Thanks to everyone who read and to M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng, StyxxOmega, and 1983Sarah for reviewing.


"Yes, ma'am," Barry agreed. The day that he needed another person to help him move boxes that couldn't weigh more than sixty or sixty-five pounds was the day that he ceased to be a Jagerbar no matter what the occupational health guidelines said, but whatever. It was easier to assure her that he'd ask for help if he needed it and then wait until she was out of sight than argue.

Other than the current nonsense about moving 'heavy' objects, his first shift at the food bank warehouse had gone okay. For the past three hours and some Mrs. Young had been popping up long enough to give him a task and whatever instructions went with it and then leaving him alone, which was fine for proving that he was trustworthy, he supposed, but kind of boring otherwise. But he was up and moving around and not scrubbing bricks which was all to the good, and next time he'd know to bring his headphones so he could listen to music if he was stuck working alone. And Roddy had promised to send him some good music, too. He wasn't totally sure what that might include, but given what Roddy could do with his violin Barry was willing to trust his opinion.

Supposedly the boxes in front of him all held some kind of canned soup, and he made sure that Mrs. Young was gone and then started dividing them between the indicated pallets two at a time, because really they were probably closer to fifty pounds than anything else. Supposedly from there they'd go onto vans destined for the various food pantries, but he had to watch some other video before he was allowed to use the pallet loaders or forklifts, and there wasn't much time left in his shift today.

His watch beeped before he was more than halfway done, and while he was a little tempted to finish the job since it shouldn't take more than half an hour now that he had the rhythm, the rules about his house arrest hadn't suddenly gone away. He sighed, scrubbed his hands against his pants, and headed for the front office.

When he got there Mrs. Young was nowhere to be seen, but the guy who'd signed him in was still working on the computer—Ben something, if Barry remembered right; he was older than Barry but not by too much—and Barry stopped in long enough to confirm the clock-out process and then headed for his truck.

This place was further from the house than anywhere else that he'd volunteered at thus far, but he'd left close enough to on-time that he'd still be safe stopping for take out, and he shot Dad a quick text not to worry about dinner. Not that they didn't still have a meal or two's worth left over from Saturday's order anyway, but he wouldn't mind a break from Indian and he suspected that Dad felt the same.

A quick scroll through the options reminded him that they hadn't had Greek in a while, and he confirmed the restaurant's location and called in an order before starting the truck. Dad's text of thanks didn't arrive until he'd already picked up the food and was most of the way home, but even if he wasn't in court Dad would never answer the phone while he was meeting with a client so Barry wasn't particularly surprised. And when he got home he snagged a couple chunks of potato in the name of a snack and dropped the rest of the food off in the kitchen before heading upstairs. Working at the food bank hadn't been particularly hard, but between cereal dust from his initial task of breaking down industrial-sized bags of Fruit Loops into ones that were more reasonable for human consumption and general grime from all of the box-moving that had followed, he definitely needed to rinse off.

Dad hadn't made it home before he'd finished, but there was an email from Jordan with her next paper attached for review, and he pulled it up. He still thought that it would be a heck of a lot easier to do this in person and it was stupid for his parole officer to care about him visiting a coffee house, but at least most of what she needed was pretty simple. Word choice and punctuation and that kind of thing, a lot like Roddy's paper.

Well, she could use more help with the content in a couple places than he'd needed, but that almost had to be a conversation, and Barry checked the calendar and then sent her a couple possible time slots if she wanted a call.

He was debating whether he wanted to do some calculus review—want to, no, but he probably should even if Roddy had helped him sort through most of what had been confusing him over the weekend—when he heard the garage opening, and he happily put the decision off until later and headed upstairs. "Hey, Dad."

"Hello," Dad greeted, setting his briefcase on the counter. "How was the food bank?"

"Okay. Definitely better than scrubbing graffiti." Barry shrugged. "Kind of deserted, though."

"Well, maybe Mondays just aren't high-volume volunteer days."

"Yeah, that's probably it. How was work?"

"Not bad. I was a little worried that Andrew would call out again, especially with everything that happened this weekend, but he was able to get down to the state courthouse himself so there was no need for me to make the trip."

"Considering that going down to the state courthouse gets him out of Portland..." Barry pointed out, and Dad smiled.

"I suppose that's true. But since I didn't have to cover for him, I was able to get caught up on most of the client meetings that I had to postpone last Friday."

"Any chance that you had time to call Nick?"

"I did. He was only able to talk for a few minutes, but he confirmed that the person that they caught was definitely the person responsible for the killings." He grimaced. "And not a Grimm, as it happens."

"What? But if he wasn't a Grimm, how did he know—" Barry's mind supplied the obvious an instant later. "He was Wesen?"

"One with some very serious personal issues, it seems," Dad said. "In fact I'm sure that his mental state will be of great interest to any number of people. But at least it's over. And while I had him on the phone, I finally remembered to invite him to dinner again. He's going to call back tomorrow to confirm, but he suggested this Thursday, given his schedule, and since I've no particular preference I told him that that was fine. Do you want to invite Roddy as well?"

"Roddy won't be able to come on Thursday, that's when he goes over to his friend Monroe's place to practice." And from the way Roddy talked, Barry was pretty sure that it would take an active natural disaster to make him skip that.

"Ah. Well, maybe he can join us some other time."

Barry nodded. "I was going to see if he wanted to come over again this weekend, though. Roddy, I mean. Or maybe next weekend since that'll be the start of his school break and his concert will be done too. Maybe if he comes next weekend he could stay over again?" Even when they'd been working on separate things it had been nice having another person around, especially when Dad had had to go do his work upstairs.

"If he's off school for the week it wouldn't even have to be Saturday or Sunday," Dad pointed out. "Unfortunately I'm likely to have to work through Wednesday given the court docket, but that way you'd have some company since I doubt there'll be a lot of volunteer shifts available in a holiday week."

Barry was actually pretty sure that there would be plenty of food bank shifts available, but then again they'd probably mostly be ones that involved direct interaction with the public and that he wasn't allowed to take so maybe Dad had a point. Dad had paused, though, looking oddly uncertain, and Barry frowned. "Dad? Is something wrong?"

"Not wrong, but I just realized that I've never asked. Is there anything that you'd like to do for Thanksgiving?"

Barry blinked. He'd known that it was Thanksgiving coming up, obviously, but he hadn't really thought about it.

Last year...well, last year there hadn't been anything to think about. He'd still been in the first months of his prison sentence at that point, trying and mostly failing to cope with Mom's death while also figuring out how to survive in hell, and he wasn't sure that he'd even noticed the holiday. There was a good chance that it had coincided with one of Dad's visits because Dad had been careful like that, but if it had, Barry didn't remember it.

And it wasn't like Thanksgiving had ever been a big deal in their family, anyway. A week off school, which was always cool, but he and the twins had referred to it as the start of Charity Party season for good reason. Mom cooked a big meal, the Colberts came over with wine and desserts, and he and the twins stole a pie or three and escaped to the basement as soon as the adults started pulling out calendars and talking about fundraisers and tax optimizations. "Not really," he said after a minute. "I mean, I guess we should order food in advance, but there's nothing..." He shrugged.

The Colberts wouldn't be coming over, obviously, and he suspected that he or Dad trying to cook anything major would just lead to a fire in the kitchen, but it would almost be weirder if they did try to do something.

Dad nodded. "A few restaurants offer Thanksgiving meals that can be picked up a day or two before the holiday and reheated on the day of. I'll see if I can find one of those that looks promising. And maybe grab an extra pie or two."

Barry nodded. Extra pie was always good regardless of whether or not it was a holiday.

"Do you think you'll have any schoolwork?"

"No. Or I guess I might have a short assignment to finish up or something, but the college is out for break that week as well so I don't expect any of my teachers to assign anything new." Now he was the one who hesitated. "Finals will be mid-December, though, so I have to start looking at the class options for next semester." And worse, Christmas was at the end of December, and that had been a family holiday.

Dad had to realize that Christmas was coming up too, but he only nodded. "Have you thought about what you might like to take? You shouldn't be as...limited...in your course selection next semester, although I suppose you'll still need to get travel approved."

"Yeah, but I got a copy of the form in the packet from the parole office, and it looked pretty straightforward." Less so if you had group projects or something like that that required meeting outside of class, granted, but he should be able to avoid those if he paid attention. "And not really. I mean, I know if I decide to take any more math I want to do it on campus, and I'll probably look for another writing class, too, but I wasn't really reading their class guide that closely before." He paused. "I guess I do still want to see about that job in their writing center, too."

Dad's expression darkened for an instant, but it cleared just as quickly, and he nodded. "Well, just let me know if you'd like me to look through anything with you."

Barry echoed his nod, and then both of them went quiet as they turned their attention to the food.

Unfortunately, now that Barry had started thinking about the upcoming holidays, it was hard to stop. Thanksgiving really didn't matter much to him, but the idea of Christmas without Mom made the food sit heavy in his stomach. Their family wasn't any kind of religious, but Christmas had been...it hadn't quite been the end of Charity Party season since there had always been something on New Years' Eve, but it had been a private family holiday all the same.

Despite everything else going on Mom had always found time to decorate the house and cook their favorite foods, and even if he'd gotten too old to get really excited about presents, she'd still managed to find something special for both him and Dad every year. And now...

He swallowed hard. Prison or no, unlike Thanksgiving he'd been painfully aware of Christmas last year. He'd ended up earning a few days in solitary for snarling at one of the guards about it and then a couple more for backing down some asshole who'd tried to twit him for his lack of 'holiday spirit,' and as much as he'd hated solitary he still thought that their push to involve prisoners in pointless, stupid special programs to commemorate the holiday was a waste of everyone's time. They were locked up in a place where no one wanted to be, and trying to pretend otherwise was just rubbing salt in open wounds. It would have been better to just shut up and forget the whole season.

Austin hadn't taken that view, of course, he'd been totally into it to the point where it had taken every bit of Barry's self control not to knock his teeth down his throat, but all the ugly paper ornaments scattered around their cell had done for Barry was remind him that he was alone and that even the family dinner that most of the other inmates were allowed was denied to him because he was still too early in his sentence to be permitted to meet with any visitors without a worthless glass shield between them. A shield that either he or Dad could have smashed through without even noticing if they'd wanted to, but that wasn't how prison worked, and although Dad had still come to talk to him and sent what little he was allowed in the form of gifts and all of that, it hadn't done anything to improve Barry's mood.

"Barry?" Dad asked.

"Hm?" He looked down at his plate and realized that he'd done a good job of mangling his souvlaki and turning the rest of the potatoes into mash, but he hadn't actually managed to consume very much of any of it.

"Are you all right?" Dad asked in a tone that indicated that it wasn't the first time that he'd posed the question.

"Yeah. Sorry. I grabbed a snack when I got home, and I guess I'm not really very hungry right now." It wasn't exactly a lie, although the day a few pieces of potato would ruin his supper was about when hell would freeze over, but Dad wasn't Mom and didn't call him on it. Barry pushed himself up. "I...Jordan sent me a paper to look over, and I should get that back to her tonight."

Mom had always insisted that he wait until everyone was finished and he'd asked to be excused to leave the table, but Dad didn't call him on his rudeness either as he hurried towards the basement stairs.

This wasn't...everything was suddenly wrong again, not that it had ever really been right after Mom had died, and he reached the bottom of the basement stairs in a rush and looked around for something to hit. There wasn't anything, though, at least nothing that he wouldn't smash right through, and that wouldn't help at all. Why had he had to be so stu—

"Barry?"

Barry spun, lashing out with both hands automatically, but Dad stepped into the shove before he had time to build up any real momentum and pulled him into a tight hug, and while he jerked involuntarily against Dad's grip Dad was still heavier and stronger than he was and he couldn't break free. He twisted against Dad's grip again anyway. "I want Mom!"