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Barclay is in the office when he hears it. Years of monster hunting has trained him to have incredibly non-selective hearing, attention drawing to literally anything out of the ordinary, because a crunch of leaves and a clink of a coffee cup sound terribly similar to battle tired ears. It’s not something he analyses closely, not something he gives a lot of thought to. When he’s sitting in Mama’s office nearing two in the morning on this particular Friday night, and a thump from somewhere nearby in the Lodge catches his attention, he knows that it might be anything.
Could be a raccoon falling off the roof. Could be a resident dropping something upstairs. Could be a customer-- few and far between that they are-- walking up the front steps and dropping a bag on the porch to ring their bell (though he didn’t hear a car pull up, or the crunch of footsteps on gravel, which are two sounds that he always notices no matter what). Could be Mama heading out to her workshop, though he didn’t hear that either, and he would have, really.
Could be someone armed on the front porch, someone who caught wise to their situation and decided to take monster hunting up themselves, with the wrong targets in mind.
Could be an abomination.
Barclay is up and on his feet before the front door opens, and if he tenses when it slams open and bounces against the wall, well that’s not something he’s going to analyze either. There’s a split second when he wishes he was strapped, just in case, that he wishes he had his gun tucked into the front of his waistband where he tends to keep it whenever he’s up and out.
But it’s in his bedroom closet, unloaded, stowed safe away. It’s not time for abominations quite yet.
And his nerves are settled very quickly, for the thump and the noise thereafter is nothing but the kids trying to stumble their way through his front door.
Jake and Aubrey are both bright-eyed and red-faced, shushing each other and swallowing giggles, with Dani strung up between them via an arm across either’s shoulders. While it’s obvious that the two of them aren’t as drunk as they could be, they definitely aren’t sober, but they almost look it from the stark contrast of Dani being absolutely shit-faced.
Barclay’s first question is how. When they’d borrowed his truck to go out for the evening, he’d figured they meant the movie theatre in the next town over, maybe one of the restaurants, hell, maybe just strolling around town. He should have known better. He’d been a young man in Kepler once upon a time, and the choices for entertainment hadn’t spruced up much since.
Drinking, yeah, that was one of the better options.
It had to be somewhere local. There was a place downtown that was rather busy on the weekends, the place to be, really. A few other local options were more boys’ clubs than anything, everyone who went there being regulars who killed the atmosphere and scared away strangers, trying to keep it quiet and solemn so they could drink till they were miserable in peace. He got glared out of a VFW like that once, hadn’t found it funny enough to try and go back.
But it had to be somewhere local. Aubrey was twenty-two or twenty-three, he couldn’t quite remember, and Dani could pass for the same rather easily. Jake though had a perpetual babyface and, if Barclay did the math right trying to calculate between years on Earth and cycles on Sylvain, wasn’t a day over nineteen.
So it had to be somewhere local enough to recognize and serve them without being carded, but not someone who knew Mama well enough to avoid letting her kids get good and wasted.
Yeah, Barclay knew exactly where they went, then.
While he figures all of this out, the trio in the doorway only manage to make it a step or two further inside. The lights are dim, so they obviously don’t see him standing in the doorway watching, and they continue to shush each other like they’re doing any good at keeping this whole stunt a secret. In the time it takes them to make it ten feet through the doorway, Mama is already at the bottom of the stairs, (appearing unarmed but Barclay knows better) in a heavy, knee-length green bathrobe, sweat pants, one of his old t-shirts, and her boots unlaced but shoved onto her feet. He’d bet money that she has three knives on her, in her bathrobe pockets and tucked into her boot. He’s never known her not to.
“What in the hell is going on down here?” she demands, hitting the light switch and blowing Barclay’s cover. The three young people in their hotel freeze like they’re being hunted, or at least Jake and Aubrey do. Dani seems absolutely unbothered, leaning her weight more heavily into Aubrey and nuzzling against the bare skin of her neck. Aubrey looks torn between being guilty, startled, embarrassed, and looking like she wants to bundle Dani into her arms and carry her off up the stairs.
Barclay would laugh if the situation allowed for it.
Mama stares slack-mouthed at the three of them, then she glanced over at Barclay and they have a brief facial conversation that ends in him shrugging his shoulders haplessly, as if to say ‘don’t look at me, I’m not the one who served them.’
Mama sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose between her fingers. She’s wise enough to know that lecturing them now is a moot effort, seeing as they’d probably absorb absolutely none of it, already saturated through with alcohol as they are. He can guess her thoughts well enough through reading the look on her face, and he bets she’s idling somewhere between “they’re grown adults, they can do what they want” and “but they’re my kids” and “they’re sylvans and getting drunk publicly is a dumb and dangerous risk to take” and “I’m gonna have to kill whichever of them decided to drive home like this.”
She doesn’t get to the point of deciding to say anything though, because Dani lurches suddenly, and before Barclay can even think to respond, she sags over her knees and vomits right there on the floor.
Jake leaps back. Aubrey cringes like she wants to, and buckles a bit under the sudden extra weight, but manages to hold onto her and lean away at the same time. Mama sighs like a knife cutting right through the room and says, “I’ll get her upstairs,” before pointing to Jake and then Aubrey in turn and saying, “Clean it up.”
Then she walks further into the room, takes Dani out of Aubrey’s arms, and nearly carries the stumbling girl up the stairs in the direction of her bedroom. Jake is still grimacing at the mess on the floor, and Aubrey is frowning at the bit splattered on the toe of her boot. She tries to slip it off and nearly falls on her ass in the process, reflexes totally shot. Barclay suppresses a chuckle.
“You heard the boss,” he says, then goes to get a trash bin and some paper towels and the cleaning solution he would prefer they used on his hardwood floors. He hands them over, and they whine about it, but Barclay ignores them as he locks the front door, turns the office light off, and retires upstairs to bed.
Mama is sitting up waiting for him, reading some tattered little paperback through a pair of reading glasses and lounging back against the pillows. He finally lets himself snicker when they make eye contact, closing the door and hiding full-volume laughter with a hand over his mouth. Mama chuckles silently, mouth hidden behind the book against her lips, eyes crinkling.
“You gettin’ up early in the morning?” she asks him, even though he almost exclusively gets up early, save for long nights and bad hunts, where he lets himself sleep in till eight or nine. Or that time the death flu swept through the Lodge and Mama had demanded he stay in bed for three whole days until the fever started to wain.
“Always,” he answers her, because it’s the truth. She grins.
“Get me up with you,” she tells him, “And help me wake the kids up. We’re having a conversation.”
It feels cruel and necessary. Reminds him of the time he and Mama stayed up drinking all hours of the night, when the untended Lodge roof had caved in under the weight of snow and they’d moved into Thacker’s place temporarily. They’d kept him up all night being absolutely obnoxious, irritating him to no end, and he’d woken up the next morning at five after seven to vacuum and blast the radio and open the windows to “air the place out” with brisk February winds.
Revenge, that had been. Consequences, this felt like. Letting your guard down that much in public was stupid, maybe not for Aubrey, but Jake and Dani knew better.
Barclay nodded and settled into bed, reading over Mama’s shoulder. “Sure thing,” he said. “I’ll make extra coffee.”