Thanks to everyone who read and to M1ssUnd3rst4nd1ng, StyxxsOmega, and Priyanka for reviewing.
Some overlap with What Strange Creatures ch. 32, but both stories can be read separately.
"Wow, this has really grown up," Barry said, kicking at the thick brush as they started to circle the pond. Given how rough the path down from the house had been he'd figured that there'd be some growth, but if they didn't get some snow to pack stuff down first, he and Dad would have quite a bit of work to do before they had anywhere to set up the tent never mind settle in to fish.
Then again, it had been a year. More than a year. And there didn't seem to be too much crud built up in the pond itself which was a good sign.
"There's fish in there?" Roddy asked, catching the trunk of a decently-sized tree and pulling himself up easily. Then again, while he seemed to find the entire concept of the outdoors suspicious—Roddy was nice, but definitely a little weird sometimes—he hadn't had any issues keeping up on the short hike.
Barry waited until Roddy had climbed out onto a branch that ran parallel to the ground and then swung up behind him, bracing himself in the V below the branch where the trunk itself forked. "Yeah. I don't know if you can tell right now, but those thicker clumps of brush across the water there and there?" He gestured across at the opposite shore. "That's where the stream runs through. Even when it's at its highest it's not that big, the main water course through this area is a string of lakes a couple miles north of here, but it's enough to bring in some fish, and some of them stick around long enough to get decent-sized."
"Nice."
"You fish?"
"On the river sometimes. Or we used to, anyway, Dad and me. I haven't been out since he died."
Barry nodded and was a little glad that Mom hadn't been much for fishing. Not that it was his favorite pastime either, but it was something that he didn't mind and Dad enjoyed and that was good enough.
"You're really planning to camp out here for Christmas?" Roddy asked. "Like actual Christmas in December? Aren't you worried about freezing?"
"Nah, Jagerbars aren't really all that susceptible to the cold. Or not what counts as cold in Portland, anyway. Too hot tends to be a problem, and I have no idea how Dad lives in suits in the middle of the summer, but on the other end of the scale it'd have to be like ten below before it'd really start to bother us." He looked up at the branch that Roddy was perched on. "If you start getting cold just say so, okay? Dad won't care if that's why we go in, and there's a good chance that I just won't notice."
"Sure, but I'm all right for now. Especially since I really don't want to run into your dad again for at least a little while longer."
Barry grinned, because that was way funnier now than it had been back up at the house. "Literally."
"Fuck you. I'm traumatized."
Barry swung up a little further to punch his arm and then settled back into the fork. "I told you, it'll be fine. You apologized—we both apologized—and no harm done." If he'd been the one to run into Dad it might be a different story, if only because there was no way that they both wouldn't have ended up on the ground, but Roddy just didn't weigh enough to do any damage. Barry looked out across the pond again, and then frowned as the obvious occurred to him. "Huh. I wonder why he's home so early."
"What?"
"It's usually past dark when Dad gets home, especially this time of year, but there's plenty of light left now, and we've been outside for what, half an hour? Maybe even a little more than that?" It wasn't like it was a long hike to get to here from the house, but the underbrush really had grown in thick. He didn't feel like digging out his phone while up a tree, but at a guess it might be four. At the latest. He wasn't even hungry, which was saying something.
"Maybe there's not much for him to do?" Roddy suggested. "It is a holiday week."
"Yeah, maybe. He said that he had to work through Wednesday, but he didn't say on what." Barry grinned. "Maybe someone signed them up for some volunteer work, random corporate groups were definitely the thing last week at the food bank." Dad's volunteer work was his pro bono hours, obviously, and his partners were the same, but it was kind of funny to think about a bunch of people in suits trying to separate cereal.
"Seriously?"
"Yeah, Mrs. Young said that it happens every year, companies wanting good press around the holidays. Although I did meet a random Blutbad girl which was kind of cool. Kind of weird too since her mom was human, but her mom's work had a group volunteering, and for some reason they had her with them, but she heard your music and ended up coming over to help me instead. It was nice to finally have some company, even if she wasn't much of a talker."
"That's cool." He grinned. "Was she cute?"
"Huh?"
"The Blutbad girl, was she cute? I mean, unless she was like twelve or something, in which case gross and forget I asked."
"No, she was probably a little younger than me, but not that much." If she and Roddy had been side-by-side Barry wasn't sure who he'd have guessed was older, although some of that was just because Roddy was a runt.
"Okay, good. So?"
"So, what?"
"Wh—oh." Roddy looked down at him and flushed. "Sorry, my mistake. I never thought to ask if you even liked girls."
"Huh?" Barry repeated. Sometimes Roddy was a little weird, and sometimes he was just very weird.
"It's cool," Roddy said quickly. "I mean, I go to an art school. That's like the only thing my classmates aren't assholes about."
Barry shook his head. "What are you talking about? Girls are fine. But she's a Blutbad."
"Right, you pretty much led with that. What does that have to do with anything?"
It was Barry's turn to stare. "Your dad wouldn't care if you looked at someone who wasn't a Reinigen? Or didn't he, I guess, or..." Barry trailed off, trying to figure out how he'd screwed that one up. Probably the same way that he always screwed up Roddy's lack of family, and he was very glad that Roddy never seemed to take offense.
Roddy just shrugged. "No. I mean, he might have freaked out about a Blutbad, because Blutbad, but the last girl I dated was human, and that didn't bother him." He made a face. "Well, the human part didn't bother him; he still said that it wouldn't end well, but that's mostly because she was one of my classmates, and it's no secret how most of them and their families feel about scholarship kids. And he was right, too, because Mrs. Jessup was a total bitch, and even Sarah wanted the whole thing to be a secret." He looked back down at Barry. "Your dad would care?"
"Well, I guess I can't remember Dad ever specifically saying anything," Barry admitted after a minute, "but junior year TB got this huge crush on this human girl in his chemistry class. Like all of a sudden he was writing poetry about her eyes—well, trying to write poetry, it was pretty bad—and wanting to hang around after school just so he could walk her to her car and trying to carry her books even though they only had a couple classes together. It was weird. And Jase and I gave him crap about it, obviously, but he asked her to junior prom anyway, and when I told Mom about it she totally flipped out. Like she started asking how the Colberts could agree to that, why weren't they thinking of our history, all kinds of stuff. It was just me and her in the car at the time, I think we were coming back from an art show or something, but she just kept going on. And then it actually got worse, because she switched over to talking about bloodlines and breeding and how someday I'd meet a nice Jagerbar girl and..." He shook his head. He loved Mom more than anything, but on a very short list of things he'd never wanted to discuss with her, 'purity' in any form was pretty high up there. "Anyway, I can't imagine how bad it would have been if it had been me and not TB."
"Wow."
"You know, I think I'm just going to forget about school and become a monk."
Roddy looked up from the brochure he'd been flipping through and grinned. "I don't think monks are really a thing these days."
"Hey, you were threatening to become a hermit earlier, so you've got no business talking." Barry flicked a paper football at him, made from a page from yet another brochure, because while he'd done like Dad had suggested and picked the three most promising-looking colleges in Portland to request information from, apparently the request-for-information forms on their websites actually triggered an insane 'send everything that anyone might even vaguely possibly be interested in' response. He might only have a vague notion of what came next, but he was very sure that it wasn't going to involve accounting in any way, shape, or form.
Roddy flipped the football right back, bouncing it off his forehead. "What's the problem?"
"As long as we're waiting for Dad," and Roddy had seen the word 'Music' on one of the pamphlets that had popped out when Barry had started opening envelopes and promptly gotten distracted, "I figured I'd see what classes would work for next semester. But I've got one school here that says that another math is required but no science, one that says that I have to have at least one science credit but I'm covered for math, and then this one that has a whole section about how important foundational classes are and it sounds like those should be the same thing as the core requirements from the other schools, but I can't find a page with an actual class list." He paused. "Probably because it's buried in the forty million other pages that they sent; here's the info about their music program if you want it."
"Oh, cool." Roddy took it and tucked it under the one in front of him, and Barry sighed and picked at the remaining stack.
The other problem that he had was that he needed to amend his opinion that they'd sent him everything to that they'd sent him almost everything. They'd put the admissions packets right on top, but while all of them asked about felony convictions, there was no information about what they'd do with his answer. There were a couple paragraphs in the student handbooks about felonies committed while a student, and it didn't seem to be totally a deal-breaker which was maybe a good sign, but his would almost certainly count as 'violent' and that was a whole other category. For all he knew it meant that his application would go straight to the trash bin and all of this would be for nothing.
"Why are you even looking at math and science anyway?" Roddy asked, drawing his attention back to the present. "I know you don't like math, and you don't sound very happy about science either...if you end up at a school that requires them you'll have to do them eventually, I guess, but why aren't you signing up for Horrible English Class 412 or something like that?" He made a face. "I'm sure they all require English classes."
"Poor you," Barry said, grinning despite himself. "But Dad says that I should take the classes that don't matter as much at the community college so my regular transcript shows the main ones for my degree from the four-year school. Which means math and science—or math or science, I guess—and maybe foreign language or economics or...I don't know. I am going to sign up for one writing class, though, just so I can stay sane. And there's a poetry class over the January term that still has openings and looks interesting, plus it's online which makes things way easier." He hadn't talked to Dad about that yet, he'd just noticed it when he'd accidentally selected the wrong page for spring semester classes, but he doubted that Dad would care about a two-credit elective.
"Poetry?" Roddy rolled onto his back and mimed gagging. "Hate to break it to you, but you're too late and you've already gone insane."
"The guy who's taking an independent math class on purpose doesn't get an opinion," Barry informed him. "In fact, I should probably find some mountain lions to feed you to, just in case the craziness is infectious."
"Why are we feeding Roddy to the mountain lions?" Dad asked, coming into the game room with a bowl of popcorn in each hand.
Barry smirked. "Bad taste."
Roddy stuck his tongue out in Barry's direction, which knowing him was way more polite than what he wanted to do, but at least he didn't appear to be actively trying to hide from Dad anymore. Despite the fact that Barry had been right and Dad hadn't even mentioned the collision again, dinner had been a little awkward.
"Have you started applying to colleges yet?" Dad asked Roddy, taking a seat on the couch and handing one of the bowls of popcorn down to Barry.
"No. Most music programs hold their auditions in February so I'll probably start looking at everything over Christmas break."
"Have you gotten your standardized tests out of the way already?"
"You mean like the SATs? Yeah, last spring. They always have a proctor person come to the school on one of the official testing dates in March and the whole junior class takes it together. And then I think some people took it again last month, too, there were some emails from the counselors going around about that before the Halloween concert, but the first time went fine for me so I didn't pay them much attention."
Barry frowned. His school had done the same thing, had an official proctor come to the campus on a Saturday in March for the juniors and everyone else who wanted to take it, but while he knew he'd gotten the results back, he had no idea what had happened to them. And while there was a place for his scores on the application forms he'd glanced through, since he'd be a transfer student rather than a new student he had no idea how much it mattered, either.
Dad only nodded, though, and when he picked up the remote Barry pushed himself away from the stacks of paper and put his back against the couch beside Dad, setting the bowl of popcorn on his other side. A moment later Roddy scooted over to join him.
"So have you two already chosen a movie for this evening?" Dad asked.
