Dennis
The healer stopped by in the afternoon and the two women fussed at each other as usual, but the eventual verdict was that Gran was strongly on the mend and was likely to be allowed out of bed the next day.
“Another day?” Gran groused as Fiona let herself out after her visit. “I can’t feel my ass at this point, and she wants me to spend another day in this bed?”
“Hell no!” As Gran had gotten used to having them around, what little verbal restraint she'd started with had completely eroded; now, she could have given a trucker a run for his money. “Next you’re going to be trying to get me to pee in a bedpan, and let me tell you, young man: nope.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, no, I think that’s you, if anyone. Did you see his face when he talked about his mother calling you a ‘human’?”
“Hm.” Dennis considered that. “So I was right in thinking that was meant as a pejorative.”
“Oh, yes. Humans aren’t equal to bears, or even other shifters, in Rowena’s eyes.”
Bjorn growled again and Dennis absently patted him on the head, which felt a little funny given that Bjorn’s head was even with his own even though Bjorn was on four feet. “Down, boy.”
Grumble.
Dennis was opening his mouth to scold Bjorn again when there was a knock at the door. He sighed, instead. “That better not be her again or I’m gonna officially lose my shit.”
Gran shifted her weight in bed. “If you’d just let me up, I could answer my own door and send her away.”
“Nope.” He pressed her shoulder gently to keep her down. “I’ll get it. You…supervise with your ears. Bjorn, you coming?”
The bear huffed as if to say duh and followed him out of the bedroom, his footsteps sounding thunderous on the wood floor. Dennis looked through the peephole and sighed his relief. “It’s the alpha,” he told Bjorn, who nodded his shaggy head.
Dennis pulled the door open. “Alpha, hi.” When had he started calling Escalus by his title, the way the den members did?
Escalus held up a large paper bag. “I brought dinner.”
Dennis blinked. “Uh…thank you?” Why had the den alpha brought them food? “Uh, do you want to come in?”
“Yes, please.” He stepped past Dennis and nodded to Bjorn as if he were addressing a human and not a bear. “Evening, Bjorn.”
Bjorn rumbled what might have been a hello and lowered his head a little. Escalus patted his shoulder. “You want me to change you back so you can eat with us?” An eager snuffle, and the man smirked. “Yeah, I figured. Shift, Bjorn.”
Muscles twisted and reformed, and then a naked Bjorn rose from the floor and shook himself out. “Thanks, Alpha. Been stuck like that for hours. Let me go grab some sweats.” He darted out of the room, leaving Dennis alone with the other man.
Dennis, unsure what to say, just stood there awkwardly for a second before offering, “Kitchen?”
Escalus nodded. “Yeah. I brought soup and biscuits. Wasn’t sure what Miz Ginevra was eating these days while she’s ill. If you can help me find the bowls and spoons, we can set up dinner while Bjorn changes.”
Obediently, Dennis led him into the kitchen and set about fetching the necessary implements for eating.
A few minutes later, Bjorn came out of his bedroom wearing sweatpants and no shirt and went into his grandmother’s room.
They came back out of the room together, Gran leaning heavily on Bjorn’s arm, but hey, she was walking!
“Oh,” she warbled, “good evening, Alpha. To what do we owe this honor?”
Escalus sighed and pulled out a chair so Bjorn could lower her into it. “I wanted to check in with y’all after this morning’s shitshow. And to let you know, Bjorn, that I spoke to your parents.”
Bjorn winced, clearly not anticipating good news. “And?”
“Your mother is insistent that it’s not acceptable for you to mate a human. Your father supports her on that. I tried to explain to them that fated is fated and that they should consider you lucky to have met your fated mate, but she refused to budge on her opinion.”
Why did it sound like this was some sort of official refusal? “Does she get a say in our mating?” Dennis asked, and if he sounded a little worried, so what?
Escalus considered that, then shook his head. “No more than any other mother would. It’s just that a mother rejecting her child’s mate is…very rare. Unheard of, really.”
“Bitch,” Ginevra said shortly, snorting, and then focused on the soup Dennis had ladled out for her. She slurped it off her spoon loudly while the rest of them stared at hearing her obscene judgment.
Escalus coughed, looking like he was trying not to either laugh or flat-out agree with her. “She, uh…” He cleared his throat. “She says he’s not welcome in her house.”
“Oh?” Bjorn cocked an eyebrow, looking surprisingly unmoved by this news. “Guess we won’t be going to visit them, then. Did she have any other edicts to lay down while she was at it?”
Gran swallowed her mouthful and looked up. “I bet she’s trying to play the money card.” She patted Bjorn on his bare arm. “She’s never understood you, and she cares more about the purity of shifterkind than she cares about her own son's suffering if he loses his mate.”
“Yes, well,” the alpha said lamely, “she did mention something about Bjorn’s inheritance. Or rather, how it won’t be his inheritance if he mates Dennis.”
Bjorn rolled his eyes and crunched down resentfully on a biscuit. “They’re not even rich,” he muttered through his mouthful before swallowing. “It’s not like they’d be making me a millionaire.”
“And you don’t need their money,” Ginevra added staunchly, and Bjorn nodded.
“That too.”
“Well,” Escalus said with a nod, “that’s a good thing.
She seemed very determined. Frankly, the entire conversation was a clusterfuck.
She wanted me to force you to renounce him, which…
” He shook his head. “I may be an asshole, but I’m not that much of an asshole.
I don’t fuck with mates.” Then, expression changing to sly, he added, “Besides, I find Dennis useful as a business consultant.”
Dennis snorted. “And now the truth comes out.” He dipped his biscuit in his bowl of soup, then looked up. “I mean, the news I have for you isn’t great, so you may reconsider that.”
A curious eyebrow went up and Escalus put down his spoon. “Oh?”
He took a moment to compose his thoughts, trying to put them in an order he could easily relay, one that would be more precise and helpful than the initial impressions he'd shared with Bjorn and Gran yesterday but also…not offend the freaking alpha of the whole den. “Your den is…kinda insular, right? You don’t have a lot of regular humans among you, nor do you interact with them very much outside the den?”
Escalus considered that, lips twisting slightly.
“Mmm, I suppose. It’s not common for humans to mate in, certainly.
But the town is full of humans, and we do business there, so it’s not like my people don’t ever encounter them.
” He cocked his head to the side, apparently catching on to Dennis’s point.
“You think we don’t know how to talk to people?
And that’s why they don’t come to the cafe? ”
Dennis rocked his hand from side to side, indicating so-so.
“I think it’s more that perhaps some of your people have a bit of a…
superiority complex? I’m not sure that’s exactly the right term to describe what I saw, but once the staff at the cafe realized I was human, the service deteriorated, like they thought they didn’t need to try so hard with me.
Then Bjorn came in once I was sitting down with my drink, and they were friendly and helpful again.
I got attitude; he got warmth.” It had occurred to him, as his observation drew to a close, that the reception he was getting from the bears was perhaps closer to the reception he'd given at shifters at his pub than he was comfortable with.
“And they don’t even like me that much, as bears go!” Bjorn added with a disconcerting level of brightness for the words he was saying.
Only Bjorn could be happy while not being liked.
“Anyway,” Dennis went on, shooting his mate the side-eye, “that, taken in combination with some of the stuff Bjorn’s mother has said, makes me think that perhaps you’ve got a snobbery problem around here.
And people aren’t going to want to patronize businesses where they get attitude. ”
Escalus put down his biscuit and slumped back in his chair. “Well, shit. I mean, it’s true we don’t see a lot of humans inside the den, but…we’re all people, you know? I had thought Rowena and Ronald were just our resident curmudgeons.”
“Isn’t Ronald pretty high up in the den hierarchy?” Dennis asked as his thoughts started to come together into a theory. “Does he train people, or sit in a position where others look up to him as a role model?”
“Aw, shit.” Yeah, Escalus had caught his point. “So you think everyone else is learning the wrong things from him.”
“I think it’s a distinct possibility, yes.”
Ginevra let out a heavy sigh. “I will never understand where I went wrong raising that boy. But it seems he’s determined to make himself into as rigid and unfeeling bastard as he can – even with his own child, let alone with strangers.
” She looked thoughtful. “Do you think it’s too late to ground him? ”
Dennis snickered, Bjorn flat-out guffawed, and even the alpha cracked a smile. “Yeah, no,” Dennis said through the laughter, “I don’t think that’s going to work.”
“It won’t work for her to do it,” Escalus said slowly, thoughtfully, “but perhaps if I do it…”
Bjorn blinked. “You want to ground my father?”
“Well no, not ground, per se. But I do have the power to discipline any member of my den if it becomes necessary, so that’s definitely an option.”
Dennis suddenly flashed back to the period when he'd worked in an office, before he opened the pub. “Put him on a PIP!” he chimed in, laughing internally at the notion of an HR bear – wearing a tie over his fur coat, of course - having a stern talk with Ronald, reminding him that harassment and discrimination weren’t welcome in an office environment.
Said office environment, of course, being the forest.
All three of his companions looked at him blankly. “A what?” said Escalus.
Apparently none of them had ever worked in corporate America.
He supposed there probably wasn’t a lot of crossover between den grandma and desk worker.
“A PIP is a ‘performance improvement plan’,” he explained.
“It’s business jargon for ‘you suck at your job and we’re giving you steps to take to improve, and if you don’t succeed at those steps, we’re going to fire you’. ”
The alpha looked thoughtful. “I see.” He gave it a few more moments to roll around in his head, then nodded.
“Yes, I think I can make something like that work. I do have the ability to remove him from his position, and I think he’d be mortified if I did that.
So would his wife. If I present it to him as ‘this is what you need to do if you want to keep your power’, I think it’s reasonably likely that he’d cooperate, even if he and Rowena would bitch endlessly about it once I wasn’t nearby. ”
“Mom would do most of the bitching,” Bjorn supplied. “I mean, she handles most of the talking for both of them in general. So you’d need to get to her, too.”
Escalus considered that, then nodded. “Yes, that does make sense.” He looked at Bjorn, then at Dennis. “Would you two be willing to sit down with me, maybe tomorrow, and sketch out what improvements we’d expect to see from Ronald and Rowena, in a format I could present to them?”
“Oh!” Bjorn raised a hand like he was in a classroom. “Can we require them to work with humans in some way – supervised, of course, so they don’t get worse instead of better? Like, put them in a position where the humans are in charge of them?”
That wasn’t a bad idea. Dennis took a moment to think through what he’d seen in town, searching for viable options.
Aha, that might work. “There’s a community center,” he said slowly, forming the idea as he spoke, “that looked pretty run-down. I heard someone talking about it at the cafe, and I think they mostly use it to give teenagers somewhere to go that’s not just, like, drinking in the woods.
Uh, assuming it's even safe to do that in bear country. Anyway, places like that nearly always need help – maintenance work, volunteers, mentors for the kids. Probably monetary donations, too. If they’ve got an administrator or something there who’d be willing to boss around a couple of bears, you could put them to work there.
” Another flash of insight. “Oh, and maybe that could even become a pipeline for employees at the den businesses! Teenagers looking for jobs, people in their early twenties looking to find a career…” He waved a hand demonstratively.
“There’s even a chance the snobs might get sucked into the whole thing and develop some enthusiasm. ”
Escalus’s eyes widened. “I know of that community center. The den donates to it annually as part of our charitable contributions for tax purposes, but as far as I know we have no other involvement with it. Do you think they’d be open to hosting a couple of rehabilitation jobs like Ronald and Rowena? ”
Dennis grinned. “Volunteer-run places like that are usually all about rehabilitation. Like I said, they’d need to be supervised by someone willing to smack them down when they need it, but if you’ve got someone like that, or the center does…I think it could work.”
Ginevra loudly slurped up the last of her soup, then cackled. “Oh, I can’t wait to see their faces when you tell them this. Bjorn, baby, do you think you can take a video of it for me?”
“Gran!” He screwed up his face in what was supposed to be a censorious look, but mostly failed at it. “You’re awful.”
“No,” she shot back, “they’re awful, and you’re going to help make them less awful.
Because I raised you right, despite the shit they put on you.
” She patted his hand. “I’m so proud of you, my baby.
And…” She turned her head to meet Dennis’s eyes.
“I think you and your mate are perfectly suited. I can’t wait to see the life you build together. ”
“Gran, you know we’re not -” Bjorn began, but suddenly Dennis couldn’t stand to watch him deny the facts again on Dennis’s behalf.
So he interrupted his mate. “I think it’s going to be a hell of a life.” He smiled at Bjorn. “Though I have to warn you, I’m kind of an asshole.”
Bjorn stared at him, open-mouthed, for long moments. “Are you…?”
Ginevra and Escalus were watching them so avidly that Dennis felt like he ought to do a little dance to complete the entertainment. Instead, he ignored them and focused on Bjorn. “Let’s go on a date. No promises beyond that, but…I want a date.”
“Oh, fuck yeah!” shouted Gran, startling everyone. “What?” she said, lowering her voice, when she saw the stares directed at her. “My boys are figuring it out!”