Thanks to everyone who read and to 1983Sarah for reviewing.
Crossover with What Strange Creatures (ch. 23), but both stories can be read separately.
Barry shifted a little in his seat, but it was ridiculous to be feeling impatient, and he knew it. Roddy had only texted him a few minutes ago, and it was a good mile or mile and a half between here and the grocery store. And it was barely half past one so it wasn't like he'd been sitting around all afternoon waiting for a text, either.
Fortunately for his nerves it wasn't too long before Roddy crested the hill in the distance, and he raised a hand in greeting. Roddy echoed his wave, and once he was close enough Barry reached over and pushed open the passenger-side door. "Hey."
"Hey," Roddy returned, climbing in.
"Bus ride okay?" Barry asked, waiting for Roddy to get his seat belt buckled before turning the truck and heading back up the driveway.
"Yeah, there's an exchange with the route that runs through my neighborhood a lot closer to my place than I thought so I didn't even have to go down to the transfer center."
Barry couldn't remember ever actually riding one of the city buses so he only nodded. "Cool. Oh, uh, my dad sort of has to work today, so we'll mostly need to stay downstairs so we don't bother him. I didn't think about it yesterday, but I hope that's okay."
"Um...okay," Roddy said.
"If you'd rather we could go outside and go hiking around or something instead," Barry said quickly, "I just can't leave the property." Which, staying on the property made it not much of a hike by his standards, but he didn't want Roddy to feel like he was trapped in a basement or anything either. He was still technically prey, and undersized prey at that.
"Nah, downstairs is good with me," Roddy said with a shrug, and this time he sounded more sure. "I'm not exactly dressed for hiking."
Well, that was true. "I think Dad prefers that I not go out and wander around too much unless I'm running laps up and down the driveway or something anyway," Barry admitted. As annoying as it was, and even if he could kind of understand Dad's concern. A drop of water hit the windshield as the gray sky that had been threatening overhead finally opened up. "Plus there's that."
"I love fall in Portland."
Barry snickered at Roddy's deadpan tone, pulling into the garage just as the real water walls started, and a few minutes later they were headed for the basement stairs. "Want to try another round of darts when there isn't a Grimm around to creep everyone out?"
"Sounds good. I still can't believe that none of us realized that that was a horrible idea until after we'd started playing."
Barry couldn't exactly disagree. "Had you ever seen one before? A Grimm, I mean?"
"Before Nick?" Roddy shook his head, following Barry to the dart cabinet. "No way. I wasn't even sure that they were real until I met him. I mean, my parents told me stories when I was little, sure, but they also told me stories about weirdly optimistic train engines."
Barry grinned and handed a set of darts over, waving at Roddy to throw first as the two of them moved back to the line. And stayed to the inside of the room as he did so because he remembered at least that much from the lectures he and the twins had gotten when they'd first begun to woge and there had been the non-zero possibility of running into other, less predatory Wesen at gatherings. "Yeah, when I first saw him, I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me. And Jase and TB thought I was joking when I told them afterwards."
"Those are your friends?" Roddy asked as he made his throws and stepped aside. "The ones you were doing the ritual stuff with?"
"Yeah."
"Are they stuck at their houses now too?"
Barry hesitated. It was a perfectly reasonable question, especially since he'd been the one to open the door by mentioning them, but that didn't make it a pleasant subject for him. After a year of missing them in prison, and now being out when they weren't... "No. They're...they got in more trouble."
"Oh. Sorry."
"I mostly try not to think about it," he admitted. "Anyway, Mom and Dad took the whole Grimm thing seriously, Dad especially, but we just..." He shook his head. It was weird to think about now, but so much else had been happening then that a fairy tale boogieman had barely even registered to him.
Roddy didn't seem to have anything to say to that, so Barry finished throwing in silence and then they went up and retrieved their darts.
"What do you do, anyway?" Barry asked as they moved back to the line again and the quiet started to stretch out.
Roddy paused; hand poised to throw. "Huh?"
"You said that you have a concert on Tuesday and then a gig next Friday. Is that like another violin concert? Or a quartet or whatever?" There had been small groups of musicians playing at a lot of the fundraisers that he'd gotten dragged to over the years, and while they'd mostly been there for background noise and he'd never paid them much attention, he assumed they'd gotten paid for showing up.
Roddy grinned and shook his head, letting the dart fly. "No way. I mean, you could make the argument that it's a kind of concert, but it's sure as hell not one I'd bring my violin to. I DJ." He paused, turning back towards Barry. "Do me a favor and don't mention that to Nick, all right? It's not...he sort of already knows, but it's not really the kind of thing I want to shove in his face."
"Um, okay," Barry agreed after a moment. "But why would he care? I won't say anything to him if you don't want me to," especially since he had no idea when he'd even see Nick next, "but DJ'ing is just a job right? Like maybe not a regular regular job, but it's not against the law or anything."
"Well, it's not if you're over twenty-one and doing it in a club, no. But if you're eighteen and at a rave in an abandoned warehouse it's a little different."
"Oh." Barry hesitated. "Because the one illegal rave wasn't enough?" He sort of thought that an interview with someone from the District Attorney's office would have been enough to make him think twice before repeating an offense, even if it hadn't come to anything, but his opinion there might be a little skewed given his own history. After all, as previously noted, he'd been the one to ignore the Grimm-slash-cop.
"The one...?" Roddy trailed off, frowning, and then shook his head quickly. "The thing with the quartet wasn't really a rave, that was just an excuse to get three assholes where I wanted them. Well, three assholes and—" He cut himself off with a harder head shake. "Never mind, doesn't matter. The point is that the raves I really DJ for usually involve a couple hundred people, and no one's ever called me out for one."
"You've been doing it for a while, then?"
Roddy's smile returned. "Couple years. A guy I knew let me try out some of his equipment when I was like fourteen, and that was enough to get me hooked. The next summer I started picking up gigs as a fill-in when someone's regular couldn't make it, and by the summer after that I was one of the regulars." He shrugged. "Technically we're trespassing, which is the part I don't want to advertise, but I'm not sure anyone knows who even owns those warehouses never mind cares about them, And Sammy especially runs his stuff clean so unless we make someone pay attention I can't see us being too much more interesting than your average jaywalker."
"Clean?" Barry had to ask, although he understood not wanting to draw attention to oneself well enough.
Another shrug. "You know there are people on the floor with a flask or a couple pills or a joint, that's just how it goes, but nobody's dealing hard shit out of a corner or passing out and having to be hauled away in an ambulance or anything like that. People show up, have some fun, and then take off." He stepped aside to let Barry take his shots, tilting his head. "I'm guessing you've never been to a rave."
"Are you kidding? Mom would have freaked."
"Yeah, they tend to be the kind of thing that people don't tell their parents about."
Barry echoed his shrug before tossing his first dart. There were plenty of things that he'd done that he hadn't told Dad about, obviously, but it had been different with Mom. Two more darts followed the first, and then they headed up to the board. "So, if you haven't told him, how does Nick already know you do it?" he asked.
"I told you that I had an alibi for the night my asshole classmates tried to frame me for the attack on Dr. Lawson? Well, a couple hundred people are a pretty good alibi even if none of us were supposed to be where we were. And he knows that I haven't stopped spinning since so it's not much of a leap."
Barry nodded.
"What kind of music do you like?"
Barry paused. He did like music, but it was a sort of general thing. He turned on the radio, and with a pretty limited number of exceptions was good with whatever was playing. Roddy's interest was considerably more specific if his mostly-incomprehensible answer to a question that Dad had tried to ask on his first visit had been any indication. But Roddy had asked, so... "Most stuff, I guess," he said after a minute. "Not so much country, and we could only listen to rap and hip hop in the car or if our parents were out since Mom and Dad and Mr. and Mrs. Colbert didn't approve, but I'm not picky." He shot Roddy a quick smile. "I'll ask you the same thing, but no promises that I'll understand the answer."
That got a grin in return. "No worries, I'm enough of a music geek that most people don't understand what I'm talking about when I get started. And even the ones who do don't usually cross genres too much. Monroe's a great cellist and it's a lot of fun dueting with him, but it's kind of hilarious to watch him wince and back away when I talk about something composed in my lifetime. Or even his lifetime. And Sammy has a good ear for samples even if he doesn't do much spinning, but he looks at my violin like he expects it to come alive and bludgeon him or something. But to answer your question, for orchestral stuff I generally like compositions from the Romantic artists best, although there's some Baroque and Modernist stuff that's pretty fun too. Nowhere near as much as Dr. Warren thinks, for the record, but whatever. And on the contemporary side I usually make my own mixes...my top three are probably EDM, Alt, and Metal, but I'll pull in anything I like the sound of. Although I will agree that country doesn't factor in too often."
"Yeah, some of that sounded like English," Barry said cheerfully.
"Ha ha. I'll get you some tapes." He paused, pulling his last dart out. "I think I'm at 281, but I haven't been keeping the closest track, sorry."
"Two forty-one for me," Barry said. "But it's cool, mostly I just play for fun." Or, realistically, mostly he just played against himself to kill time, so adding even a casual opponent was a pretty big improvement.
Roddy nodded. "Call it 281 and I'll keep better track going forward, then." He set up on the line again. "So what's the community service stuff you were talking about yesterday? Is it from...?" He made sort of a vague gesture downwards after he'd thrown a dart, and Barry didn't wait for him to figure out what to call it.
"Yeah. Five hundred hours over the next twelve months. Or eleven months, now, I guess, but I've completed almost fifty, so it scales."
"Five hundred? Seriously?"
"Yeah." It was the maximum that the court could order given what he'd pled to, and Barry shrugged. "It's okay. I mean, it's not like I'm doing a whole lot else. And I'm allowed to apply for an extension to twenty-one if it conflicts with classes or if I get job or something like that, but mostly I'm just trying to get as many hours out of the way as I can before this thing comes off. Especially since it gives me an excuse to leave the house."
Roddy nodded. "And the only options are picking up trash or scrubbing graffiti? Aren't there, like, spaghetti dinners or whatever it is that churches do, or Habitat for Humanity builds, or that kind of thing?"
"Not that I'm approved for. Not yet anyway, it's kind of weird how they do it. And I think spaghetti dinners are probably right up there with animal shelters and volunteer tax prep on a list of things that I shouldn't get anywhere near. I kind of doubt that giving people food poisoning would win me any points."
"Guess I can't argue with that." He frowned. "And I'll agree that tax prep sounds like a weird thing to volunteer for, but what's wrong with animal shelters?"
Barry snorted. "You want to see a panic, put a Jagerbar in the middle of a pack of little rat dogs." Or almost any other kind of small mammals, really, but as soon as the words were out of his mouth, he realized that that might have come out more offensively than he'd intended. Fortunately, Roddy's wince seemed to be directed at the intent of the words rather than the specific wording.
"Oh. Yeah, I could see how that could get ugly."
"Yeah. I'm hoping I get the okay to try something different soon, but even scrubbing graffiti is better than the alternative, so..." He trailed off, shrugging.
