Thanks to everyone who read, and to StyxxsOmega and 1983Sarah for reviewing.
Note: Includes references to Grimm 2.10 (The Hour of Death) and crosses over with What Strange Creatures (ch. 25/26) but the two stories can be read separately.
Barry rubbed his forehead and scowled down at his notebook and the page of equations that was more than half smudged-up eraser marks. He hadn't gotten much done before lunch since while he wasn't exactly a connoisseur of classical music, Roddy's impromptu concert had still been way more interesting than calculus. Even if Roddy had insisted that it was only practice. But this problem set had to be submitted by tomorrow, and at the rate he was going he was never going to get it finished.
He wasn't even sure that the few problems that he had worked to some form of completion were right, and his next test was this coming Friday so he didn't have a lot of time to get it figured out.
Since it was pretty obvious that any more erasing was going to go right through the paper, Barry flipped to the next page, recopied the first problem, and started again. Theoretically both his book and the online workbook had examples of how to solve these stupid equations, but he'd walked through all of them the first time he'd gotten stuck, and it was like they'd chosen the most simplified cases possible and left him floundering when it came to the actual problem set.
"I swear he was high off his ass when he wrote this," Roddy muttered.
"What?" Barry asked, rolling onto his back to look up at him. Roddy had put his violin away when lunch had arrived and was currently curled up on the couch finishing whatever book he had to read for his English class, and that wasn't the first comment he'd made that made Barry think that he wasn't enjoying it.
"Huh?" Roddy looked up from his book. "Oh, sorry, was just talking to myself."
"About what?"
Roddy tilted his book so Barry could see the cover. "We're doing the Candide Overture to open the concert, and since we took the exam for our last lit section on Tuesday and they like to pretend there's some kind of connection between the music we play and our classwork—it's total bullshit, but apparently it looks good on the syllabus or something—we get to spend the two weeks before the break reading and discussing it. Candide, I mean. I'm a little bit hopeful that the 'derivative works' thing my teacher mentioned means that we'll get to spend most of the concert week watching a recording of the play or the operetta or both in class, but I still have to get through this fucking opinion piece first.
"I don't think 'the author was high' is the kind of opinion most teachers are asking for."
"Yeah, I kind of got whacked over the head with that freshman year."
Barry laughed.
"Still doesn't mean I'm not right. I mean, if this guy was any more optimistic I'd puke."
"That's the point, though, right?" Barry said, tucking his arm behind his head as he found himself suddenly on more familiar ground. "I mean, Candide is satire. He's living in this idyllic paradise, and then the real world suddenly turns up and he has no clue how to deal with it." Personally he could see some parallels there, even if they didn't necessarily apply to Roddy.
Roddy stared at him for a long moment, and Barry was suddenly reminded of a few English teachers who'd assumed that the big guy at the back of the room never read anything. Or possibly couldn't read anything. And then Roddy grabbed one of the throw pillows and flung it at him. "Sorry, I forgot that you're the nutcase who wants to make English papers longer."
Barry grinned and flung it right back. "Watch it, or I'll steal your book and leave you with these stupid calc problems."
"Don't tempt me, I can do calculus."
"Wait, seriously? I thought you were taking some kind of statistics class or something."
"Yeah, because there's no other math I can take since I finished calc last year. Math is easy; no one tells me my opinion's wrong when I tell them what x equals."
"They do when I do." Barry gestured at his notebook. "I swear, if you can tell me what I'm screwing up here, I will summarize whatever you want for Candide. Or at least what I can remember, anyway. It's been two or three years since I had to read it, and Voltaire wrote a lot of other stuff too."
"Mostly I need to not be a smartass while I write my stupid paper, and I'm pretty sure that's a lost cause," Roddy said as he set his book aside and slid to the floor. "But I wouldn't mind taking a break to look at some numbers."
"Thanks. I can sometimes work my way to an answer, but even when I do it feels like I'm just making it up as I go, and I have no idea what's right. If any of it is." He flipped back to the previous page in his notebook with all of its smudges. "Sorry, I'm not sure how readable that is."
"It's okay." Roddy took the notebook and stared at the page for a minute before looking back up at him. "Are you allergic to negatives or something?"
"What?"
"Look." He took the pencil from Barry's hand before Barry could object and started making changes on one of the first lines of the first problem. "See, you've got the chain rule started right, but then when you go to do the second part you have to carry it with you. You did the pretty much the same thing between these two lines, and then again down here."
Barry leaned down to look over his shoulder, ignoring the other problems that Roddy'd stabbed the pencil at and focused on the one he'd marked up. "Wait, that's how that's supposed to work?"
"Yeah. There's got to be an example in your book or something."
"Not one that makes any sense, they just do the easiest thing possible and then tell me to 'apply the rules' in more complicated cases without bothering to tell me what rules they're talking about. But if that was supposed to happen..." He took the notebook and flipped to the next page where he'd recopied the problem, trying to work it with the changes from Roddy. And promptly got stuck again three lines down. "Damn it. I thought I had it."
"I think you almost do." Roddy tugged at the notebook until Barry lowered it a little bit so he could point again. "Yeah, see, right there? It's like the negative again, but you have to simplify as the final step. They cancel."
"Oh. Okay," Barry said. He finished that one and then recopied the second problem and found the missing negative for himself, but the third one tangled him up again, and Roddy hummed for a minute and then pointed out another lost minus sign.
"Shut up," Barry said when Roddy shot him a quick grin.
"Not my allergy."
Barry punched his shoulder, and while he'd intended it to be playful, he forgot to recalibrate for someone who weighed a whole lot less than a teenage Jagerbar and Roddy hit the carpet with a yelp.
"I'm sorry!"
"Ow." Roddy caught the hand Barry proffered and pulled himself back up, and Barry was relieved to see that he looked more annoyed than hurt as he rubbed his shoulder. "Be careful, would you?"
"I'm sorry," Barry repeated. "I haven't exactly done any roughhousing this past year, and before that Jason and TB were both my size."
"Yeah, well, I'm not, and I pick up enough bruises at school from kids who are only a reasonable amount bigger than me."
Barry was tempted to crack a joke about him somehow missing a growth spurt, but the first part of the sentence distracted him. "Wait, at school? You know, before you told me how you and Nick met, I'd have assumed that kids at a music school would be nice. Or at least relatively harmless. My school had a band not an orchestra, but even so I don't remember anyone getting bludgeoned with a tuba or whatever." Some of the jocks might have gotten a little rough sometimes, he wasn't totally blind to that kind of thing even if they'd never dared to bother him or the twins, but from what he recalled kids carrying instrument cases had generally steered well clear of that group.
"Are you kidding? Playing for fun is one thing, but music students—like real music students, ones who want to do it professionally—are about as vicious as it gets."
"That's twisted."
"No shit." Roddy tilted his head. "But what do you mean you haven't done any roughhousing in a year?"
"What?"
"What what? Was it like a bet before graduation or something?" He grinned. "You're still shoving me around, so obviously you didn't grow out of it."
Barry stared, trying to remember what he'd told Roddy. What Roddy had said that Nick had told him. He'd shown Roddy the ankle monitor and told him a little bit about what had happened, but thinking back he probably had left some stuff out.
"Hello?" Roddy asked after a minute, waving a hand in front of his face. "Barry?"
Barry hesitated for a moment longer and then gave up. Even if he could come up with some kind of story in the next two seconds, there was no way that he'd be able to make it convincing. "I was in prison last year."
Roddy's eyes widened.
He looked away. "Even second degree kidnapping carries a minimum five-year sentence if convicted, and with everything else on top of that..." He shrugged. "The plea deal was for a year in prison, six months of house arrest, and then assuming that I'm approved regular parole until twenty-one. I'd only been out for a couple weeks when Nick dragged you over."
"Wow. Nick sucks at explaining things."
That was not the response that Barry had been expecting, and he looked back at Roddy. "You're not going to freak out?"
"Well, it's a little late for that, don't you think? I mean, I can't say it's not weird to think about, and it's probably a good thing you didn't tell me that first day, but it's not like you're the first person I've ever met who's been in prison."
"Seriously?" Before his arrest the only person Barry had known who'd even been near a prison—a prison or even a jail, he'd barely understood the difference at the time—had been Dad, and that had only been for work.
"It's not..." He flushed a little. "If you haven't already figured it out, I didn't grow up in this kind of neighborhood."
"I figured," Barry admitted. Not that he'd call the middle of the woods a neighborhood, exactly, but if Roddy had showed up at his school wearing the clothes he did and talking the way he did, he'd have stood out. There wasn't anything precisely wrong with any of it, and Barry liked Roddy just fine, but there was a distinct sense of 'other' as compared to Barry's prep school classmates that had nothing to do with him being a Reinigen.
"Yeah. I've been dodging shit my whole life, and when the police show up around my place nobody thinks they're there to help anyone. Hell, even those of us that they aren't specifically looking for don't generally get the benefit of the doubt when things go south. Jail's a lot more common that prison—I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of relatives I have that haven't been in jail somewhere along the line—but still."
"You haven't, though," Barry said, just before it occurred to him that he didn't actually know that.
"No, but I also only turned eighteen in February, and I've had a lot of practice keeping my head down. And if I hadn't had an alibi for everything at school last spring they probably would have locked me up right along with Dad because like I said, we're not getting the benefit of the doubt. Well, that and I sort of tried to punch Nick."
"Wait, you what?"
"Hey, what are you up to?" Dad asked.
Barry turned away from the computer to find Dad standing at the entrance to the game room. "Just putting in the answers for my calculus homework." He'd gone back through a couple of the other assignments too since Roddy really did know this stuff and made a heck of a lot more sense than the examples in the book did, and for the first time in a while he actually felt a little optimistic about the subject. "Are you done with work?"
"Well, let's say I've done about as much as I think I can for the day and leave it at that." He shook his head. "It turns out that having an old-world killer roaming around Portland doesn't do great things for my concentration."
Barry nodded.
"Do you boys mind if I turn on the television? There doesn't seem to be any new information online."
If it wasn't online it probably wouldn't be on TV either, but Barry shook his head. "It's not going to bother me. Roddy?"
"Hm?" His head popped up over the back of the couch.
"Will the TV bother you?" Barry asked.
"Oh, no, I'm used to music or whatever in the background."
Given the way that Roddy had been playing earlier Barry figured that it was a lot more music and a lot less 'whatever,' but since he wasn't objecting Dad nodded and headed for the couch, retrieving the remote control on the way. "What are you working on?" Dad asked Roddy.
"Finishing the conclusion for an opinion paper on Candide," Roddy said. "It goes along with some of the music we're playing next week." He looked back at Barry. "I didn't bother writing anything about my opinion of the author."
"Ha ha. I'd throw something if I wasn't afraid I'd break your computer."
Barry suspected that if Dad wasn't here Roddy would have flipped him off, but as it was he just stuck out his tongue and twisted back around, and after a moment Barry went back to his calculus as well. Stupid, finicky equations and signs that didn't appear on a standard keyboard. If he was forced to take any more math classes after this one, he was taking them in person.
Since most of what he was doing now was just copying the answers from his notebook, Barry kept an ear on what was going on behind him, and it seemed like Dad had to flip through quite a few channels before he found one that had anything to say about last night. Which maybe wasn't a surprise, a single murder wasn't the kind of thing that made the national news, creepy Grimm sign notwithstanding. Murder in Portland, victim previously implicated in the kidnapping of a young woman who'd since been rescued, police still investigating. The end.
"At least they're not talking about any more murders," Dad said as the newscasters switched away again to a discussion about travel and projected airport volumes for the upcoming holiday. There was some rustling a few minutes later, and then, "Do you know how to play?"
"Huh?" Barry turned back to find him standing in front of the cabinet with a chess board in his hands. "Um...maybe? I think you might have showed me once, but it was a long time ago."
"Ah."
"I do," Roddy said before he could put it away again.
Dad looked surprised. "Really?"
"Yeah. My dad played."
"If you guys want to try a game, I can join you when I finish this up," Barry offered. "Play winner or whatever, although I can't promise much of a game since I think someone will have to remind me of how all of the pieces move. I'm...well, I'm not too far from done."
Dad hesitated and then shook his head. "I don't want to interrupt your homework."
"I'm finished," Roddy said. "I mean, I need to proofread, but I should take a break before I do that anyway."
Dad paused for a moment longer and then nodded and headed for the couch, and Barry sighed as he turned back to the computer. Definitely in person next time.
The game was still in progress when he finally got all of his answers submitted, and he headed over to drop down on the arm of the couch by Roddy. "How's it going?" He really didn't remember much about chess beyond the fact that different pieces moved in different ways, but there seemed to be considerably more white than black pieces left on the board.
"Not too far from over, I think," Dad said. He looked at Roddy. "What's your definition of 'some,' out of curiosity?"
"Dad and I played once or twice a week, maybe." Roddy shrugged. "I usually lose—lost—though." He pushed one of the white pawns forward.
"Did your dad play a lot? Barry asked as Dad moved one of the black horse-shaped pieces.
"With me, and then sometimes at the park on Sundays if he wasn't working or having an argument with someone down there. So maybe once or twice a month." He nudged a castle-shaped piece forward. "Check."
Dad moved his horse piece back.
"Want me to take a look at your paper?" Barry offered as Roddy considered the chess board. "If you're at the proofreading stage, I'm pretty good at that."
Roddy looked up. "For real?"
"Sure." He grinned. "Figure I owe you for the calculus."
"Nah, but if you don't mind looking that'd be cool." Roddy grabbed his computer up off the floor and passed it back to Barry. "I'm not all that great at the official grammar sh-stuff. Just remember that I don't want the word count upped, all right?"
"Yeah, yeah."
Barry was just starting to read when the news switched topics again abruptly. And this time the Sterbestunde G displayed was on the wall of a totally different room than they'd shown last night. Dad's quiet 'damn it,' overlapped with a 'fucking hell,' from Roddy.
