Thanks to everyone who read and to Priyanka and a guest for reviewing.
Sorry about the delay, real life is being itself.
The smell of coffee and frying fish woke Barry, and he yawned and blinked as he sat up. He was alone in the tent, no surprise there, and he changed quickly and crawled out. "Hey."
"Good morning. Breakfast?"
Barry nodded and took the plate Dad offered, filling his cup from the pot beside the fire before taking a seat on one of the fallen logs they'd dragged around and all but inhaling the first fillet. Apparently all this fresh air was making him wake up hungry. "Did you already eat?" he checked.
Dad dipped his head and gestured to the plate on the ground beside him, although he was still nursing his own cup of coffee. "That's the last of yesterday's fish, so I was thinking that we could try and pull in a few more this morning and then maybe head upstream and see if we can clear out some more of the debris where that big pine came down? I took another look, and the flow is still slower than it should be even for this time of year."
"Yeah, sure." The fishing had actually been pretty good these last couple days. A lot better than he'd expected given how small the pond was. Dad was still way more into it than him, for his part Barry hadn't even noticed the low water flow, but at least that meant that he'd known the best places to throw in their lines and thus far the only thing that Barry had needed to run back to the house for was extra chocolate. And once they had some fish on the rack, Dad had been happy to spend some time hiking around with him, checking out the rest of the property, and generally finding other ways to fill their time.
Unfortunately, despite a few laps around the perimeter, they hadn't managed to scare up much more than a few scrawny squirrels, certainly nothing worth hunting. But as much as some rabbit or a deer would be a nice change…Barry stared out over the pond, watching the wind ripple the surface. There was still this stupid electronic thing on his ankle, and he didn't need any more trouble.
A snort. He didn't need the trouble that he had.
"Barry?"
He blinked, looking back over at Dad. "Hm?"
Dad frowned. "Are you all right? I just asked if you wanted me to rinse your plate while you get the fishing stuff together since it looks like you're about done."
"Oh. Yeah, sure. Sorry, guess I'm not all the way awake yet." He downed the last of the fish in one bite and then handed his basically-already-clean plate over before gulping down his coffee and passing the cup along too. So far they hadn't done much talking while they'd been out here, at least not about anything serious, and he was pretty okay with that. Doing was easier than thinking, and not just because of everything happening with his parole. Christmas-without-Mom had been two days ago, and he'd been very glad that there had been no acknowledgement of it.
He shook himself and ducked behind the tent. The poles were exactly where they'd set them out of reach of wildlife yesterday afternoon, not that there was any wildlife in the state that was going to risk challenging a pair of Jagerbars for anything anyway, and he grabbed them and the tackle box and headed over to where Dad was crouched by the stream leading out of the pond.
Dad smiled and set the rinsed plates and cups aside when Barry reached him, finding a comfortable seat in the grass, and Barry did the same beside him. "So, I was thinking," Dad said as they dropped their lines in.
Barry couldn't help but tense a little.
"The New Year's dinner for the firm has been pushed out to Friday this year given the inconvenient placement of the actual new year, but what would you say to inviting a few friends over and doing something at the house that evening? The thirty-first, I mean. I don't have to go in the next morning so a late night would be fine."
He relaxed again. That sort of not-serious serious he could manage. "Yeah, sure, that would be cool." Definitely better than a full formal dinner with Dad's partners and everyone from the law firm, not that he could go this year even if he had been invited. "I was going to see if Roddy could come over on Monday since you'll have to be back at work, but I could wait a day or two."
"Or ask him to stay for a couple days, assuming that his concussion isn't still giving him enough trouble that he'll be with Monroe or Rosalee. You two seem fairly good at keeping yourselves occupied."
That was tempting. Really tempting. Not that Barry couldn't handle himself alone, but he liked company, and a week with no community service or school stuff to distract him would drag out even if he didn't have the hearing to worry about. And Roddy had been fine staying here before, despite his concussion. It wasn't like Barry was going to interrupt him if he needed to nap or do school stuff or whatever, he just liked having someone else around. "I'll call once we're back at the house," he agreed. "Guess that'll be tomorrow night?"
"I think we could stay out until Sunday morning, if you'd like," Dad said. "Although I will need to make sure that I get through my emails before I go in to work on Monday."
That was no surprise, and Barry nodded. "Do you think Nick'll be able to come too? For New Year's I mean?"
"I hope so. And what would you say to including Monroe and Rosalee as well?"
Barry had sort of assumed that they'd be on the list based on Thanksgiving. Or Monroe, at least, and since according to Roddy Rosalee was his sort-of-girlfriend there was no reason she shouldn't come along now that she was back in town. She'd seemed nice. He frowned, not quite sure why Dad had phrased it as a question. "Okay?"
"Are you sure? You didn't seem particularly comfortable around him before."
Oh. Dad wouldn't have forgotten that. Not that Barry wanted to get into it any more now than he had then, and he shrugged quickly. "It's fine. Really."
Dad hesitated for a moment and then looked at him again. "Can you explain what the problem was? I'm afraid that I didn't quite follow."
Probably because Barry hadn't made any attempt at explaining, and he shrugged again and kept his eyes on the water. "Blutbaden can be dangerous."
"I remember you saying that before."
Of course he did.
"But I don't recall ever hearing about any Blutbaden in your classes. Or even your sports teams, back when you played."
Barry had been a little kid back then and probably wouldn't have noticed even if there had been unless one of them had tried to gnaw on his ankles or something. And his school had been exclusive in a way that hadn't made it real likely that a Blutbad would enroll, something Dad knew full well.
Dad shifted, looking distinctly uncomfortable. "Did you meet one...elsewhere?"
Now it was Barry's turn to squirm a bit, because the implication was obvious, and they didn't talk about prison. Heck, even when he'd been in prison they'd barely talked about it. Dad had visited whenever he could, but their conversations had mostly revolved around the few harmless, or as close to harmless as anything in that place got, topics, namely school and work shifts. And sometimes much more nebulous queries about whether Barry was okay, but while Barry had been generally honest about the former, he'd been vague to the point of uselessness about the latter because of course he hadn't been okay. He'd been in fucking prison.
As soon as the words crossed his mind he couldn't help but think that Roddy was maybe a little bit of a bad influence language-wise, but the flash of amusement didn't last very long because Dad was still very carefully not looking at him, and the silence was rapidly becoming uncomfortable. "If I ever did, I didn't realize it," he said finally. "I mean, there probably were some somewhere, it's a big place, but there weren't any on my work shift or in my classes or anything."
"Mm."
Barry shifted again and wished that some fish would hurry up and take the bait because Dad wasn't Mom. Well, obviously, but for his whole life, or at least his whole life up until everything, Mom had been the one he'd talked to. Or maybe that wasn't the right way to say it, because it wasn't like he and Dad hadn't talked, but with Dad it had mostly been conversations around the dinner table, and if he didn't want to say something, he just hadn't brought it up. Not like Mom who'd always been there and always known everything, and granted that that was mostly because it had never really occurred to him to keep secrets from her, but even on the rare occasions he'd tried she'd always sniffed it out pretty much immediately anyway. Heck, there had even been times that she'd distracted Dad when Barry had brought up something that made his eyes narrow—and Dad was a lawyer, it wasn't like he couldn't pry information out of someone when he wanted to—which…. Barry cut off that thought with a sharp shake of his head because in retrospect that particular action suddenly didn't seem as helpful as it had at the time.
"We've never talked about it," Dad said slowly, echoing Barry's previous thoughts and drawing him back to the discussion at hand. "And we don't ever have to, if you don't want to. But I know you're worried about the hearing. I am too, even if it shouldn't come to anything, and if it would make you feel better, I'm always willing to listen."
"There's nothing to say," Barry said quickly. And maybe a little more sharply than he'd intended. "It's just concrete and dirt and fences and too many men crammed into way too small a space," he added, trying to smooth things over a little. "Not...not like this." Not with open air and woods and trees and a world that he felt comfortable in. "You've seen it." From the outside, at least, and the visiting rooms, and why couldn't that just be enough?
Dad nodded again, and Barry fought down the rest of the words suddenly bubbling up in his throat because even if it abruptly wasn't enough, there was no point in giving voice to the memories. It wouldn't help to tell Dad about the complete lack of privacy and personal space, the constant, low-level menace permeating the place in between the occasional more overt threats, the fact that you were far more a number than a name and you might as well forget entirely about your existence as a person…. He choked a little. Dad couldn't do anything. He himself couldn't do anything. No one could do anything, it just was.
"If…." Dad sighed, and Barry couldn't help but be grateful that Dad hadn't caught the hitch in his breath because he had a bad feeling that if Dad did call him on it, he might break down again. "If worst comes to worst and there is some kind of remand—I don't think it'll come to that, but just in case," he added quickly, "—promise me that you'll keep your head down, okay? You managed before, you can do it again, and we'll do whatever we have to to have you out as soon as we can."
Barry jerked his head in a nod and didn't bother to state the obvious: Dad couldn't make that promise. Or he couldn't define 'soon,' anyway, which made it empty and all but useless. Just like Barry couldn't promise anything in return because realistically he'd gotten lucky before. He might not have realized it until he'd heard about the twins, but if the predator—human, but a predator all the same—that had gone after him hadn't been so overconfident, things could have ended in far worse than a frightening memory. If there had been a guard close enough to hear, if Barry's inexperience had cost him more than a few ugly bruises, if the creep's friends had been willing to back him when he'd discovered that Barry was a far more dangerous predator in his own right….
Heck, even the fact that Barry had been shaken enough that he'd only been fighting to get away had probably worked in his favor, because it wasn't like he wasn't just as capable as Jase or TB of delivering hits hard enough to smash bone when he wanted to.
"And no matter what, we don't have to invite Monroe for New Year's—for New Year's or any other time—if he reminds you of any of that," Dad added, and Barry forced himself back to the present again. "I can't say that I understand, but I won't have you feeling uncomfortable in your own house. The fact that he's friends with Nick and Roddy doesn't change that."
Part of Barry did kind of want to say no, because even if the guy fixed clocks and played the cello and was probably only more dangerous than Roddy because of a genetic technicality, he still somehow reminded Barry of a far more dangerous predator in an unnervingly empty concrete hall. But that was stupid because not only did Roddy and Nick like him, Dad obviously had as well, and none of the crap that was currently making him restless had the least bit of anything to do with Monroe anyway. He'd just have to tell his nerves to knock it off. "It's fine," he said. "Really. Besides, games and stuff will be more fun with more people."
