Ramble!fic wherein Jim is a stalker and Pike is a stoner
This fic is shaping up to be a bloated mass of writerly self-indulgence, so I figured I'd go ahead and post the first half (third?) of it. This part is plenty long enough.
The One-Eyed Wonder Dog makes her first appearance. :)
(Should I do an informative picspam of German Shepherd? I'll get that up sometime tonight, maybe, if I get a few yea-votes.) Now with an informative picspam!
2,688 words, R for language and drug use, Jim + Pike + PikeSis + PikeDog (1/?)
"Gosh, this is a surprise," says Jim, clutching his comm to his chest.
Pike's sister, leaning on her shovel with one booted foot crossed in front of the other, fixes Jim with the tired, hard stare he used to get from bartenders. "Captain Pike isn't here," she says.
"Shit," Jim mutters. He looks down at his comm but the screen's nearly unreadable in this light. He steps forward, squinting at the peaked roof of Elena Pike's house until it wobbles up and blocks the setting sun. "Ma'am, I'm really sorry to bother you. I mean, I apologize for intruding on your privacy like this," he adds hastily, because honestly, the only time he ever sees houses like this, gabled and crooked with toothy woodwork, is in horror vids, and Elena is digging a hole in her front yard without any potted plants lying around waiting to be transferred, and the Google magic he performed to find this place pulled up some very specific information on the Pike family business which is basically Animals and Things That Can Be Made From Animals.
Not to mention it's getting dark, he's in the middle of nowhere, and his comm connection just crapped out.
"Ma'am," he says again, just to be safe. There's a possibility that Elena Pike is trying to hold on to her youth and will be offended at being called 'Ma'am,' but Jim's other option is 'Dollface' and he doubts that will help anything.
"You are looking for Chris, right?" Elena asks.
Jim blinks at her for a few seconds before he realizes that 1) Chris = Captain Pike and 2) Elena isn't going to reveal that Pike's body is in a burlap sack under the porch. That would be an amateur mistake, see, no matter how certain she is that Jim cannot escape her clutches.
"Yes ma'am, I am," Jim says finally. "I've looked for him all over the planet, actually. He isn't on campus, he's not at the shipyards or on a training mission. He's not answering his comm and his yeoman won't tell me anything, so...."
"So you looked up my home address," Elena says, in a voice so dry that the Mojave Desert probably just crept a mile closer to the patch of woods they're standing in.
"Technically, I looked up your work address," Jim says. He wasn't trying to be a creeper; it just so happens that, as Executive Director, Elena Pike lives on the property of the West Eckett Animal Containment and Recovery Center, which really means she has access to all sorts of ways to make Jim's death look like an accident. At least getting mauled by a recuperating grizzly bear is an interesting way to go. "Anyway, you said he's not here, right, so I'll just leave you alone," Jim says.
"He's at the grocery store," Elena says, before Jim skitters more than a few steps back.
"Ma'am?"
"There's a grocery store down the road," Elena says, slowly and carefully like Bones does when he's running out of patience. "Wait here a few minutes; he'll be back."
"Oh," says Jim. He grins in relief because seriously, 'I've looked for him all over the planet' was not an exaggeration. "Thank you!" he says.
Elena's face does a few interesting things while she looks at him, but Jim has barely figured out Pike's expressions (aside from the frowny calisthenics he's developed specially for Jim's more obstreperous moments) so he just nods politely when she says, "You're welcome."
Jim finds himself a cleanish-looking tree to lean against while he waits. He considers offering to do the digging for Elena, but she seems pretty capable on her own (and not too shabby to watch, despite the tragic bagginess of her shirt) and she spears him with an eyebrow every time he opens his mouth. Pike family: Not Big on Small-Talk. Jim files that away in his mental catalogue.
After about fifteen minutes of listening to the steady scrape of shovel against dirt, Jim sees a figure coming down the path. Actually, it's two figures; he recognizes the slim stance of Pike, and ambling in front of that is a German Shepherd. As they get closer, Jim isn't sure who's walking who because Pike doesn't have a hand on the leash. Instead, it's tied to one of his belt loops. That seems a little dangerous because his belt is undone, with the free end of it tapping against his thigh with every step. The dog steps briskly against Pike's lackadaisical swagger and the leash tugs at the waistband of his jeans, exposing a shadowy triangle of skin.
The dog gets halfway up the front steps before the leash pulls taut. Pike stands his ground but cocks out his hip to give the dog a few extra inches. That isn't enough; the dog sends him an eloquent look, pawing at the step it can't reach.
Pike shifts the grocery bag to one arm and reaches up to delicately pinch the hand-rolled cigarette hanging sticky from his lower lip.
"Captain Pike!" Jim calls.
Pike stops and stares at him. "What the hell are you doing here?" he snaps, and while Jim has had nicer welcomes, Pike doesn't seem too pissed. Actually, he looks kind of... mellow.
Jim jogs up to him. Suddenly the dog barks and bounds down the steps, teeth bared. Jim jumps back and Elena jumps forward to snag the dog's leash and reel it back. Pike ends up staggering towards her, too, and behind all three of them the shovel falls abandoned to the ground.
"Naja, settle!" Pike snaps. Jim goes tense; that same stern shout has dropped him to the ground to do push-ups and, it is rumored, can make a cadet stop falling mid-air.
Pike tries to walk toward Jim but is stopped by the leash. Elena rolls her eyes and reaches over to unhook it from his jeans in some economical motion too fast to see.
The dog, who must be Naja, continues to skewer Jim with the one sharp eye turned toward him but cocks an overlarge ear at Pike. "This is Jim. He's a good guy," says Pike. He steps toward Jim and, hello, lays his palm right in the middle of Jim's chest. "Good guy," he says again. "Don't eat him."
The dog regards the two of them for a moment, then steps back, giving Pike a look that says, I'll be chill for now, but the second this punk tries anything I'm gonna fuck him up.
"Sorry," Pike says to Jim. "She's a rescue dog; not fully socialized yet."
Jim gives the dog another once-over. Now that she's facing him (squaring off against him, more like, paws shifting agitatedly in the dust and her muscles taut) he realizes that she only has one eye. It's not gory; she'd just look like she were constantly winking if not for the flecks of scar tissue at the corner and the thin pale crescent, barely visible through the fur, sweeping from eyelid to ear.
"Your dog looks badass," says Jim, and maybe it's the secondhand weed talking but he's already designing her superhero costume. Something noir-ish, he thinks, and understated, but the cape's a must.
"Beg pardon?" Pike says, his voice low and dangerous.
Jim backtracks a second, trying to figure out what he's done wrong now. 'Badass' is still a compliment in Pikeland, right? This guy laughs in delight when Jim calls him a sadistic bastard so what's the problem? "I was just, you know. The eye," Jim says, and points. "She looks badass. Like she's been in fights. You know, a scuffle down at the docks? A run-in with some dastardly minions?" Actually, screw minions; it'd be the best backstory ever if Naja lost that eye in a fight with a shark.
Elena tilts her head down to hide a smile but Pike just looks more pissed. "Kirk, she's missing an eye because she was a victim of abuse."
"No," Jim says patiently, "she's a survivor of abuse. That's badass." Pike is still staring him down so Jim adds, "It's all about the mindset." He should know, right? He's lost count of all the girls who have hit him over the years.
Pike considers this, and turns to the dog. "Did you hear that, Naja? I want you to remember that the next time I use the vacuum."
Naja does a quick twirl around Elena's legs, ears laid back as if a ninja vacuum cleaner might zoom in from any direction. Pike snorts and she rears her head back over to him, tail flicking in a half-aborted hopeful wag.
"Vacuum," he whispers.
Naja's not about to fall for the same trick twice. I DON'T LIKE THAT WORD, she says.
Pike smirks. "Va-"
Elena cuts him off with a short, sharp whistle. There's a few seconds of inscrutable body language from both of them but Elena gets the last word-an eloquent hike of her left shoulder-and Jim decides that she must be the only person in the world who can get away with calling Captain Pike an idiot.
Pike turns his back on her and tokes up for a couple of seconds, staring at Jim with hazy, black-fringed eyes smeared ochre from the sunset.
"Luke told you I was here?" he asks finally.
"Sir, no sir," Jim says. He actually figured out the location of Elena Pike's secret lair using his mad awesome investigatory skills but that doesn't mean he didn't try the easy way, first. "I think he's going to report me to the Ethics board for even asking, actually." He steps in close, watching the dog out of the corner of his eye (she shifts her front paws but stays put, relaxing fractionally when Elena pats her side) and says quietly, "If there is any way you could, you know, head that off at the pass, I'd really appreciate it. I can't afford any more demerits."
"I am aware of that," Pike says in a tone of voice which indicates that Jim's demerits might have a little something to do with why Pike is hiding in the middle of the woods with his communicator turned off and a joint in his hand. Not in a helping mood, then. Luckily Jim got a good look at Luke's quarters before the door slid shut in his face and, unless that half-completed foreign money-chit collection belongs to a roommate, Jim knows how to butter him up.
Pike must read something incriminating in Jim's expression-which is a very annoying ability, by the way-because he shakes his head and says, "Why are you here, Kirk?"
"I need you to sign an exception form," Jim says. "The deadline is midnight."
Pike narrows his eyes and points the blunt at Jim, sort of how he'd point a stylus if they were in his office. But they're not in his office, and instead of a clean-cut stylus, or even a steam-cigarette like most people use now, it's a cream-colored twist of paper that glows at the end (real embers!) and smells like the finest leaf of THC that Jim has ever encountered. He takes a deep breath to be sure and oh yeah, that shit is organic. The kind that's grown on a co-op and gets shipped out with smug symbols on the label to specify "gluten-free," "kosher," "made on Earth," whatever.
"You don't exist until I finish this," Pike says.
At first Jim thinks that he should really amend his opinion of the organic-Terra movement if it produces hash so potent that it gives users the delusion that solid matter can spontaneously exit the physical realm and then pop back in again. Then, because he's a smart guy capable of picking up on subtext and innuendo, Jim realizes that Pike wants Jim to pretend that he doesn't exist, which in this case means to stay still and shut up.
"Understood, sir," he says. He resists the urge to drop into a proper at-ease because while Pike still maintains his air of command he is also stoned off his ass and Jim's self-respect has limits. He can hear Invisible Bones snorting at that but it's totally true. Jim is better than so many people in this universe.
Pike seems to have deleted Jim from his mind already. He sets the grocery bag on the edge of the porch and then sets himself down, sprawling across the stairs. The dog trots up immediately, dropping her hindquarters to the wooden steps with a soft thump. She shifts her bulk in increments until she's laying half across Pike's belly. Jim's not sure how comfortable that is-it looks like the pins taught in Basic Hand-to-Hand to restrict an opponent's breathing, and the floofed-out tail is sweeping back and forth near Pike's head in a way that'd make Bones sneeze, if he were here-but Pike doesn't seem to mind. He settles the joint between his lips and curls his hand absent-mindedly over the dog's rump.
Jim must make some noise-his bootsoles crunching against some fallen leaves, maybe, or a random whirr from his comm-because the dog rears her head up suddenly and growls.
"Don't be such a jealous bitch," Pike says, shoving his hand against the dog's snout in limp admonition. The dog ducks to avoid it and weaves back in to perform a counterattack, licking his wrist.
"We can work on the jealousy," Elena says. "But she's always going to be a bitch."
Pike snorts. He murmurs something, but Jim can't make it out; it's a sweet-sounding secret, meant only for Naja's radio dish ears. Somewhere, crickets start chirping.
Jim stands uncertainly while Pike blows out gnarled-up strings of smoke and his sister leans on her shovel, crackling the sides of her water bottle with every gulp. The dog is breathing heavily, her one good eye cocked warily in Jim's direction. The air is thick with all the things that would be happening if Jim weren't here. He doesn't really know how adult siblings act around each other; he hasn't seen Sam since he left for Tarsus IV when Jim was twelve, and only hears from him in the occasional e-mail filled with inconsequential small talk and excuses for why he won't come home.
His mother and Uncle Frank aren't much help, either; Jim remembers sneaking out of bed to listen to them, their voices echoing softly from the kitchen, but they didn't converse so much as pick their way through a minefield. Jim knows they must have misstepped once or twice but he doesn't remember (doesn't think about) those brief explosions.
From what Jim has seen, the Pike siblings are anything but careful with each other. Still, the hurts they dole out are sharp but commonplace, more like brawling in scrap yard than a minefield. Jim's information is imperfect but thorough; he's pretended not to exist before. Maybe, if Jim is invisible long enough, Elena will sit on the steps next to Pike's outstretched legs and steal the joint. Pike might complain about that or surrender it quietly, and after a moderate pull, she'll slot it back into the scalloped space between his teeth.
Jim wonders if the dog will allow that or if she gets jealous of the sister, too. She seems unworried by the threat of invasion from that corner, and relaxes the crosshairs she's set on Jim. He doesn't blame her; vigilance is a virtue but hard to maintain when Captain Christopher Pike is petting you. Pike is drawing lines from the crest of her skull down to the base of her tail. The swoop of his arm is well-oiled, almost mechanical, and his eyes are closed.
The shovel scrapes against the soil, rhythmic and organic like a pulse.
The dog twists her head to tell a secret with her single eye. Master and Mistress are one halved soul, she says, born from an ancient tree split by lightning. They feast on strips of flesh cut from wanderers and send out Naja, their familiar, to vex unlucky souls.
Maybe Jim inhaled more secondhand smoke than he thought.
The One-Eyed Wonder Dog makes her first appearance. :)
(Should I do an informative picspam of German Shepherd? I'll get that up sometime tonight, maybe, if I get a few yea-votes.) Now with an informative picspam!
2,688 words, R for language and drug use, Jim + Pike + PikeSis + PikeDog (1/?)
"Gosh, this is a surprise," says Jim, clutching his comm to his chest.
Pike's sister, leaning on her shovel with one booted foot crossed in front of the other, fixes Jim with the tired, hard stare he used to get from bartenders. "Captain Pike isn't here," she says.
"Shit," Jim mutters. He looks down at his comm but the screen's nearly unreadable in this light. He steps forward, squinting at the peaked roof of Elena Pike's house until it wobbles up and blocks the setting sun. "Ma'am, I'm really sorry to bother you. I mean, I apologize for intruding on your privacy like this," he adds hastily, because honestly, the only time he ever sees houses like this, gabled and crooked with toothy woodwork, is in horror vids, and Elena is digging a hole in her front yard without any potted plants lying around waiting to be transferred, and the Google magic he performed to find this place pulled up some very specific information on the Pike family business which is basically Animals and Things That Can Be Made From Animals.
Not to mention it's getting dark, he's in the middle of nowhere, and his comm connection just crapped out.
"Ma'am," he says again, just to be safe. There's a possibility that Elena Pike is trying to hold on to her youth and will be offended at being called 'Ma'am,' but Jim's other option is 'Dollface' and he doubts that will help anything.
"You are looking for Chris, right?" Elena asks.
Jim blinks at her for a few seconds before he realizes that 1) Chris = Captain Pike and 2) Elena isn't going to reveal that Pike's body is in a burlap sack under the porch. That would be an amateur mistake, see, no matter how certain she is that Jim cannot escape her clutches.
"Yes ma'am, I am," Jim says finally. "I've looked for him all over the planet, actually. He isn't on campus, he's not at the shipyards or on a training mission. He's not answering his comm and his yeoman won't tell me anything, so...."
"So you looked up my home address," Elena says, in a voice so dry that the Mojave Desert probably just crept a mile closer to the patch of woods they're standing in.
"Technically, I looked up your work address," Jim says. He wasn't trying to be a creeper; it just so happens that, as Executive Director, Elena Pike lives on the property of the West Eckett Animal Containment and Recovery Center, which really means she has access to all sorts of ways to make Jim's death look like an accident. At least getting mauled by a recuperating grizzly bear is an interesting way to go. "Anyway, you said he's not here, right, so I'll just leave you alone," Jim says.
"He's at the grocery store," Elena says, before Jim skitters more than a few steps back.
"Ma'am?"
"There's a grocery store down the road," Elena says, slowly and carefully like Bones does when he's running out of patience. "Wait here a few minutes; he'll be back."
"Oh," says Jim. He grins in relief because seriously, 'I've looked for him all over the planet' was not an exaggeration. "Thank you!" he says.
Elena's face does a few interesting things while she looks at him, but Jim has barely figured out Pike's expressions (aside from the frowny calisthenics he's developed specially for Jim's more obstreperous moments) so he just nods politely when she says, "You're welcome."
Jim finds himself a cleanish-looking tree to lean against while he waits. He considers offering to do the digging for Elena, but she seems pretty capable on her own (and not too shabby to watch, despite the tragic bagginess of her shirt) and she spears him with an eyebrow every time he opens his mouth. Pike family: Not Big on Small-Talk. Jim files that away in his mental catalogue.
After about fifteen minutes of listening to the steady scrape of shovel against dirt, Jim sees a figure coming down the path. Actually, it's two figures; he recognizes the slim stance of Pike, and ambling in front of that is a German Shepherd. As they get closer, Jim isn't sure who's walking who because Pike doesn't have a hand on the leash. Instead, it's tied to one of his belt loops. That seems a little dangerous because his belt is undone, with the free end of it tapping against his thigh with every step. The dog steps briskly against Pike's lackadaisical swagger and the leash tugs at the waistband of his jeans, exposing a shadowy triangle of skin.
The dog gets halfway up the front steps before the leash pulls taut. Pike stands his ground but cocks out his hip to give the dog a few extra inches. That isn't enough; the dog sends him an eloquent look, pawing at the step it can't reach.
Pike shifts the grocery bag to one arm and reaches up to delicately pinch the hand-rolled cigarette hanging sticky from his lower lip.
"Captain Pike!" Jim calls.
Pike stops and stares at him. "What the hell are you doing here?" he snaps, and while Jim has had nicer welcomes, Pike doesn't seem too pissed. Actually, he looks kind of... mellow.
Jim jogs up to him. Suddenly the dog barks and bounds down the steps, teeth bared. Jim jumps back and Elena jumps forward to snag the dog's leash and reel it back. Pike ends up staggering towards her, too, and behind all three of them the shovel falls abandoned to the ground.
"Naja, settle!" Pike snaps. Jim goes tense; that same stern shout has dropped him to the ground to do push-ups and, it is rumored, can make a cadet stop falling mid-air.
Pike tries to walk toward Jim but is stopped by the leash. Elena rolls her eyes and reaches over to unhook it from his jeans in some economical motion too fast to see.
The dog, who must be Naja, continues to skewer Jim with the one sharp eye turned toward him but cocks an overlarge ear at Pike. "This is Jim. He's a good guy," says Pike. He steps toward Jim and, hello, lays his palm right in the middle of Jim's chest. "Good guy," he says again. "Don't eat him."
The dog regards the two of them for a moment, then steps back, giving Pike a look that says, I'll be chill for now, but the second this punk tries anything I'm gonna fuck him up.
"Sorry," Pike says to Jim. "She's a rescue dog; not fully socialized yet."
Jim gives the dog another once-over. Now that she's facing him (squaring off against him, more like, paws shifting agitatedly in the dust and her muscles taut) he realizes that she only has one eye. It's not gory; she'd just look like she were constantly winking if not for the flecks of scar tissue at the corner and the thin pale crescent, barely visible through the fur, sweeping from eyelid to ear.
"Your dog looks badass," says Jim, and maybe it's the secondhand weed talking but he's already designing her superhero costume. Something noir-ish, he thinks, and understated, but the cape's a must.
"Beg pardon?" Pike says, his voice low and dangerous.
Jim backtracks a second, trying to figure out what he's done wrong now. 'Badass' is still a compliment in Pikeland, right? This guy laughs in delight when Jim calls him a sadistic bastard so what's the problem? "I was just, you know. The eye," Jim says, and points. "She looks badass. Like she's been in fights. You know, a scuffle down at the docks? A run-in with some dastardly minions?" Actually, screw minions; it'd be the best backstory ever if Naja lost that eye in a fight with a shark.
Elena tilts her head down to hide a smile but Pike just looks more pissed. "Kirk, she's missing an eye because she was a victim of abuse."
"No," Jim says patiently, "she's a survivor of abuse. That's badass." Pike is still staring him down so Jim adds, "It's all about the mindset." He should know, right? He's lost count of all the girls who have hit him over the years.
Pike considers this, and turns to the dog. "Did you hear that, Naja? I want you to remember that the next time I use the vacuum."
Naja does a quick twirl around Elena's legs, ears laid back as if a ninja vacuum cleaner might zoom in from any direction. Pike snorts and she rears her head back over to him, tail flicking in a half-aborted hopeful wag.
"Vacuum," he whispers.
Naja's not about to fall for the same trick twice. I DON'T LIKE THAT WORD, she says.
Pike smirks. "Va-"
Elena cuts him off with a short, sharp whistle. There's a few seconds of inscrutable body language from both of them but Elena gets the last word-an eloquent hike of her left shoulder-and Jim decides that she must be the only person in the world who can get away with calling Captain Pike an idiot.
Pike turns his back on her and tokes up for a couple of seconds, staring at Jim with hazy, black-fringed eyes smeared ochre from the sunset.
"Luke told you I was here?" he asks finally.
"Sir, no sir," Jim says. He actually figured out the location of Elena Pike's secret lair using his mad awesome investigatory skills but that doesn't mean he didn't try the easy way, first. "I think he's going to report me to the Ethics board for even asking, actually." He steps in close, watching the dog out of the corner of his eye (she shifts her front paws but stays put, relaxing fractionally when Elena pats her side) and says quietly, "If there is any way you could, you know, head that off at the pass, I'd really appreciate it. I can't afford any more demerits."
"I am aware of that," Pike says in a tone of voice which indicates that Jim's demerits might have a little something to do with why Pike is hiding in the middle of the woods with his communicator turned off and a joint in his hand. Not in a helping mood, then. Luckily Jim got a good look at Luke's quarters before the door slid shut in his face and, unless that half-completed foreign money-chit collection belongs to a roommate, Jim knows how to butter him up.
Pike must read something incriminating in Jim's expression-which is a very annoying ability, by the way-because he shakes his head and says, "Why are you here, Kirk?"
"I need you to sign an exception form," Jim says. "The deadline is midnight."
Pike narrows his eyes and points the blunt at Jim, sort of how he'd point a stylus if they were in his office. But they're not in his office, and instead of a clean-cut stylus, or even a steam-cigarette like most people use now, it's a cream-colored twist of paper that glows at the end (real embers!) and smells like the finest leaf of THC that Jim has ever encountered. He takes a deep breath to be sure and oh yeah, that shit is organic. The kind that's grown on a co-op and gets shipped out with smug symbols on the label to specify "gluten-free," "kosher," "made on Earth," whatever.
"You don't exist until I finish this," Pike says.
At first Jim thinks that he should really amend his opinion of the organic-Terra movement if it produces hash so potent that it gives users the delusion that solid matter can spontaneously exit the physical realm and then pop back in again. Then, because he's a smart guy capable of picking up on subtext and innuendo, Jim realizes that Pike wants Jim to pretend that he doesn't exist, which in this case means to stay still and shut up.
"Understood, sir," he says. He resists the urge to drop into a proper at-ease because while Pike still maintains his air of command he is also stoned off his ass and Jim's self-respect has limits. He can hear Invisible Bones snorting at that but it's totally true. Jim is better than so many people in this universe.
Pike seems to have deleted Jim from his mind already. He sets the grocery bag on the edge of the porch and then sets himself down, sprawling across the stairs. The dog trots up immediately, dropping her hindquarters to the wooden steps with a soft thump. She shifts her bulk in increments until she's laying half across Pike's belly. Jim's not sure how comfortable that is-it looks like the pins taught in Basic Hand-to-Hand to restrict an opponent's breathing, and the floofed-out tail is sweeping back and forth near Pike's head in a way that'd make Bones sneeze, if he were here-but Pike doesn't seem to mind. He settles the joint between his lips and curls his hand absent-mindedly over the dog's rump.
Jim must make some noise-his bootsoles crunching against some fallen leaves, maybe, or a random whirr from his comm-because the dog rears her head up suddenly and growls.
"Don't be such a jealous bitch," Pike says, shoving his hand against the dog's snout in limp admonition. The dog ducks to avoid it and weaves back in to perform a counterattack, licking his wrist.
"We can work on the jealousy," Elena says. "But she's always going to be a bitch."
Pike snorts. He murmurs something, but Jim can't make it out; it's a sweet-sounding secret, meant only for Naja's radio dish ears. Somewhere, crickets start chirping.
Jim stands uncertainly while Pike blows out gnarled-up strings of smoke and his sister leans on her shovel, crackling the sides of her water bottle with every gulp. The dog is breathing heavily, her one good eye cocked warily in Jim's direction. The air is thick with all the things that would be happening if Jim weren't here. He doesn't really know how adult siblings act around each other; he hasn't seen Sam since he left for Tarsus IV when Jim was twelve, and only hears from him in the occasional e-mail filled with inconsequential small talk and excuses for why he won't come home.
His mother and Uncle Frank aren't much help, either; Jim remembers sneaking out of bed to listen to them, their voices echoing softly from the kitchen, but they didn't converse so much as pick their way through a minefield. Jim knows they must have misstepped once or twice but he doesn't remember (doesn't think about) those brief explosions.
From what Jim has seen, the Pike siblings are anything but careful with each other. Still, the hurts they dole out are sharp but commonplace, more like brawling in scrap yard than a minefield. Jim's information is imperfect but thorough; he's pretended not to exist before. Maybe, if Jim is invisible long enough, Elena will sit on the steps next to Pike's outstretched legs and steal the joint. Pike might complain about that or surrender it quietly, and after a moderate pull, she'll slot it back into the scalloped space between his teeth.
Jim wonders if the dog will allow that or if she gets jealous of the sister, too. She seems unworried by the threat of invasion from that corner, and relaxes the crosshairs she's set on Jim. He doesn't blame her; vigilance is a virtue but hard to maintain when Captain Christopher Pike is petting you. Pike is drawing lines from the crest of her skull down to the base of her tail. The swoop of his arm is well-oiled, almost mechanical, and his eyes are closed.
The shovel scrapes against the soil, rhythmic and organic like a pulse.
The dog twists her head to tell a secret with her single eye. Master and Mistress are one halved soul, she says, born from an ancient tree split by lightning. They feast on strips of flesh cut from wanderers and send out Naja, their familiar, to vex unlucky souls.
Maybe Jim inhaled more secondhand smoke than he thought.