Thanks to everyone who read, and to M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng and StyxxsOmega for reviewing.
Note: Includes references to Grimm 2.10 (The Hour of Death) and crosses over with What Strange Creatures (ch. 25), but both stories can be read separately.
Frank sighed as he made the turn up into the driveway. Finally. For all that that it was almost an hour earlier than he usually got home, it had still been a long day. And while he felt a little bit bad about not stopping back at the office after court... He shook his head. Trying to get through downtown Portland at this time of day would have required at least another half an hour in the car and been a complete waste of time, especially since anything that came in this late on a Friday afternoon would be something that he could deal with from home or over the weekend anyway.
He pulled into the garage and shut it behind him. Maybe Barry would be willing to join him for another movie or two after dinner tonight. Things had been a little awkward between them since the whole mess while they'd been boxing up the artifacts last weekend, and while they'd needed to have the conversation, Frank wasn't sure how to bridge the remaining distance. He'd tried to assure Barry that he wasn't angry at him—which he wasn't, not anymore—but he was still angry at Diane, and Barry had a hard time with that. Barry still blamed himself and only himself for everything that had happened, and damned if Frank knew how to deal with it. On one hand Barry was old enough to have known better, but on the other he'd paid for his mistakes. More than paid. And so much had come from Diane in the first place that it just...
Frank shook his head and got out of the car, retrieving his briefcase and heading into the house.
"Dad?" Barry asked, coming up from the basement as Frank crossed into the living room, and Frank smiled in greeting.
"Hello. And hello, Roddy," he added when the little Reinigen pup trailed his son into the room. He hadn't expected to see Roddy today, although Barry had mentioned inviting him over again at some point this weekend. Frank would have preferred a different day, obviously, but too late for that now. It wasn't as if Barry had had any reason to expect him home early.
"Hello," Roddy echoed.
"Is everything okay?" Barry asked. "You're never home before five."
"It's fine, it was just a long day. Andrew called in sick this morning and asked me to cover voir dire for him, which would have been fine except that it was for a trial being held down at the state courthouse. The hour there was one thing, but the two and change back was another, especially given the number of times they had us down to one lane for road construction. I was able to handle a few calls over lunch and then from the car, but by the time I got to the 217 split I'd already decided to come straight home rather than trying to fight my way back to the office."
Barry nodded. "I—we've been playing regular pool, but if you want to join us we could switch to cutthroat."
Cutthroat being a three-person game and Barry and the twins' usual, as Frank recalled, and if Barry had sounded a little hesitant, at least he'd made the offer. "I'd like that, but maybe after dinner? Those lunchtime phone calls mean that all I managed was a granola bar from the machine before we were called back into court, so I was thinking we could make an early call for pizza. Unless one of you would rather something else?"
"Pizza sounds good to me," Barry said immediately, to Frank's absolute lack of surprise, and when he looked down at Roddy, Roddy nodded as well.
"Sure."
"There is some leftover barbecue in the fridge if you want a snack," Barry offered. "I picked it up after orientation today, and we didn't quite manage to finish it at lunch."
"I'll keep that in mind, but I think I'll be able to hold out until the pizza gets here. But..." Frank frowned and turned to look at Roddy again. "Did you not have school today?"
Roddy shook his head. "No, today was first semester parent-teacher conferences."
"Ah. Well, why don't you two go ahead and finish your current game while I get changed and make a quick call to the office so they know not to expect me back." Somehow that was not a call that he'd managed to make from the road. "It's early enough that if I send in the order now it shouldn't take much more than half an hour for the pizza to arrive."
"Sounds good," Barry agreed.
Frank texted the order to the restaurant on his way upstairs and then dialed in to the office's private number, but as expected there wasn't anything that needed his immediate attention. Per his legal secretary the files he'd been waiting for for the Turner case had finally arrived, but she'd had their intern put them in his office where they could wait until Monday. Mr. Walcomb and Mrs. O'Sullivan both wanted changes to their estate planning documents but she'd sent those notes to his inbox and the changes could be made over the weekend and sent out for review early next week. And the rest of the work that he needed to get done was a combination of motions to draft and motions to write rebuttals for, all things that he'd already known about and the earliest of which didn't need to be filed with the court until Tuesday.
He did one last check of his email just to be safe and then sent off a summary of the voir dire proceedings to Andrew before changing and heading downstairs.
"Oh, yeah, that's not going to work," Barry was saying as he reached the bottom of the basement staircase.
"Not unless I grow a foot in the next thirty seconds."
"Well, I could make the shot from here."
Whatever Roddy said or did in response made Barry laugh, and Frank's heart twisted because that wasn't a sound that he'd heard very much since Barry had gotten home. For a moment he was tempted to stay out of their way, but it was a little too late for that, and both of them turned towards him as he entered the game room.
"Hey, Dad. I think this game's about over if you want to grab a cue." He grinned at Roddy.
"I still don't think 'I can beat someone who's only played a couple dozen times in his life' is all that impressive," Roddy said.
Barry scoffed. "Be too short to sink anything so we can move on."
Roddy waved him out of the way, and Frank understood the issue as soon as Roddy lined up his shot. With the way the cue ball was placed he or Barry might have been able to do something, but Roddy really did need another six or eight inches to get any kind of stability. And while Frank was almost certain that the pool set had originally come with a bridge that might have salvaged the situation, he was also fairly sure that it had been broken years ago by a trio of sword-fighting preteens.
As it was Roddy managed to connect with the cue ball, but the hit was off-center and with nowhere near the force needed to accomplish anything, and he shook his head and stepped back. "All yours."
Barry sank the 8-ball easily and then straightened. "Cutthroat?"
"You still haven't said what that is besides a different kind of pool for me to lose at."
Despite the words Roddy didn't look at all put out, and Barry smiled again and ran through the rules quickly. Ending with a 'Just try to knock something in and it'll be an improvement' that Frank suspected would have gotten a distinctly impolite response from Roddy if he hadn't been there, but both of them were grinning.
Barry grabbed the triangle and set up the table before turning back to Frank. "Do you want to break?"
Frank glanced at Roddy who immediately shook his head. "It'll be better if one of you does it, I mostly don't get them separated well enough and someone else just has to hit them again. I really haven't played that much."
"All right." Frank got the game started, but Barry was just stepping up for his turn when the doorbell rang, and he waved the boys towards the stairs ahead of him. "Get the plates and drinks, please."
A few minutes later and the three of them were settled at the table with three supremes and breadsticks—a pizza apiece was probably overkill even for him and Barry, but he'd been hungry when he'd put in the order, and he wasn't worried about the the leftovers going bad before they could be eaten—and they'd all started to dig in when the obvious occurred to him. "Oh, Roddy, do you need to call home and let your mother know you're eating here?"
"Huh?"
"Is she expecting you home for dinner?" Frank clarified, a little confused at the wide-eyed headshake that Barry gave him from his spot beside Roddy. Roddy might be eighteen, but Frank knew how Diane would have reacted if Barry had just decided not to show up for dinner one evening without so much as a phone call. For that matter Frank wouldn't have been particularly pleased himself.
"My mom's dead," Roddy said. "She has been for a long time."
"Oh. I'm sorry, I just assumed." Nick had said that Roddy's father had died at the end of this past summer, but no mention had ever been made of his mother. He had said that Roddy didn't have family support, granted, but... "Shouldn't you call whoever is waiting for you then? A grandparent?"
"I don't—there isn't anyone waiting for me. I live by myself."
Frank's surprise must have shown on his face, because Roddy shrugged and shifted a little in his seat.
"It's not a big deal. I'm eighteen."
Which was still far too young to be entirely on his own in Frank's opinion, and that was despite the fact that he'd seen his own son in prison at eighteen. But Roddy wasn't actually wrong—and realistically speaking nowhere near the only eighteen year old in the city making his own way, either—and when Barry caught his eye and shook his head again Frank made himself change the subject before dinner got any more uncomfortable. "So have you boys been playing pool all afternoon?"
Frank made the final edits to Mrs. O'Sullivan's trust papers and marked them to be sent off for her review and then leaned back in his chair with a sigh. He still had the motions to sort through, plus the work for the Public Defenders' office, but given what had happened last night he was not doing a good job of keeping his focus on his work.
He pushed himself to his feet and wandered over to look out the window. Endezeichen Grimms were the creatures of nightmares. Old nightmares. Barry had recognized the Sterbestunde G when Frank had named it outright as being from 'that creepy alphabet book,' and he wasn't wrong because Frank still remembered the arguments that he and Diane had had about that thing. Frank had found it troubling enough that Diane's parents had given them an alphabet book with graphic images of mutilation and decapitation at all, never mind given it to them with the expectation that they'd show it to their not-even toddling son. The fact that she'd saved it and given it to him to look at on his own when he'd been just old enough to start recognizing his letters and numbers had made Frank furious.
He'd always fully supported their son being taught his history, obviously, but that was the sort of thing that he'd felt was best explained when a child was old enough to understand it. The context, the state of the world at that time, all of that. It was beyond unnecessary to show such a thing to a three year old, especially since the Endezeichen Grimm had long since ceased to be a part of this world.
Except that apparently they hadn't, because a man had been killed last night with the Sterbestunde G branded into him. Frank had been shocked when Roddy's friend had called to tell him the news—he hadn't meant to scare the pup, but it was a label he'd never thought to hear outside of a history book and the fact that Roddy had clearly been talking about current events had more than started him—but after Frank had finished speaking to Monroe they'd found the news story themselves. The reporters hadn't been able to show any images of the actual brand, of course, especially since the victim had been a corpse at that point, but they had shown a picture of the bloody symbol on the wall and there had been no denying what it was.
It had been a pleasant evening up until that point, too. Privately Frank might admit that a Reinigen still wasn't his first choice for a friend for his son, but unlike the ones that he'd dealt with through work Roddy was quiet and generally polite.. And very sharp when he let himself relax a little, too, although when he relaxed also seemed to be when the four-letter words started to slip through. The fact that he was an orphan and living completely on his own was still something that Frank hadn't wrapped his head around, but...well, presumably Nick would have said something if he'd thought it was a problem.
Frank looked back at the stack of files he'd brought home with him and then shook his head and headed for the door. He'd checked the house alarms twice last night and then again this morning, but it wouldn't hurt to do it one more time. Realistically he was being incredibly overcautious and he knew it; there were something on the order of six-hundred thousand people in Portland, at least ten percent of whom had to be Wesen. And the neighborhood that the newscasters had been talking about was considerably south of here. But after what had happened last year...Barry's arrest hadn't been a major news story, but a few short articles had made it into the papers despite Frank's best efforts—the kidnapping angle had been just salacious enough to make a couple reporters look their way, and it was a situation where protesting too much would only have drawn more attention—and since even a new Grimm had made the connection, he'd prefer to be very sure that everything was locked up.
That reminded him that he needed to figure out what to do about lunch, though, because it was a little after noon. Late wake-up or not, the boys were bound to be getting hungry soon. Frank wasn't thrilled about the idea of inviting even a delivery person up to their place with a lunatic running around out there, but he liked the idea of leaving even less, and all that they had in the kitchen besides leftover pizza and barbecue was a limited amount of breakfast supplies. Very limited since they'd had eggs and bacon a couple hours ago. His plans as of mid-week had been to make a run to the grocery store this weekend and restock, but under the circumstances that wasn't going to happen.
He checked the window on the landing and then continued across the hall and confirmed that Barry's window was still locked too before heading downstairs. He could hear faint strains of music echoing up from below, and after he checked the much larger collection of windows and doors on the main level he opened the basement door and headed down.
Barry was sitting on the couch looking over the back of it, and he turned and held a finger to his lips when Frank came around the corner. Not that Frank had needed the request to remain quiet because the music was not what he'd expected.
Roddy's eyes were closed, his focus entirely on the piece he was playing, and while Frank had been to far fewer orchestra concerts than art shows in his lifetime, he'd still estimate the pup was playing at a pretty close to professional level. Nick had said that Roddy was a musician, and Frank had had a vague notion that Von Hamelin was one of the more prestigious music schools among Portland's many private academies, but for a Reinigen even average was impressive and Frank hadn't put much weight on the claim. He obviously needed to rethink that, too.
Frank sat down on the arm of the couch beside Barry to listen, and a few minutes later Roddy brought the piece to a close and lowered his violin. And then he opened his eyes and squeaked and jumped a little. "Sorry. You could have interrupted if I was bothering you."
"You weren't," Barry said. "You're really good."
"Oh. Thanks."
"What piece was that?" Frank asked. "It didn't sound familiar."
"Partita in E Major. Bach." Roddy shrugged. "The time limits on solos mean that I can only audition it from the Gavotte on, but I like it better when I can play the whole piece."
"Audition like for your concert next week?"
"The week after next, but yeah," Roddy said, nodding at Barry. "The concert itself is the Friday right before Thanksgiving break, but they'll be picking solos this coming Monday and Tuesday so it's got to be as perfect as I can get it."
Frank frowned. "Isn't next week a little late to audition if your concert is only a week later?" Or a week and a half, rather, but that still didn't seem like much time to prepare.
"Not really. We'll still have some late practices after orchestra to work on whatever the music teachers don't like, because there's always something that someone doesn't like or wants played differently or whatever, but since everyone soloing in this concert will be an upperclassmen and we all know the drill—the pieces have to be pretty close to perfect to win a spot at all—it's not a big deal. It's always kind of a shock for the freshmen the first time they audition, but that's why the underclassmen played their solos at the concert a couple weeks ago."
"Ah. Well, I apologize for interrupting your practice session, but I was thinking that we could put in a large order for lunch—Indian, maybe?—and hopefully between that, yesterday's leftovers, and the remains of the breakfast food it'll tide us over for the rest of the weekend. What do you two think?"
