Work Text:
your heart is the only place that i call home
--
He’s got a voicemail when he wakes up.
It’s not from Nick; his ringtone for Nick is ridiculously loud and faultlessly wakes him up, even when he’s dead asleep. And nobody else really calls him, except clients, and he really doubts a client would be calling early enough to have left a voicemail before seven o’clock in the morning.
He supposes it could be a client on the East coast; it’s happened before, and that’s why he listens to it without checking his missed calls – it’s not like he’ll recognize the area code, right?
“William,” it starts out, and he freezes, absolutely freezes, every muscle in his body locking up for just a moment. “Call me back. It’s about your father.”
And that’s all there is.
He’s dialing their number on autopilot, four-zero-six-six-eight-three – and he has to pause and try to remember before his fingers can finish it, because he hasn’t had any reason to dial it for more than ten years.
(That first year, though, found him sitting on his porch steps at two o’clock in the morning with their number lit up on his phone screen, words waiting in his mouth, can I – is it okay if I come back, I was wrong, I’m not supposed to be this. He never pressed ‘call’, not once.)
It’s only eight there – eight oh-two, he supposes – but someone answers on the first ring. It’s an unfamiliar voice, male.
“Yeah?”
Monroe bites back an ‘um’. Don’t show weakness, don’t show hesitance. “Is Margaret there?”
“Who’s this?” There’s undisguised suspicion in the voice and Monroe has to remind himself that his family has never been particularly blessed with social graces.
He has to get down on the boy’s level. He thinks he knows who it is, and he’s willing to chance it if it means he can slip past an interrogation. “Let me talk to your mother.”
“Who the hell is this?” There’s a snarl tacked onto the last word and Monroe can hear Milo, who’s that in the background – a female, older. There’s the sound of a small scuffle, like the phone is being taken away, and the woman says, into the phone this time, “Who’s this?”
He swallows. “It’s William,” he says. He hasn’t introduced himself as that for a long time.
A pause.
“Your father died last night,” she says. “I need you to come home. You’ve been away long enough.”
--
Nick comes over late that evening and finds him smoking on the back porch. He’s surprised, but doesn’t say anything, which is nice; Monroe doesn’t smoke very often – stress smoker, he supposes – but when he does he can go through two packs in a day if he doesn’t check himself. This is his third in the last hour and he’s never going to get the smell out of these clothes. He hasn’t smoked for a long time, five or six years – he didn’t even smoke when Hap died, although Angelina had gone through three packs that night, lighting up one after another. He hadn’t even been tempted. He’d bought these on autopilot, and he thinks he’ll probably throw them away. Maybe.
“Hey,” Nick says, and takes a seat next to him on the steps. “How’s it going?”
“Been better,” Monroe says. “You?”
Nick can clearly take a hint and doesn’t ask. “Alright. You know anything about butterfly Wesen?”
Monroe, sufficiently distracted for the moment, raises his eyebrows. “Schmetterlinge don’t commit crimes. They’re like Kaninchen.”
“Yeah, this was just a human thing, but there was a – Schmetterlinge?” He glances at Monroe and Monroe nods, stubbing his half-smoked cigarette out in the makeshift ashtray he’d brought out with him, a little saucer so he won’t have to throw them out in the yard. “She was one of the witnesses, and she was really... I don’t know, spacey, but she was nice. Not super helpful, but she gave me a bunch of facts on Grimm-Wesen couples, for some reason. We weren’t formally questioning her so nobody but me heard.”
“Hm,” Monroe says. She’d been able to smell him on Nick; Schmetterlinge have maybe the best sense of smell in the entire Wesen community. Monroe doesn’t feel like explaining that.
“Staying for dinner?” he asks after a moment, and stands up. Nick doesn’t; it’s a nice night, late May, well warm enough that the scant breeze is welcome.
“If that’s alright,” Nick says. He doesn’t want to go back to his big, empty house, and it doesn’t take Blutbad senses to know that. Monroe just hadn’t gone back to the apartment he and Angelina lived in after they broke up.
Monroe is really good at running away from things.
“’Course,” he says, and opens the screen door. “Probably not going to be much, I need to go to the store sometime.” He makes a mental note that he shouldn’t go tomorrow like he planned; theoretically vegetables and fruit and bread would keep for three days – his flight leaves tomorrow and gets back Thursday – but he could be wrong about the situation out there. He doubts it, but it doesn’t hurt to hope.
“As long as there’s beer,” Nick says contentedly. He stays on the porch while Monroe gets dinner ready; he likes to cook, likes to work with his hands, and what he makes tonight doesn’t require a lot of work but requires enough that he can stop thinking about anything but slicing the last of his vegetables and cubing up tofu and putting rice in the steamer for five or ten minutes. He ends up throwing the tofu and vegetables in a cast-iron skillet with olive oil and soy sauce and letting it simmer, and takes a beer out of his well-organised refrigerator to take out to Nick. He doesn’t feel like drinking tonight.
“Beer for you,” he says, handing it down to him. He leans a hip against the porch railing and looks out over his backyard; he hasn’t needed to mark his territory in a while – he thinks the Grimm-scent is getting rid of any potential skullduggery.
“What’s going on,” Nick says, after the first slow drink. It’s not a question. Monroe glances down at him and isn’t terribly surprised to see that Nick’s looking at him, watching him with those calm grey eyes.
He’s tempted for a moment to act like it’s nothing, but he knows he’s got to tell Nick that he’s leaving for a little while – he can’t have Nick coming to his house and not finding him and thinking he’s run off or been kidnapped or something.
“My dad died last night,” he says. “And don’t say you’re sorry or anything, you shouldn’t be, I don’t even know what I should think.”
Nick blinks at him and there’s a moment of quiet before he says, “You’ve never really said anything about your parents before. Do they live here?”
Monroe shakes his head. “Little town in south Montana. Blutbaden don’t raise their pups in cities, that’s just asking for trouble.”
“Right,” Nick says, “makes sense,” and looks back out over the yard. “So when are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow,” Monroe says. He’s quiet for a moment. “I haven’t seen my family for twelve years. I don’t know why I called her back.”
“Because they’re your family.” Nick sounds very sure of himself, and Monroe is tempted for just a second to argue with him, to tell him that he’s wrong, but he can’t. He’s right. And plus he’d be a shithead for arguing with Nick about the importance of family – he kind of feels like one anyway, talking bad about his family to somebody that never really had one other than a crazy aunt.
“I suppose,” he says, and rubs the back of his neck. He feels restless and uncomfortable, always does when he’s nervous about something, and he knows already that a three-hour flight is going to be absolute hell tomorrow. He wants to drive, but the Bug probably isn’t suited for a three-day journey. “So, yeah, I’ll be out there, but I might have signal – I’m staying in a hotel in town, so pretty much any time at night should be good, but if you need something during the day you can try calling.”
“Dude,” Nick says. “Your dad just died, I’m not gonna bug you while you’re in Montana for his funeral.”
“Please do,” Monroe says bluntly. “I can’t stand my family and they can’t stand me so honestly, whenever. I’ll need the distraction.”
Nick makes a little hmmph noise but doesn’t protest further. Monroe ducks back inside to check on dinner; it’s done and he beckons Nick inside, serving stir-fry over rice with neat practiced motions. Nick takes Monroe’s chair at the table and grins mischievously up at him. Monroe smiles – his first actual smile of the day – and shakes his head, pulling out the chair Nick usually sits in and taking a seat.
After that, things are normal, or as normal as they get for them; Monroe asks about Nick’s day and gets to hear more about the Schmetterling girl he encountered, while Nick is regaled with a call from an elderly lady in Seattle that wanted him to drive up today to fix her clock (because the show must go on and all that – Monroe’s not going to stop working) and copped an attitude with him when he said that wasn’t possible. Nick laughs, and Monroe is more relaxed after twenty minutes than he’s been for what feels like days.
--
Monroe doesn’t fly into the Dillon airport. He doubts if he could, and he doesn’t want to; he arranges for a rental Jeep to be waiting at the Billings airport and drives himself west for three hours, taking his time because it’s all country and there’s nobody, really, on the roads. He’s not in any hurry.
His flight out of Portland was at five thirty in the morning and he landed in Billings at nine. Dread settles low in his stomach, makes him pass by a row of coffee shops and cafés while he leaves town. He should take 90 west and 15 south but doesn’t, stops in Livingston for gas and cigarettes and heads southwest, taking gravel roads that he’s kind of surprised still exist. Nothing has changed, really; Livingston is bigger than he remembers but the farther south he drives, the more familiar everything seems.
Dillon is just like he remembered. He doesn’t stop; no one would recognize him if he did – he doesn’t exactly look the same as he did when he was twenty-three. He left the sweaters and corduroys at home; he’s got a pretty small suitcase packed, jeans and tee-shirts and socks and boxers and that’s pretty much it. He isn’t staying long, he’s determined of that.
He hasn’t shaved for a few days – usually he tries to keep himself at least sort of neat, but he’s more than aware that things like that are something his family will pick up on, read into it as being vain and therefore something to attack when it’s needed. He’s not dressed like everyone else he sees but it’s close, faded jeans and a white tee-shirt and a wool-lined denim jacket because it’s cold in Montana, even this close to summer, low fifties if that.
It’s a twenty minute drive to Wise River, and he notices as he passes through that most of the houses are empty – he can’t smell anything, not until he gets a little closer to his parents’ house. He can still smell Kaninchen but the scent is distant and faded; there haven’t been rabbits here for a long, long time. There hasn’t been anything here for a long time; there was a Luchse family down the road when he was growing up, a mother and father and three girls around his age, but his father told him that they moved away. He had accepted the story, because at eight years old he hadn’t known that Blutbaden are the top predators anywhere and will do anything and everything to stay there.
The house is at the end of a long gravel road, and he notices as he makes his way down that there’s a gate opened to the side; they bar off the road, it seems, when they aren’t expecting visitors. His mother has apparently grown more distrustful in her age.
Her age – like she’s that old. Fifty-two, if Monroe is right; she was eighteen when she had him, and there had been nine more pups from then on – the oldest is nineteen or twenty, he thinks, a boy he’s never really met, young enough to be his son if it was the old days and they were married off in their teens. But fifty-two is old enough for a Blutbad; older than sixty is revered as an elder, someone to be respected and listened to. His father had been fifty-eight.
The driveway is on the right, he remembers, a long stretch that had been gravel, once, now mostly dirt. The house it leads to is small and low, like an old-style ranch, and Monroe wonders for a moment how many people are there – when he was growing up, until he moved in with Angelina, there were nine of them and their parents, sleeping and eating and fighting in a four-bedroom house. He can remember sleeping in the barn on nights it was warm enough, stretching out in the hayloft. He’d brought Angelina up there, too, later on.
God. He hadn’t wanted to think about her – the Lassers still live just outside of Dillon, or at least the parents do, unless they’ve died off too.
His mother is the only one out the door, though she doesn’t walk fast. She looks older than he remembers (of course she does, he hasn’t seen her for thirteen years) and the lines in her face are more pronounced, thick black hair streaked with gray. The Native American in her – Shoshone, he thinks, but could be wrong; there are a lot of Crow around, too – is more obvious, high cheekbones and a sharp nose and dark, suspicious eyes.
“William,” she says, and doesn’t touch him. He’s standing against the Jeep, and he lights a cigarette because he isn’t sure what to do and it’ll buy him a little time. “You drive that all the way out here?”
“Flew into Billings,” he says, already lapsing into the way he used to talk – not an accent, just fewer words, shorter sentences. One of the big reasons he’s so verbose at home is because he wasn’t like that back then. “Rental car.”
She looks him over, takes in well-kept boots and big, callused hands. “Get your things and come inside,” she says. “Don’t bother putting it out, Tom’s smoking in the kitchen.”
“I’m staying in Dillon,” he says. “In the Best Western. I’ll leave it.”
“Suit yourself,” she says, and he knows he’s made her mad already by how clipped her words are. He follows her up the driveway like he doesn’t notice. Neither one of them say anything until they get to the house; before she opens the door she glances over her shoulder at him.
“Milo doesn’t want you here,” she says simply.
Monroe shrugs. He knows it isn’t the right response, but he’s never really done the right thing as far as his parents are concerned – which is fine by him. She opens the door and he holds it for her while she goes in; most of the windows are open but when he breathes in it feels like someone opened a canister of condensed scent just under his nose: smoke and blood and sweat and Blutbad and pack.
He reminds himself, carefully, that it’s instinct to see every other Blutbad as pack or an enemy. That if he thinks about it, nobody in this house, town, county is his pack, that his pack is in Oregon.
It helps, a little.
--
Three of his siblings are already there when he walks into the kitchen. Annie – closest to his age since Jim died last year – is sitting on the counter, swinging her legs; Tom is sitting at the table with a brimming ashtray in front of him, long brown cigarillo between his fingers; a boy that must be Milo is leaning against the refrigerator with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops and his hips pushed out. He’s wearing dirty cowboy boots and when he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, Monroe can hear spurs jangling like quiet little windchimes (and who wears spurs anymore – he’s pretty sure that’s animal cruelty).
Monroe wouldn’t know any of them on the street if he walked by them, except maybe Annie; she’s four years younger than him and he was always fiercely protective of her, although he was always well aware that she could protect herself. She’s the first person Monroe would have killed somebody for. It’s a short list, two and a half decades later.
“Will,” she says now, and slips off the countertop. “Jesus, when did you get here? Mama didn’t say you were coming.” She still looks like a little girl to him, even though she’s thirty-one and wearing a wedding band, black hair in a long plait down her back, no makeup.
“You got married,” he says. She hugs him and it’s unexpected enough that he sort of flounders for a minute but hugs her back, minding his cigarette.
“Last summer,” she says. “Now answer my question.”
“This morning. Flew into Billings, drove out here.” He glances at Tom, then leans over to tap his ash off. Tom’s looking out the window, but Monroe can feel Milo staring at him.
He glances over to meet his gaze, and to his credit, Milo doesn’t look away. He’s got their mother’s hair and eyes and complexion, but there’s something in their father in the way he looks at Monroe, the way he holds himself. Monroe is glad he already dislikes his family; he doesn’t need to feel guilty for not liking this one.
“Mama didn’t say you were coming,” Annie repeats, looking up at him. “Nobody thought you would – I mean, you and Dad.”
“She asked me to come out,” Monroe says, a little bit curtly.
Milo speaks for the first time, then, the same voice he’d used to answer the phone, that ever-present edge of a snarl in his words. “You didn’t come out when Jim got killed.”
“No,” Monroe says, “I didn’t,” and takes a long pull off his cigarette. He’s locked eyes with the boy –his brother, his little brother, he reminds himself, and eases himself down a little. “You were too young to remember –”
“I’m not that damned young,” Milo interrupts, and Annie glances quickly between them. Tom is watching, too, patient and quiet, and Monroe wonders which side he’ll jump on, or if he’ll join one at all, because Tom has always been the most level-headed out of all of them, never prone to fights or impromptu hunts. “I was old enough to remember Mama crying when you ran off –”
“Milo,” Annie says. “Milo, honey, please don’t start a fight, we’re pack, Daddy just died and you’re starting a fight,” and that seems to hit him as much as anything, that or the tiniest hint of tears in her voice. He shrugs his wide shoulders – he’s shaped like their father, and like Monroe, built like a T, wide shoulders and narrow hips – and bumps against Monroe on his way out of the kitchen, even though there’s more than enough room for him to pass.
“You were right,” Tom says unexpectedly. He’s looking out the window again, at the timber that borders the house on three sides for miles and miles. “He’s too young to remember anything between you and Jim. You can’t blame him.”
“I don’t blame him,” Monroe says after a moment, and pulls out the chair on the other side of the table. “He’s just disrespectful.”
“He’s young,” Annie says softly, and hikes herself back up on the counter. “We were all headstrong and stupid when we were young, Will, you know that better than anybody.” There’s a long moment of silence, then she says, “Nobody expected you to come back, you know. After Jessie – when you didn’t come back for that, I know Mama thought you really were done.”
“I didn’t even know about Jessie until that winter,” Monroe says, grinding his cigarette out. “I didn’t – I was going through a lot of shit. I know that’s not an excuse, but I didn’t want to talk to anybody from the old days. Hell, Rolf Lasser had to break into my house to tell me.”
He hadn’t liked Jessie – they’d gotten along when she was a pup, but as she grew older she grew more aggressive, more cruel, worse than Angelina by far. She and her twin brother, Jack, had gone to a Graubär’s house seven years ago, an old, old man that lived on the other side of Dillon, far out in the country. They’d been planning on having a little fun with him, two young strong wolves against one old grizzly bear. Jack’s leg had been smashed from the knee down; Jessie had died quickly and brutally, massive trauma and blood loss. She was twenty-one.
Their parents, from what Rolf had told him, hadn’t sought revenge. Wolves are supposed to be smart, supposed to choose their battles wisely.
“We knew you wouldn’t come back for Jim,” Tom says, a little bit unnecessarily. There had been a message on his answering machine last January, a voice he hadn’t recognized – Charlie, maybe, he thinks now, but not Jack, and not Tom now that he hears the voice – tell him that Jim had been killed in a bar fight, that they thought he might want to know. He’d listened to it once and deleted it.
He shrugs. “Waste of time,” he says. “You know how we felt about each other.”
“Then why did you come back for Dad?” Tom is looking at him, but there’s no malice in his gaze or tone. “We all knew how you two got along – Charlie and Milo might’ve been too young, but the rest of us knew you hated each other.”
“Charlie wasn’t too young,” Monroe says. Charlie had watched his father and his oldest brother fight before, real fights that left them both bleeding and snarling. He’d seen the fight that left Monroe’s left ear mostly ripped off, and the ones that left Monroe coughing up blood for days when their father had slammed a steel-toed boot into his stomach over and over again until Annie and their mother had finally pulled him off. “And I told Annie – Mom wanted me back.”
“Are you staying?”
“No,” he says, too quickly. “I have a business out west, now. Clock-making. I have a life that isn’t... this. Not anymore.” He clears his throat. “Three days, I think. My flight leaves on Thursday morning.” It can’t come soon enough.
--
Monroe’s hotel room isn’t bad, for being in the middle of Podunk; they don’t have room service, but there’s a Chinese restaurant down the street that delivers to his room even though it’s almost ten o’clock at night. He’s just taken a bite of vegetable lo mein when his phone rings.
It’s Nick. Of course.
“Hi,” he says. “Everything okay?”
“All’s well on the western front,” Nick says, and laughs at his own joke. Monroe rolls his eyes and definitely doesn’t smile, or tell him that it’s all quiet and not all’s well. “How are you? How’d it go?”
“Well, I’m alive,” Monroe says, and covers his lo mein back up. “Getting killed was a definite possibility.”
“Wait, seriously?”
“Well. Yeah,” Monroe says. “Blutbaden parents aren’t really the type to be all ‘whatever makes you happy’, you know? There have been honor killings before. Not, like, the honor killings you hear about on the news, these are like, my-son-shamed-the-family honor killings.”
“Oh,” Nick says, and Monroe can hear him swallow. “Wow. Is your family like that?”
“My dad was,” Monroe says. “I’m not totally sure why I’m here.”
“If you would have told me that I definitely wouldn’t have played the ‘they’re your family’ card last night,” Nick says. “I mean, yeah. Family is important or whatever, but not when they’re like that.”
“Yeah,” Monroe says, “everything’s... cool. I mean, it’s not fun, but I didn’t think it would be so it’s not like I’m super disappointed that my family still sucks. Anyway, how was your day?”
“Good,” Nick says, and thankfully goes with the change of subject. “Slow, which is nice when you’re a cop. We had prank call and I thought Hank was going to give a sophomore a beatdown.”
“What kind of jackass prank calls cops?”
“Apparently a jackass at Downing Public,” Nick says. Monroe can hear him stretch – it’s a familiar little sound, breath catching while his legs stretch out. “This kind of sucks,” he says after a moment, unexpectedly. “You not being around.”
“What do you mean?”
Nick is quiet for a moment. “It’s just weird to be around people that don’t know about me anymore,” he says finally. “I think that’s why I wasn’t very upset when Juliette left. It’s hard knowing that I’m keeping something from them, and it’s hard knowing that they don’t know – you know?”
“Yeah,” Monroe says. It’s a weird, convoluted way to put it, but it’s as accurate as anything else. “You always go to your own kind – Wesen and Grimms aren’t that different. At least you don’t have to lie to us about who someone is. I get what you mean.”
Nick lets out a quiet exhale. “Exactly,” he says.
There’s a pause, not as long, and Monroe says, quietly, “It’s weird without you around, too.” It’s as close as he’s probably ever going to get to telling someone that he misses them.
--
He manages to avoid his family until the next evening. The timber that runs on the north side of his parents’ house is the same stretch that runs alongside Dillon itself, and he goes for a long walk in the quiet, sticking along Sorrow Creek for most of it. Living in Portland means that he doesn’t get this very often; the deepest parts of Forest Park are almost silent, but it takes more time than he usually has to get six miles into the woods and back.
These woods are far older than most of the trees in Forest; some are familiar – this was his stomping ground when he was young, his and Annie’s and the Lassers. He doesn’t want to change, though, and it’s a strange feeling, being content to remain himself.
(He wonders what Annie and the others would say to that – that he considers his man-self his real self, instead of the wolf. He really is a traitor, he thinks, and isn’t all that ashamed.)
When he finally goes back to the hotel it’s long been afternoon. He’s got a voicemail – no signal in the woods, unsurprisingly. It’s from Annie, telling him that he ought to come down for dinner; Ellie and Charlie are there, and Jack should be there by the time he drives down. He’s not sure what makes him go; maybe it’s just that it’s Annie, that she so clearly wants him to pretend that everything is fine, at least for a couple of days, but go he does, knocking at the front door with his other hand in his jacket pocket as the sun sets.
Annie opens the door and leans up to hug him around the neck. “I didn’t think you’d come down.”
“I didn’t get your voicemail until a little bit ago,” he says. She leads him inside; he exchanges brief greetings with Charlie and Jack, both of whom are unsurprisingly cool towards him, while not aggressive, and Ellie, who seems to at least try more than her brothers to be friendly. She’s a nice girl, younger than him by a decade, the closest to him in behavior; she’s a doctor in Dillon, he thinks, a family practitioner. They get to talking, and while she isn’t quite as warm as Annie they have more to talk about than any of the others – Ellie went to the same college that he did, up in Helena, and they’re talking about that when Monroe catches what Milo is saying across the room.
He’s talking to Jack about Blutbaden that think they’re better than everyone else because they go to college, or – and he turns, here, to glance at Monroe – go Weider like a coward and turn their backs on their instincts.
Milo is an open book, and Monroe is far too good a reader to spend much time on him. There’s something dismissive and contemptuous in his voice, something he doesn’t recognize, when he says, “Sit down and shut up.”
The room stills. Milo straightens his shoulders and puffs his chest out, all swagger, but Monroe sees in him what Milo himself doesn’t; they’re similar, similar enough that Monroe is already bracing himself for what’s about to happen.
The mouth, he thinks. Get him a good one in the mouth and maybe it’ll knock some sense into him.
“I’m not gonna have some goddamned old man tell me what to do,” Milo says. He’s approaching where Monroe is sitting, and Monroe stands before he can start looming above him. Milo’s tall – six feet even – and he’s in good shape, but none of that matters when Monroe has the head for fighting that he’s had since he was fourteen years old. He only let the old man beat the shit out of him for so long until he started fighting back, and going up against a full-grown male Blutbad calls for more skill than Milo Monroe is ever going to possess.
“And I’m not going to let some pup talk to me like that,” he says. Milo shoves him, both hands on his shoulders. Monroe is knocked back an inch and steps up swinging.
The first hit isn’t much – it hits him in the jaw, in too tight, too controlled, and Annie’s already protesting, standing up until their mother pulls her back down by the arm. The set of Monroe’s mouth is hard and scornful, and he doesn’t say anything when he hits the boy again, a solid hard hit to the spot just in front of his ear. It snaps Milo’s head to the side, and Monroe says, “That’s enough.”
“Fuck you,” Milo says, and his next punch carries most of his weight behind it, catches Monroe hard enough in the mouth that he feels his lip split open. Monroe’s blood is hot and running quick now; this is something he’s good at, something he likes doing that he hasn’t gotten to do for a long time, and he hadn’t been lying when he told Nick he’d boxed in college. Milo is smart and mean, but he doesn’t have the experience Monroe does, and when Monroe hits him in the belly twice, one fist then the other, head bent, he aims his knee in for Monroe’s groin. Monroe steps back and his heel catches on someone’s extended leg – he doesn’t know whose – and he goes down; he’s rolling to stand back up when Milo stamps at his head. He rolls away and catches a vicious backwards kick from Milo’s big Mexican-style spurs that drives them into his face.
Monroe lunges up from the floor, appalled and infuriated, and brushes a punch aside, smashing his fists into Milo’s face with short, vicious hooks. As his brother staggers back he breaks his nose with an overhand right. Milo feints and smashes a left into the cut his spurs made, and Monroe thinks of nothing but to destroy, smashing into his mouth until his lips and teeth are bloody, sinking another brutal punch into his already-smashed nose. Milo falls against the wall.
“Had enough?” Monroe is panting; blood is running freely down his face.
“Fuck you,” Milo says thickly, and spits a mouthful of blood, but he doesn’t try to hit him again.
Monroe doesn’t turn his back on his brother, but the bathroom is just off the living room, and he doesn’t have to deal with the stunned silence from his family for long. He leaves the door open and bathes his lip first, pressing a wad of toilet paper against his cheek.
“He caught you pretty deep,” his mother says. She’s leaning against the door frame, arm folded. There’s something in her face that Monroe hasn’t seen for a long time – not affection, but something like it. “You ought to put something on that.”
Monroe opens the medicine cabinet and looks for the rubbing alcohol, splashing it on the toilet paper when he finds it and pressing it against his face again. He’s still buzzing with adrenaline but it doesn’t hurt any less. He knows he’s got to do it, though, God only knows when the last time Milo cleaned those spurs was.
“You’d make a fine alpha someday,” she says. “If you ever come to your senses. You could get any woman you wanted, fighting like that.” There’s a pause, then she adds, “But in a real fight, you have to incapacitate your enemies. You should’ve killed him.”
He looks at her in the mirror. “He’s my brother.”
“He attacked you,” she says simply. “If he attacked Jack or Charlie, they would have killed him. That’s the risk he was running when he pushed you.”
“He’s a stupid pup,” Monroe says. “He’s still wet behind the ears and thinks he knows everything. I’m not going to kill him for that.”
“Suit yourself,” she says, and walks away. She doesn’t say what she’s thinking – you’re weak, you’ve always been weak – but he hears it regardless.
--
The day of William Orrin Monroe’s funeral dawns far prettier than it has any right to be.
Monroe, despite all of his instincts telling him to stay in his hotel room – or maybe that’s just his subconscious masquerading as his instincts – showers, and when he’s done he takes a critical look at himself in the mirror. His knuckles aren’t quite as swollen as they were, and even if Blutbaden heal fast he’s going to be sporting a split lip and busted-open cheek for most of the day. Milo is going to look worse, he’s sure, and he feels a momentary stab of regret; if he’d just convinced the boy to go outside with him for a talk instead of losing his temper, he might have avoided that and avoided making an enemy – because he recognizes that in Milo, just like Jim and their father, that mean streak that comes with remembering all the wrongs done against you, marking them off in your head so you can get your revenge sometime down the line. That more than anything makes Milo dangerous.
But he doubts, with their family there, that he’ll start anything. And it isn’t as though he’s scared of some pup, no matter how bad that pup thinks he is.
That in mind, he gets dressed, good jeans and a button-up shirt – no one is wearing suits, he doubts if Milo or Charlie has ever worn a suit in their lives – and heads down to the rental car to drive west.
They’re burying him in the family cemetery, far out in the timber, and he leaves on his own, parking the Jeep at the house and absently tracking his mother’s scent into the woods. He used to walk out to the cemetery on his own when he was a teenager – Angelina had wanted him to take her out there, had wanted him to fuck her out there, and he thinks that was the first time he’d ever told her ‘no’ and stuck to it – because it was quiet and still, out there with Galloway Monroe, 1853 – 1921, and his ilk, and his father wouldn’t try hard enough to find him to go all the way out there. He’d know that Monroe would have to come back eventually.
Funny how his father ends up in the one place on this property Monroe had ever felt safe.
He can’t help thinking about it as he gets closer; this is the route he always took, crossing Sorrow Creek at the stepping-stones that someone – probably someone from his family – had laid down a long time ago. The cemetery is a mile and a half, maybe two, into the woods, and it seems smaller than he remembers when he finally comes upon it, scattered headstones and one single fresh mound of earth. His mother is there, flanked by Ellie and Charlie. He’s surprised that he’s one of the early ones; he had figured Annie would be out sooner than him – she had actually gotten along with their father, one of the only pups to do so. He thinks everybody got along with Annie, though, even Jim.
Charlie nods at him; their mother doesn’t look at him, but then again she doesn’t seem like she’s looking at much of anything. She’s looking in the direction of the grave and for the first time, watching her, Monroe feels something that isn’t relief or indifference when it comes to his father’s death; Blutbaden mate for life, once they find their true mate – it takes years, sometimes, and some of them don’t find their mate at all – and, despite all of his faults, his father had been his mother’s true mate.
Monroe thinks, just for a moment, about how it would feel if he lost his life-mate, and the only thing he can think of is Nick, saying all’s well on the western front and laughing at himself, completely unselfconscious, Nick stretching out on his couch, Nick looking up at him with quiet eyes through his lashes, and for just a second he understands his mother.
--
Monroe wishes he had planned this a little bit better. A flight directly after the funeral would have been more than acceptable; everything was done by noon, he could’ve driven to Billings and been back in Portland by midnight.
But no; instead, he’s sitting in his mother’s house – because she had asked and cried and told him that she wanted them all to be there, could he just do this for her – and listening to Annie make conversation with everyone. Neither Charlie nor Tom have spoken a word since the funeral; neither had cried but Tom had looked close, holding Ellie while she sobbed. Milo had left first, crashing away through the woods; he hadn’t been in the house when they all got back. Monroe had made up the rear, leaving the cemetery last, waiting until he could barely smell the others at all before he’d spoken.
I don’t know what to say, he had said. I should be sorry you’re dead, because Mama’s upset, but I’m not. I don’t think I feel anything. He knew that it was crazy, talking to a headstone, but he had no one else to say it to and he never got the chance to say it when the old bastard was alive. I hated you for a long time but I think now I just feel sorry for you, because you were a mean, bitter old man, and you didn’t deserve the people that loved you, or the people that hated you.
He’d walked away around then, thinking about his crying sisters and stone-faced brothers, hands jammed in his pockets as he made his way back to the house.
He feels a little better, knowing that he gets to leave tomorrow night; everyone is ignoring him, mostly, which suits him just fine – his days of wanting to be the center of attention ended about thirty-two years ago. He’s just starting to think that he can slip away for the night when the front door opens.
Genevieve Lasser looks like her daughter, long hair and pale eyes, and for just a moment Monroe is startled into thinking that it’s Angelina – but no, Genevieve is just a shade taller, holds herself with more composure, and she looks around the room like a queen until she sees Margaret.
“My dear,” Genevieve says, and Monroe is reminded that Angelina’s mother is French-Canadian, born in Quebec, married to a businessman from Billings old enough to be her father. Margaret keeps her dignity in front of anyone that isn’t family, even if they’re old friends, and doesn’t cry, but she accepts the hug Genevieve gives her, as does Annie.
It’s then that Genevieve turns to look at the rest of the room, and it’s then that she sees him.
Shit, Monroe thinks.
“William,” she says. Her voice is friendly enough that he’s instantly and automatically wary. He’s right to be, because the next thing out of her mouth is, “How’s your Grimm?”
Everyone is staring at him, tensed, and Monroe feels himself freeze. “Sorry?”
“Your Grimm,” Genevieve says. “Your little friend in Portland.” She smiles, and Monroe realizes just how fucked he is right now. “Angelina mentioned to me that she encountered a Grimm when my sons were killed – a Grimm that was parked outside your house with his throat still intact, which she, of course, tried to rectify. And you stopped her.”
There’s a long, long pause.
“He’s not like the others,” Monroe says finally, very stiffly.
“Will,” Annie says softly. There’s no mistaking the horror in her voice.
“He assaulted my daughter,” Genevieve says.
“Your daughter was trying to kill someone,” Monroe says sharply. “Nick’s a cop first, he was doing exactly what he would have done if they were—”
“Nick,” Jack says. “Jesus, you’re on first name basis with a Grimm.”
“He’s not like the others,” Monroe repeats, a little bit louder. “If he was he would’ve killed me already, if he—”
“You don’t know that, you don’t know how those things’ minds work!” His mother is practically screaming, getting over her shock. “He could have followed you here—”
“He’s a cop, he can’t just leave the city—and even if he could he wouldn’t care about you, he only deals with Jagerbars trying to bring back Roh-hatz and—”
“Shut up,” his mother said, “just shut up, you’ve done enough damage already, we have to fix this—”
“You don’t have to do anything,” Monroe says, and stands. He’s a foot taller than Genevieve, who’s staring at him and looks almost amused. Monroe wants to take her head off. He could, and probably would, if he were anyone else in the room. “He has no interest in any of you, and none of you had better have any interest in him.”
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” his mother says, but it falls on deaf ears; Monroe is already leaving.
--
Monroe lets it ring four times before a snarl of frustration tears its way out of his throat. His mind is leaping into overdrive already: he doesn’t know who the other Blutbaden in Portland are, he’s got no idea if Genevieve or his mother have any pull there, and if they manage to make the right phone call at the right time Nick is dead and Monroe can’t do anything to stop it—
His phone buzzes, loud and insistent, and he snatches it up without even looking at the screen.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” Nick says easily. “I saw you called, what’s up?”
“I need you to get a hotel room tonight,” Monroe says immediately. “Make absolutely sure you aren’t followed and talk to as few people as possible—”
“Whoa,” Nick says, “whoa, dude, what’s going on, why?”
“My family found out that I’m friends with a Grimm and they’re convinced you’re going to come after them or something, I don’t know, they’re idiots but they’re dangerous idiots, I have to ask around and make sure there aren’t any Blutbaden in Portland that they’re connected to but I can’t do that fast enough for you to be safe at your house tonight, they could be calling someone right now, I don’t—”
“Monroe,” Nick interrupts. “Breathe. I’m packing a bag now, okay?”
God bless him. He’s an argumentative little shit sometimes but when it counts he’s willing to follow orders to the letter.
“Okay,” Monroe says, and sits down on the edge of the bed. “I’m flying back in tomorrow morning, we can figure something out then, I should be there by seven.”
“Okay,” Nick says gently. “Everything’s going to be fine tonight, I know where to go.”
“Good,” Monroe says. “I need to make a couple of calls, but let me know when you get there, okay?”
“I will,” Nick says. “Bye.”
Monroe taps ‘end’ and has a number dialed a second later.
“Roddy,” he says, “hey, can I talk to your dad?”
“What? Why, what’s going on?” Roddy takes a breath and when he speaks again he sounds more serious. “Did something happen to Nick?”
“Something might happen to him,” Monroe says. “I need to talk to your dad.”
“Right,” Roddy says, “yeah, give me just a second.” Monroe can hear a door opening, shutting, can hear Roddy say hey, Dad, it’s Monroe, remember – the Blutbad that helped me out.
“This is Ephraim,” Mr. Geiger says a moment later.
“Mr. Geiger, do you know of any Blutbaden in your area?”
“Well,” Mr. Geiger says, and sounds more than a little surprised. “I would figure you’d know more about that than me, Mr. Monroe.”
“I’m Weider,” Monroe says. “I try not to associate much with other Blutbaden if I can help it.”
“Ah,” Mr. Geiger says. “The only Wesen I know of around here is a murder of crows up north of us, maybe two or three miles – we try to keep tabs on the predator Wesen in the area, understand? But no, I can’t think of any Blutbaden around here, haven’t been for a long time. You and those Lasser boys that died a few months ago were the only ones I knew of.”
Monroe feels weak with relief all of a sudden. “Thank you, Mr. Geiger. Tell Roddy that Nick and I will be around to see him sometime soon.”
“Will do. You have a nice night, Mr. Monroe.”
“You too.” He hangs up and lets himself breathe for a second before he makes another call, this time to a Papagayo he’s known for years – a pretty little bartender named Savannah. She answers on the second ring.
“Hi, stranger,” she says coyly, and Monroe presses the heel of his palm against his forehead.
“Hi, Savvy,” he says. “I have a question.”
“My place, eleven thirty,” she says. “Bring strawberries.”
“I’m serious,” he says, but she does make him feel a little better.
“Okay, shoot.”
“Do you know any Blutbaden in the area? Especially newer ones.”
“Um.” There’s a low sound like she’s sucking in a breath; she’s outside smoking, probably on a break from the bar. He has good timing. “I pretty much only ever knew you and the Lasser boys, and that crazy sister of theirs that was in town for a little while.”
“Think,” Monroe says. “Think hard, Sav, this is really important.”
“There’s an old woman in Brentwood, I think,” she says after a moment. “Or maybe Mount Scott, but she’s got to be, like, seventy, I don’t think she’s who you’re looking for.”
“Who do you think I’m looking for?”
“I’m assuming somebody hurt your Grimm,” she says. “You’re not the territorial type – can’t see you picking a fight with another wolf for no reason, you know?”
“What the hell do you mean, my Grimm?”
“People talk, Monroe. Not just parrots,” Savannah says. “A lot of people know about a Weider Blutbad helping out the resident baby Grimm, okay? And a lot of people think it’s a good thing. This whole city would be fucked if we had a loose cannon Grimm running around.”
“Shit,” Monroe says.
“It’s not a big deal,” she says reassuringly. “I think people kind of like it – a Blutbad doing something good.”
“I think some Blutbaden are about to do something very bad,” Monroe says. “Sav, I need you to promise me you aren’t going to tell anybody this, okay? Not for at least a couple of weeks.”
Savannah makes a displeased noise but says “okay”, a little bit sulkily.
“You’re the best,” he says. “I’ll call you when I’m back in town, you and Anita should come around for dinner, you can meet Nick.”
He realizes it’s worded badly when Savannah squawks, “Oh my God, he really is your Grimm! I thought it was a professional thing – !”
“You’re the biggest pain in the ass in the world,” Monroe says. “Thank you.”
“Any time,” she says, and hangs up.
“Shit,” Monroe repeats.
--
Monroe does a cursory driveby of Nick’s house as soon as he’s back in Portland and back in the Bug – he gets to the airport at ten to seven and he’s out of the snarled traffic surrounding it by seven fifteen. Nick lives on the other side of the city but Monroe knows his way around well enough to avoid the rest of the traffic tangles, and he’s scoping out Nick’s front lawn for anything suspicious by seven forty-five. He can’t see anything, and when he gets out of the car to knock at Nick’s door – because he feels like wandering around Nick’s yard might look kind of suspicious – he can’t smell anything other than Grimm. It’s a scent he’s accustomed to, one he sort of naturally hones into, and that alone makes it easy to track down where he’s staying.
Blutbaden powers could totally be used for evil, he thinks, knocking at Nick’s motel room door. He’s staying on the first level of what look sort of like cabins, except they’re all connected – Monroe is confused by this whole setup but clearly it wasn’t a last-minute choice because Nick said he had somewhere in mind, and his scent trail hadn’t gone anywhere else.
Monroe knocks again before he hears someone stirring on the other side, footsteps approaching the door.
Nick is wearing a black tee-shirt and red boxer briefs and Monroe bites his tongue hard. Jesus, Grimms have no sense of self-preservation, none at all.
“Morning,” Nick says, and yawns. His hair is flat on one side and sticking up on the other, and there’s a crease on his left forearm from where it was laying under the pillow all night.
“Do you always answer the door without pants?”
“Nah,” Nick says, and opens the door a little wider, standing to the side. “I knew it was you.”
“How’d you know it was me?” Monroe asks, before he can properly think about what Nick just said.
“I could just tell,” Nick says, infuriatingly casually.
“Hmph,” Monroe says. “Did anybody see you come here?”
“I’m still alive, right?” Nick glances at him as he pulls his jeans on. He bends his right leg to pull on his sock and looks like a heron or a stork or some other ungainly little bird and Monroe, God help him, Monroe wants to fuck him blind. This is not the time or place for that kind of realization, but there he has it.
“Looks like it,” he says, and clears his throat. “So, this whole you having to go to a motel thing. Sorry about that.”
Nick waves his hand in Monroe’s general direction, using the other to finger-comb his hair. “Buy me breakfast and I’ll call it even.”
Monroe lets out a longsuffering sigh but doesn’t argue. Nick grins as he passes him on his way out the door, and Monroe makes sure to throw in a grumble as he follows him out into the parking lot.
--
“Jesus. Hello?”
“Does that ‘be on the lookout’ thing still apply?”
Monroe rolls over to look at his clock. It’s five fifty-seven, three minutes until it was going to go off anyway, so he flicks it to ‘off’ and gets up. “Nick, you’re a Grimm, I think it’s pretty safe to assume it applies literally all the time.”
“Okay,” Nick says, and the total lack of a retort makes Monroe’s eyebrows raise.
“What’s going on?”
“There’s something on my porch.” Nick clears his throat. “Pieces of something. An animal, I don’t know – a cat, maybe.”
“Ah,” Monroe says. “Shit. You want me to come take a look?”
“If you would,” Nick says, a little too quickly. He sounds like he’s trying to be casual.
“Give me ten minutes,” Monroe says, and hangs up. He dresses fast, jeans and a tee-shirt and flip flops, and he texts Annie while he’s driving: do you know for sure that jack and charlie went back home? Because if it was any of them, any of his siblings, it would be one of the boys, and Jack and Charlie are the first ones that come to mind.
It takes him five minutes to get to Nick’s house and he can smell the blood as soon as he steps out of his car, sharp and sweet, cat blood, not Katzenvolk. The scent is almost overwhelming, a fresh kill, and he has to tamp the wolf down as he approaches the porch. It’s one of his more barbaric instincts – something approaching hunger at the first breath of blood-scent, especially a prey animal or a natural enemy of the Blutbaden, something like a cat or fox. Thankfully, it’s just as easy to force down as the rest of them, by now.
It’s a fresh kill, though, with none of the sourness that comes with old blood, and that makes it harder. Monroe hates himself a little bit, sometimes.
He’s distracted momentarily when his phone buzzes in his pocket. Yes, Annie says, I talked to Moira this morning, Charlie hit a deer last night just outside Swan Valley. He’s ok. And Jack flew back to Wyoming this morning.
That alleviates his fears, a little. It would take more than a day to drive from southern Idaho to Portland and well more than that from whatever hole in the ground Jack’s stuffed himself into out in the middle of nowhere.
“You were right,” he says absently, standing just near the steps – they seem to have gotten the brunt of the attack, the steps and the spot right in front of the door, although whoever did this wasn’t stingy with their decorating. “It’s definitely a cat.” He glances around the blood-splattered porch, the bits of fur and meat. “Or. Was, I guess.”
Nick swallows audibly and is determinedly not looking at his porch. He actually looks a little bit ill. “I don’t know how this is grossing me out way more than a homicide scene. Jesus, who would do that to a cat?”
“Go to the station,” Monroe says. “Do cop stuff. I can do it.”
Nick blinks at him, and for once he doesn’t try to shove off Monroe’s offer of help with no, thanks, it’s cool, I got it. “Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Nick puts both hands on the porch railing and vaults himself over so that he doesn’t have to touch the steps. There’s blood everywhere Monroe looks – Nick probably barely avoided stepping on the pile of guts in front of his front door.
“You’re awesome,” he says. They’re very close. Nick, Monroe has realized over the past months, is not overly concerned with other peoples’ personal space. “Seriously.”
“Mm,” Monroe says. “Shoo, go do good, I’ll see you later.”
“Dinner?”
“Dinner. Bring beer. Hopworks, or Upright Six if you can find it.”
“Snob,” Nick says, but there’s affection in his tone so blatant that Monroe blinks at his back as he walks away.
After a moment, though – and he turns to look at the porch again so Nick doesn’t see him watching while he backs out of the driveway because hi, creepy – he has to turn his attention back to the mangled cat. He isn’t exactly squeamish; he’d done worse to much larger – and occasionally more sentient – animals in his time, but he still doesn’t like to see something like this.
He doesn’t clean it up right off, though. Before anything he needs to know if he can catch a scent, and that involves pacing the length of the porch for a minute or two, studiously avoiding bits of flesh and fur. He can smell wolfsbane more than anything, so obviously they’re Blutbaden – or some other Wesen using wolfsbane to throw them off the trail and make them think they were Blutbaden, and God, wouldn’t that just be typical. But no, he can smell Blutbaden underneath the cloying, heavy herb, sharp and inviting.
blutbaden, he texts Nick. used wolfsbane to cover up the scent, knew i would recognize it.
Angelina?
Smart boy, Monroe thinks. maybe, he says, and hopes for Nick’s sake that he’s wrong.
--
This time, Nick doesn’t even bother calling; he just shows up at Monroe’s house, looking frazzled and exhausted and Monroe can practically taste his agitation. Something’s bothering him in a big, flashing-red-light way.
“What happened?”
“Somebody spraypainted my house,” Nick says, stepping inside when Monroe beckons. “And smashed in all the windows on the first floor. I mean, completely smashed. And they climbed the trellis to get to the ones in the office upstairs.” He glances at Monroe, who is unabashedly staring at him. “Oh, and they set my yard on fire.”
“Jesus Christ,” Monroe says. “So you got home and saw it?”
“Yeah.” Nick sits down and runs a hand through his thick hair. “They painted ‘get out’, I think, on the front, and ‘leave’ on the sides, and I don’t know if they were trying to actually burn something into the yard but it just sort of burned the whole thing. I’m lucky the house didn’t catch, Jesus, there’s enough shit to pay for as it is.” Monroe doesn’t sit but stands next to him, resisting the urge – need – to touch him, reassure himself that Nick is there and solid and unhurt. He settles with putting a hand on his shoulder and moving his thumb, which is far less than he wants to do and a little more than he thinks Nick is okay with, but Nick practically leans into the contact. He’s calming down already while all Monroe can think about is a burning front lawn and sparkling glass and what would have happened if Nick had been there, if he hadn’t been able to get to his phone, if, if, if –
“Do you know who’s doing this?” It’s not the question Monroe is expecting, and nor is it one he really wants to answer.
“I think,” he says carefully, “it’s my brothers. And Angelina.”
“Oh,” Nick says. “Awesome. God, I should have shot her when I had the chance.”
Monroe doesn’t say anything to that.
“You said when you called me, the last night you were in Montana, that your family found out that you’re friends with me,” Nick says after a moment. “Explain that a little more.”
“They said it’s because I’m putting the pack in danger,” Monroe says. He’s pacing back and forth in front of the couch, movements agitated and fluid, stalking up and down the rug under the coffee table. He hates this house right now, hates how small it is, how many things there are, hates how wild he feels in his own skin. The only thing calming him down is Nick’s scent, collected, now, and worried—about him, when his house is the one that just got vandalized, his windows smashed, his yard set on fire. “I’m not pack to them and they sure as hell aren’t pack to me, this is all about the fact that they hate you for who you are and they hate me for what I turned into—”
He cuts himself off and sits down abruptly, forcing himself to be still. God bless Pilates for self-control methods. Nick doesn’t say anything; he’s close enough that Monroe can feel his warmth.
“You have to stop being around me,” Monroe says after a long moment. Nick tenses hard and abrupt enough that Monroe can practically feel it through the couch.
“No,” he says. That’s his cop-voice, or his Grimm-voice, hard and unapologetic, his do-what-I-tell-you voice.
“You’re going to get killed,” Monroe says. “I’m going to get you killed just by you being here, I don’t care about me, they won’t do anything to me, but Nick—”
“No,” Nick repeats, and stands up—now he’s the one pacing, moving with restless angry energy, “no, Monroe, we went through this a long time ago, if you aren’t a status quo guy neither am I—” He cuts himself off. “I need some air.”
“This isn’t about the status quo, I don’t fucking care about the status quo!” Monroe instinctively gets up and follows him; he’s going for the back door, through the kitchen. “This is about me keeping you alive!”
Nick whirls around, and his voice is shaking, just a little hard-lined tremor, when he says, “You don’t understand, I can’t do this without you, any of this—not Grimm stuff, I feel like I can’t breathe without you sometimes—”
And Monroe, God help him, cuts him off with his mouth, with a long kiss that crosses the line into brutal by a mile, one that backs Nick against the door and even though Monroe’s hands stay on his slender hips he’s claiming his Grimm entirely.
“Fuck,” he breathes after one of them breaks away. “Fuck.”
“Fuck,” Nick agrees, and kisses him again.
--
It’s weird, but after that, things are quiet.
The workmen can’t get to Nick’s house until Thursday – apparently there was some pretty heavy damage from a tree or something in the southeast part of town – but Nick seems pretty content to just stay at Monroe’s (“if that’s okay with you, I mean,” he says when he tells him, which, duh). It’s nice to have someone else in his bed. Weird, especially considering that said someone has a dick, but Monroe is willing to suspend that particular “what” moment for a while.
Nick is still asleep, it seems, when Monroe starts carefully getting up. The Grimm is able to maintain his charade for about six more seconds before his eyes open halfway and his arm tightens just a little around Monroe’s waist.
“Rmph,” he says, which Monroe takes to mean ‘where are you going’.
“I have to go to somebody’s house,” he says, stretching back out on his back. Nick is positioned just so Monroe can bury his nose in his hair. He’s not sure if Nick smells like him or if he smells like Nick, but he likes it either way. “A client.”
“You should stay,” Nick says, running one square-palmed hand down Monroe’s belly from where it’s resting on his chest, kissing the spot under his ear, moving his lips down the side of his throat. Monroe grins a little, rolls over, slips one hand under the sheet covering them; Nick’s hard, like he thought, and he makes absolutely no effort to stop Monroe from getting a hand down his boxers.
He makes a little oh sound, like he’s surprised, tips his head back; Monroe angles himself so he’s not on top of him but can still mouth at his throat, kiss down over the bruises on his chest and shoulders that bloomed during the night – he had been careful not to leave any on Nick’s actual neck, although Nick had been a little less considerate. Nick’s hips roll forward, shameless already; God, Monroe loves this, he would honestly stay in bed with him for days if he could, figure out all the spots that make him whimper and the tricks that make him shake. He knows a few already, but he’d like to get to know the rest.
“You know,” Nick says, already a little breathless, “this is great and all but –”
Monroe bites him, just hard enough to sting, and Nick cuts himself off, letting out a tense noise from somewhere in his throat, low enough that Monroe can feel the vibrations. “You’re still getting off,” Monroe says, and thumbs over the head of Nick’s cock with just a little more pressure than Nick was probably expecting, like he’s emphasizing his point.
“Yeah,” Nick says agreeably, and closes his eyes, pushing his hips forward. It doesn’t take long to get him off – not that there are any issues with Nick’s stamina, Monroe is just apparently really good at handjobs, which seems like something a thirty-five-year-old man should not be proud of – and Nick, Monroe has realized over the last four days, is gorgeous when he comes, biting his lip and gasping and arching, like something out of a porn that Monroe designed for himself. He’s not loud, usually (although last night had been an exception, and Monroe is really glad his neighborhood is spaced out), but he says Monroe in a sharp little moan when it’s really good, and he does that now, nails digging into Monroe’s bare back and dragging down.
“You are so hot,” Monroe says against Nick’s neck, lips pressed against his racing pulse point.
(It would be so easy.)
“Mmph,” Nick says, because now that he’s gotten his morning orgasm in, apparently, words are no longer needed.
“You are,” Monroe says, kissing up his neck and jaw. “You’re hot and beautiful and amazing and mine.”
Nick shivers a little bit, because Monroe hasn’t said anything about mine yet, but his small smile is pleased.
--
He’s late to his appointment with his client, but luckily she’s one of his regulars, a collector like him, an old, old Kaninchen. She’s a direct import from Germany, she likes to say, and he greets her as Frau Kreiv. He’s there for two hours, tinkering with the grandfather clock in her entryway because, she says, the second-hand seems just a little off; it’s not a difficult fix but everything is hard on a clock that large, more difficult than anything on a tiny one, which he also handles, an impossibly tiny watch that needs cleaning. It’s not often that his hands seem too big for whatever job he’s doing – logically they are, his hands are huge, but normally he can make them work – but today it’s difficult.
He gets in the Bug with the promise of a check in the mail – usually he only accepts payment upfront, but Mrs. Kreiv was one of his first customers, and let it not be said that Monroe doesn’t show gratitude – and makes his way back across town, stopping at a drive-through Dutch Brothers for coffee because Nick, doubtlessly, has long since finished off the pot Monroe had put on earlier.
He’s more than content, turning down his street; they have the rest of the day to themselves – Nick’s commanding officer had told him not to come in today, he and Hank had just wrapped up what sounded like a pretty grueling triple homicide – and Monroe is thinking that maybe he’ll make up for this morning when he pulls into his driveway.
His door is hanging open.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, fuck.”
He tears the buckle off his seatbelt in his haste to get it off, get out of the car, get to the house, and any feeble attempts his human side makes to control the wolf side are quickly stifled when he smells blood. Blutbaden and human – not human, Grimm, his Grimm, splattered on the porch, smeared up against the house, short dark hairs caught in the hinge like someone slammed his Nick against it and the back of his head hit just there, and Monroe fights the overwhelming urge to howl his rage to the sky.
--
The scent is easy to follow. It’s not a good sign – they want him to track them down, they want him to watch what they’ll do.
They haven’t even made an effort to mask it. He can smell Angelina as clear and sharp as a knife, but he can smell something else, something that hits somewhere deep and long-abandoned inside of him, something that makes the wolf want to howl and chase in happiness, something that says go and mine and pack. It’s instinct, primal and there, and it’s then he knows – knows for sure, because as much as he dislikes his family he didn’t want to believe they would do it – that his brothers are here. That his brothers have Nick.
The trail leads him to Forest, as though that’s any kind of surprise. He doesn’t bother with his car; the forest is close and he doesn’t trust himself driving right now, just walks fast and purposeful, shaking hands jammed into his pockets. He can smell his brothers – Jack, probably, Jack and Charlie and Milo – like they’re standing in front of him.
They stay off the trails – he wonders if they drove to the park and pushes the information out of the way immediately, because as of right now it’s irrelevant, the only thing that matters is finding Nick because he doesn’t know if they want Monroe to see his body or they want Monroe to watch them kill him. Or if they want Monroe to kill him himself, which isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility and makes Monroe’s stomach twist itself into sailors’ knots. They’re off the trails and heading northwest and he breaks into a run, feels himself shifting just enough that he can keep his balance better, feels his face changing and teeth bursting through his gums. It’s not pleasant but it’s necessary, and he can pick up the scent even stronger now.
He keeps trying and keeps failing to stamp down the rage smoldering inside his ribcage, bellows stoked with every inhale.
They haven’t gone far, down into a ravine sheltered by old, old trees, close enough to the river that he can smell water. He can feel himself changing back – it’s an unconscious thing by now, he’s losing control, but for once he doesn’t care. He can smell blood, above everything else, sharp sweet Grimm-blood hanging thick in the air. And he can smell them, they’re right there, two men and – he could smell four, where’s –
Annie crouches next to Nick, one small hand cupping his face. Milo and Charlie watch Monroe; Milo carries a handgun, and there’s another in Angelina’s belt. Angelina is staring at him, too, with less surprise than his brothers.
“Annie,” Monroe says, and hates how stunned he sounds, because God, he should have known, should have never trusted one of them. “Annie.”
But of all of them. Of all of them, he thought she would understand, he thought she would be the last to turn on him like this –
“You know what happens when you betray the pack, Will,” Annie says, looking at him now, and her voice is anguished. “You know this has to happen –”
Monroe steps closer and Milo and Charlie move as one, stepping up to block him off. Angelina moves up, too, and it hits Monroe that she hasn’t said a word, not yet.
“You’re a traitor,” Milo says, and there’s an inappropriate amount of satisfaction in his voice even if he’s spitting out the words like they’re bile in his mouth. “You’re fucking a Grimm, you ought to be split open –”
“Milo,” Annie says sharply, and Monroe refuses to acknowledge that there are tears on her face. She’s stroking Nick’s cheek with the back of her bent fingers; Nick’s face is bleeding from a cut that splits the outer edge of his left eyebrow, and blood has soaked into his shirt from the back of his head. His eyes are closed and Monroe takes just a second to listen to him breathe. He can’t tell if he’s conscious or not.
“You’ve been doing this,” Monroe says, looking at Annie like Milo isn’t even worth his attention. “You lied when I texted you –”
“Good job, baby,” Angelina croons, and steps even further forward than his brothers. “You should have known it wouldn’t last, you should have known this was crazy, being with a monster –”
“I’ve been with a monster,” Monroe bites out.
She takes another step forward, hand inching for her gun, and as soon as he sees that he hits her, backhands her across the face and sends her staggering. They’d fought before when they were together, but he’d never hit her – he had pushed her back when she pushed him, had held her down when she threatened him and he thought she meant it, but he’d never hit her, not even when she scratched long bloody furrows into his cheek or bit through his bottom lip. He’d never raised a hand to her until now.
He doesn’t feel bad.
Milo is next, and he draws his gun before Monroe can get to him. The first shot goes wild and Monroe uses the chance to knock it out of his hand, and –
And it almost feels like he’s watching himself, because Monroe of clocks and sweaters and a pale yellow Bug and good coffee and a sweet, handsome, goofy boyfriend does not slam young men’s heads into trees, does not pick them up by the throat. He does not drop them and let them fall in a crumpled heap next to their whimpering pack-mate, huddled on the ground, cradling her jaw.
Milo stares at the bright sky with their mother’s eyes in their father’s face and slowly closes his eyes, and Monroe hears Annie say Milo – Milo in what seems like a very faraway voice. When Monroe turns, he kneels for just a moment to pick up the gun that Angelina had dropped; Milo’s gun is buried in the loam, somewhere none of them will find any time soon. He isn’t good with guns, but he can shoot one and he can aim one and that’s what he does. He aims at Annie, not at Charlie, and slowly, slowly, she straightens up, leaving Nick panting in the leaves.
“We don’t kill our own,” she says softly, beseechingly, and Monroe’s hand shakes.
“He’s mine,” he says. “My pack, Annie. He belongs to me. Take the boy and get out of here.”
“He’s not pack,” Annie says. She’s still crying and Monroe wants suddenly and furiously to pull the trigger, to wipe her away, leave her bleeding and cooling in the leaves – she betrayed him, God, she –
“He’s my pack,” Monroe repeats instead, and takes a breath. “Leave.”
“We can wait,” Charlie says quietly. “We have as much time as we need. We’ll wait a week or a month or six years, but we’ll come back.”
Monroe’s body tightens like a bowstring and if he didn’t have his gun covering Annie – she’s still the closest to Nick – he’d have it aimed directly at Charlie’s head. “If any of you come back – I don’t care who – Ellie or Jack or anyone – I’ll track you down and I’ll kill you, all of you – if you ever –”
“He isn’t worth this,” Annie says, and there’s naked pleading in her voice now. “Will, just – let us, let us do this and come back with us, everything could be so good if you just –”
Monroe doesn’t mean to scream it – not consciously – but he does, screams get out loud enough that a gaggle of crows takes flight, vocalizing their displeasure.
Annie moves a fraction of an inch towards Nick, almost imperceptibly.
“Annie,” Monroe says, “Annie, if you touch him I swear to God – take Milo and get out of here, go back to Montana and don’t you ever come back, I swear –” His voice is shaking and he feels so close, if she doesn’t – he can’t –
“We can wait,” Charlie repeats, and picks up Milo’s limp body like he’s a sack of flour, slinging him over his shoulders in a fireman’s lift. “We won’t forget, Will.”
Monroe covers Annie as she moves towards Angelina. Angelina’s jaw is broken, and she staggers when Annie helps her up. Monroe watches with red eyes and keeps watching her until they disappear over the edge of the ridge. He can smell Nick’s blood but he has to keep smelling them, has to keep smelling them until they’ve faded, until he knows they’re gone – they know he’ll make good on his threats, though, and they don’t come back, and then and only then does Monroe fall to his knees next to the Grimm.
“Nick,” he says, voice low and hoarse. “Nick, can you hear me?”
“You did pretty good,” Nick says, a little blearily. His eyelids flutter open. “I thought you’d really shoot them.”
Monroe feels like his knees would give out were he not sitting on them. “Jesus, you’re awake.”
“Been awake,” Nick mumbles. “Ribs hurt. Head hurts. Hit my head on your door.”
“I saw,” Monroe says, and runs a hand over Nick’s face. The bleeding has slowed a little from the cut, but the blood is still sticky when he touches it and he comes away with a perfect bloody thumbprint when he moves his hand. “Think you need to go to the hospital?”
“You can do stitches,” Nick says, a little bit more coherently – he’s clearly trying to shake himself into wakefulness. “Right? For my eyebrow.”
“Yeah,” Monroe says, shaky with relief. “Yeah, I – you should still go, say you got mugged or something –”
Nick nods and lets Monroe help him up. Monroe takes a second to breathe in: forest, a squirrel, dead leaves, stagnant water, blood – he can smell his family and Angelina but not well, not anymore; they’re moving, and moving fast.
“You’re going to be okay,” he says, letting Nick put his arm around his shoulder to stabilize him.
“They’ll come back,” Nick says, leans his forehead against Monroe’s shoulder for a moment. “You know they will. After you this time, too.”
“We’ll be alright,” Monroe says softly. “Let them come.”