step back from the graffiti-covered wall with the rest of his work crew. On Barry's part with an internal sigh of relief, because his knuckles were getting raw where he kept accidentally scraping them against the brick instead of the brush he was holding. Barry was luckier than a lot of people on parole in that he could do his community service hours at basically any time without being constrained by a job, but it turned out that all he was eligible for at this point was picking up trash or scrubbing graffiti, and only graffiti scrubbing had had open slots. He was kind of hoping he'd be able to sign up for enough of those timeslots to be done by the time his ankle monitor came off in six months, but right this second he wasn't sure that his hands would hold up. Lifting boxes was way easier.
"According to the parole office, six of you were working at Johnson and Vine last week?" the same voice asked, and Barry finally saw the man speaking and recognized one of the detectives who'd arrested him. No wonder his voice had sounded familiar.
The shift supervisor stepped forward. "I was, and a couple of the others as well. Is there something that we can help you with?"
"I'm Detective Griffin; this is my partner Detective Burkhardt. We'd like to ask about anything that any of you might have noticed about the white van parked in front of the laundromat while you were there. The driver, the passengers, maybe any packages anyone was carrying?"
Detective Burkhardt being the Grimm, and he was just coming up beside his partner now. He must have been parking their car or something.
Barry had a sudden and completely gutless impulse to find something to hide behind as the two of them scanned the line. He wasn't...it wasn't that he was afraid of the Grimm, exactly. Mom and Dad had told him stories, sure, but no self-respecting Jagerbar was going to cower from anyone. It was more that he never wanted to see anyone associated with his arrest again, not the human detective or the Grimm detective or any of the other officers either. Unfortunately at a few inches over six feet his options for hiding places were pretty limited, and he didn't have much of a choice except to stand impassively.
"Of course, Detectives," the supervisor said. "I'm sure that everyone who was there would be happy to tell you what they remember." That was said with a warning look down the line, a less-than-subtle reminder that parole agreements included a standard clause about cooperation with law enforcement agencies, and Barry was suddenly glad that he'd only started this past Monday. In prison you didn't talk to the guards any more than you had to, he'd learned that real quick, and he strongly suspected that things weren't much different out here no matter what anyone had agreed to. He didn't exactly want to piss off any police officers either, though, especially ones who 'knew' him, so not having been here and completely legitimately not having a clue what they were talking about was about the best that he could hope for.
"We appreciate that," Detective Burkhardt said. "And we'll try not to take up too much of your time. Do you mind if we start with you?"
"Not at all. But there's no reason for everyone to be standing around while we're chatting."
Barry had no idea how the others felt, but personally he was more than willing to take the excuse to turn around and get back to scrubbing. Raw knuckles were annoying, but he'd rather those than talking to the police any day. Unfortunately while the detectives clearly knew who they wanted to speak to among the others on the line, the Grimm detective had apparently caught sight of him as well. Their third interviewee was a man two spots down from Barry, but while Detective Griffin walked right past him on his way to number four, Detective Burkhardt took a detour and stopped beside him.
"Hey, it's Barry, right? Rabe? I remember you."
"Yeah," Barry acknowledged, turning reluctantly away from the wall again. He hadn't forgotten the Grimm, either, even if the guy somehow seemed a little shorter now and for the moment his eyes looked as human as anyone else's. And then Barry felt his control slip and he woged despite himself. "I remember you, too," he growled.
Detective Burkhardt's eyes suddenly looked incredibly inhuman, but although he held up his hands, he didn't retreat. "Hey. Easy. I just wanted to talk to you." A pause. "I heard about your mom. I know it doesn't make anything better, but..." A shake of his head. "I'm sorry."
Surprise as much as anything helped Barry to get himself back under control, and once he had he lowered his eyes and kept his mouth firmly shut. The Grimm was right; it didn't make anything better. Nothing ever would.
"You weren't working last week, were you?"
No doubt he already knew the answer, but Barry shook his head anyway. "No. I just started on Monday."
"Okay. That's all I needed, then, thank you." A pause. "You might not believe me, but I'm glad you're out. Stay out of any more trouble, okay?"
He stepped back before Barry could answer, moving to rejoin his partner, and Barry blinked and stared after him for a moment. That had been...he wasn't sure what that had been. At least it was over, though, and he grabbed the brush he'd somehow dropped and ducked it back into the bucket of soapy water. A little more fiercely than necessary, apparently, given the wave of soapy water that splashed to the sidewalk.
"You know him?" the man—human, as far as Barry could tell—next to him asked, more than a little suspicion in his tone.
Barry checked that Detective Burkhardt had well and truly moved on. "Define 'know.' He and his partner are the ones that arrested me."
"Well, shit."
That, in Barry's opinion, pretty well summed up the interaction.
Their shift on graffiti scrubbing ended at four, and Barry was back at home shortly thereafter. He'd heard some of the others talking about using the time after their community service rotation ended and before their monitors would expect them home to do things that they might otherwise not have permission for—visiting girlfriends seemed to be popular—but it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go.
Back when he'd been younger, before he'd started to woge, he'd had a lot of friends besides the twins. Jase and TB always been there, but the three of them had also played every sport that they could talk their parents into, and Barry remembered birthday parties with probably two dozen children running around the backyard. And then there had been an accidental woge during a flag football game, and a human boy on the other team had ended up in the hospital with a compound fracture, and Mom and Dad and the Colberts had gotten together and decided that allowing three Jagerbear cubs just coming into their strength to compete against human or even most other Wesen children was a recipe for disaster. Between them being pulled from all of their teams, everyone in their cohort moving up to middle school and having a much larger crowd to interact with, and Mom in particular making a concerted effort to find the three of them more isolated—and therefore safe—activities to participate in, his friends who weren't the twins had started to fade away quickly. By the time they'd reached high school Barry had been friendly with some of the other students, but that was about it. He'd never had any issues finding partners for group projects or anything like that, even when he and the twins didn't share a specific class, but there were no actual friends among them. Not even of the casual kind, never mind someone that you could just drop in on after a year in prison.
Well, there were Mr. and Mrs. Colbert, of course, but even if they'd practically been his second parents...he just didn't think that that was a good idea right now.
Barry grabbed a quick snack when he got home and then headed down to the game room. He'd gotten a two-week leave of absence from his community college courses to get settled back in here, but he needed to be caught up again by next week if he wanted to keep his grades decent. Most of it wasn't a big deal: he was pretty sure that he knew as much US history as his teacher did given all of the events that Mom had taken him to over the years, and the two short stories he'd picked to do opinion pieces on were ones he'd read back in one high school lit class or another. But he'd gone ahead and signed up for a calculus class too, and right now he was really regretting it. He wasn't bad at math, but he wasn't particularly good either, and it was a horrible subject to ask questions about over email or chat.
Aside from the small desk in the corner of the game room giving him a better setup for the computer than anything his own room, the whole game room itself was less uncomfortable for him these days than most of the rest of the house. It had always had fewer artifacts than anywhere else, mostly because Mom had been unwilling to place precious antiquities in a room where three Jagerbar boys regularly roughhoused. Which was reasonable considering that three of the pool table legs were replacements, as were the coffee table and a couple bookshelves and he couldn't even remember what else. So when he'd removed the few hangings that had been on the walls, it had been pretty unnoticeable.
His room on the other hand...he'd done the same thing as Dad and moved everything he'd had into Dad's old office, but unlike in the game room the removal of everything in his room had made the place look completely and utterly wrong. Dad had told him that he could use his credit card to order new stuff if he found something he'd like, new posters or other wall hangings or whatever, but thus far he hadn't seen anything that he wanted.
Not that he'd really looked, because that felt wrong too.
He'd slept on the couch in the game room the last couple nights, and never mind that he didn't fit particularly well.
Barry took a deep breath once he was in front of the computer, making himself focus on his work, and he'd finished one opinion piece and gotten half a dozen problems into his calculus assignment when he heard the garage door opening upstairs. After one more look at his current problem, he flipped his scratch notebook shut and pushed himself to his feet. He could use a break. Besides he was getting hungry again.
Dad smiled in greeting when he got to the top of the stairs, handing over a bag of takeout—it smelled like Thai tonight; Dad usually picked up something on the way home or they ordered delivery after he arrived since he hadn't been kidding about his cooking skills and it wasn't like Barry had a clue either—and turned to put his briefcase on the other staircase heading up to his room. "How did community service go?"
"Well, the Grimm showed up."
Dad choked, spinning back to face him. "What?"
"Not for me," Barry said quickly. He probably should have worded that a little better. "He and his partner wanted to talk to some of the other guys about what they might have seen at some site they were working at last week. But he—the Grimm—saw me. And said hi." He paused. "And said that he was sorry about Mom and that he was glad that I was out."
Dad frowned, but most of the tension seemed to have faded with Barry's clarification.
"Do you think he was serious?" Barry asked. Because whatever stories Mom and Dad had told him, so far this Grimm hadn't fit any of them. Even when he'd had a gun in his hand in the middle of the Roh-hatz he hadn't actually shot Barry or the twins or Mom or anyone. He hadn't fired at all except up into the air as a warning. He'd listened to Dad, as insane as that still seemed. It was...he didn't know what it was.
"Maybe," Dad said after a moment. "I asked about him. After."
A good reminder that Barry wasn't the only one who had a hard time referring directly to the events of last year.
"He's got a good reputation, and that's from a number of contacts, including a few at the Public Defenders' Office where police aren't always highly looked upon. And I was being discreet, obviously, but I don't believe that we're the only Wesen in Portland whose identities he knows, and yet I haven't heard anything about even minor harassment.
Never mind genocide, which was the usual thing where Grimm and Wesen were concerned, at least as far as Barry knew. "That was never in any of the stories that you and Mom told me," he said after a minute.
"It was never in any of the stories that I heard," Dad said. He frowned down at his plate for a moment. "I think maybe we should invite him over for dinner."
This time Barry was the one who choked.
