Fic: One in a Million, Chapter 2
Author's Notes: Look at that! A finished story! Yaay! Hope you guys liked it. As always, comments are loved.
Disclaimer: Nope. Still not mine. Damn.
Chapter | 1 | 2 |
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Chapter 2
It was ridiculous that, as a grown man, Pike was forced to contemplate the best way to sneak into his own house. He’d told himself that he was doing it because he didn’t want to wake up his son or disturb his wife, but that was a stretch of the truth. Really, Chris simply didn’t want to have to deal with Lynn’s pestering questions the moment he walked in the door. He loved her with every ounce of his heart and soul, but she worried, most often times unnecessarily.
Pike cringed as the door that led from the garage to the house squealed, reminding him yet again that he needed to find that damned can of WD-40 and oil the hinge. Pausing like a teenager, he waited for any indication of sounds from the sleeping house. When nothing stirred, Chris moved inwards, ducking and avoiding fixtures and upholstery with the practiced ease of familiarity. He didn’t bother with the lights; instead, he set his bag of dirty clothes on top of the dryer and tiptoed through the open door that led into the kitchen.
He was foolish enough to believe he was home free when he heard the snap of the light switch somewhere in front of his face. Instantly, the room went from cavern-black to brightly illuminated by the warm, white bulbs in the ceiling fixture. Chris squinted, bringing one hand up to shield his offended eyes while he made out the silhouette moving stealthily about the kitchen.
“Oh, this is poetic justice,” Lynn Pike said with a grin so big it might have parted the Red Sea. Leaning against the countertop in the spacious but dated kitchen of the home she shared with Chris, Lynn was practically bouncing on the balls of her feet. She raised a hand to forestall any words that might have spilled from her husband’s mouth when she added, “I distinctly remember you saying something just last week about how you’d been doing so well, keeping you and Len out of trouble. How many OJI reports have you filled out so far this year?”
Chris sighed, smiling like a little kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Wrapping his wife in a big hug, he laid a gentle kiss on the top of her head before he stepped back and replied, "And here I thought you took our marriage vows seriously. In sickness and in health?"
With a loud-ish snort, Lynn covered her mouth with her hand and shot right back, "If I took 'em that seriously, I never would have married you! The 'sickness' you have isn't fixable!"
Maybe he should have used the WD-40 on his jaw, because the sound of it swinging through the air as it fell open was the only thing audible in the room. It took a couple of seconds, but Pike’s brain finally caught up with his facial expression while he stuttered unintelligently. “Hey! That’s below the belt.”
Lynn walked up and put one finger over her husband’s lips. She gently ran her fingers over the rapidly forming black eyes and the cuts on his face while she said, “Someone’s opening his mouth and inserting his foot, isn’t he?”
“If my entire face wasn’t throbbing, I might consider trying it,” Pike mumbled as he trudged through the door, making a beeline for the high cabinet above the refrigerator. He pulled down the bottle of Johnny Walker black before he moved to the cabinet for a glass. Pouring himself a healthy glass, he sat down at the kitchen table with a relieved groan and tossed back half the contents in one go.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, that rough of a night, huh?” Lynn asked as she joined her husband at the table with a glass of ice water.
Pike snorted weakly into his drink. He winced when the smirk pulled at a sore spot on his cheek while he wondered just how many different colors his face was going to turn in the next couple of days. Belatedly, he hoped Ethan wouldn’t be too afraid of him. “Yeah, but you should see the other guy,” Chris finally answered, though it was without his usual confident conviction.
“Oh, I have no doubt. What did Len do to him?” she asked with a little twinkle in her eyes.
Despite the pain centralized in the center of his face, Pike’s lips quivered as he smiled, rolling his eyes at the same time. “Why do you always assume that it’s my partner doing the beating? You don’t give me enough credit for teaching McCoy all the dirty tricks I learned from the Corps.”
Tilting her head down, Lynn fixed Chris with a pointed stare. She pointed one finger at him while she sipped her water and said, “I have a feeling your partner forgot more than you ever knew before you came along. You remember he was pre-med, right? His knowledge base about the human body is about as vast as yours is about music.”
“Yeah, if that’s true - and I’m pretty sure it is - let’s not test how much he knows. I forget how strong that kid is until he literally picks someone up off the pavement with one hand. He doesn’t need any extra help or encouragement,” Chris answered before he took another sip of his drink. “God, I feel like I’m slipping. And it sucks.”
“Hmm. Well, that’s what happens when they get younger and you get older.”
“Lynn!” Pike exclaimed, running a self-conscious hand through his hair while he whimpered in figurative and literal pain.
Lynn giggled out loud, clapping her hand over her mouth to keep from waking Ethan. She bit her lip and practically purred, “I like the older version of you. It’s more manageable, and definitely smarter.”
“Thanks,” Chris replied, screwing his face up in confusion. “I think.”
“You’ll always be a child at heart, my dear. God help us when your son is old enough to see what an overgrown kid his father is,” she said with a dramatic wave of her hand towards Ethan’s bedroom. Lynn smiled at the thought of her boy, tucked safely in under the fleece Super Mario Brothers goomba blanket she’d made for his birthday. Taking stock of her husband’s face, Lynn pursed her lips, laid her hand over Chris’ and took a breath. With a more serious undercurrent to her voice, she finally asked, “So what happened to you two tonight?”
“Chick fight,” he replied with a chuckle as he parroted back Kirk’s description of the action.
“Chick fight? As in poultry or women?”
“I got a stiletto to the nose. What do you think?” Pike asked.
Lynn cringed. “That would explain things, now wouldn’t it? But I have to say I’m surprised to hear you know what that is, considering your definition of fashion.” Pushing the chair backwards before he could reply, she stood, walked around the table and flicked on the dining room table light. Lynn stuck her face about an inch from her husband’s and started examining, gently poking and prodding the bruised, cut skin. She pulled down her first aid kit she kept stashed in the cupboard and flipped it open, looking for the fresh gauze and Neosporin. “Did the medics look at you?”
Chris pulled his sensitive nose backwards when Lynn’s gentle fingers probed a particularly tender spot. “Ow! Of course they did!” he answered a little quickly while he glared up at his wife.
“Chris…” Lynn scolded, drawing out the vowel in his name. Stepping back, she placed one hand on her hip, titled her head, and tapped her socked foot against the linoleum floor.
How Lynn possessed the capability to say so much with a single expression was a skill Chris had yet to master. The look in her eyes said, all at the same time, that she knew he was lying, she knew he was hurting, and he’d better start coughing up the damned truth. It was like being stuck in an interrogation room with that new IA officer, which was a nice way of saying it was uncomfortable as fuck. The flicker in his eyes, imperceptible to the rest of the human population flashed, and in that instant, Pike knew he was sunk. He made a concerted effort not to fidget when he replied, “No.”
Lynn threw her hands up in the air and bobbed her head back and forth to quell her mounting frustration. Instead, she leaned into his personal space and simply glared. “Why am I not surprised? You know, this has got to be a stupid guy thing. There is no way in hell a woman would go home with their face looking like ground beef. We’re too sensible,” she hissed, gesturing with one hand towards his face. Pursing her lips, she took a deep breath before she asked in a calmer tone, “Did you at least let Leonard look at you?”
Chris hesitated. “Well, I would have but…” he said, trailing off.
“But what?” she asked, eyes darkening while her hand squeezed the small tube of antibiotic salve unconsciously.
“But he might have taken a blast of CS to the face in the same fight,” Pike answered as he picked up his glass and polished off the contents. Looking up at Lynn, Chris tilted his head to the side and said, “Before you start mother henning me to death about your adopted son, don’t worry. We got back to the house and he stuck his face in a bucket of water to wash everything out, just like we’re supposed to.”
“And he was okay after that?”
“Well, he’ll be wearing his glasses for a couple of days instead of contacts, but he’ll be fine,” Chris reassured his wife. “He was complaining the entire way back to the station about stupid people, not how much it hurt. There’s your indicator.”
The anger formerly lacing Lynn’s face faded. She tilted her head to the side while she observed the truthfulness of her husband’s testimony. “You’re not just telling me that to keep your ass out of hot water, right?”
“No, of course not,” Pike answered, pulling his cell phone from his pocket before he slid it across the table towards his wife. “Call him if you want to. I’ll bet he’s still up.”
Satisfied, Lynn relented while she pushed the phone off to one side of the surface of her workspace. She pulled the chair out from the table and took a seat to resume her treatment. Twisting the cap off the Neosporin, she rubbed some of the salve on her fingers and gently massaged it into the deeper cut right on the bridge of Chris’ nose. “Just do me a favor: talk to him in the morning to see how he is?”
Pike closed his eyes and let out a little content sigh as he relaxed his face. “You know, you don’t need to worry so much about my partner. Len can take care of himself.”
“I know he can, but worrying about him is a job I’ve readily accepted. You know it, I know, and he knows it,” she said, wiping her hands on a paper towel she grabbed off the roller.
“I worry plenty about him,” Pike said, almost defensively.
“You,” Lynn started, pointing the Epi-pen she kept stashed in the kitchen to ward off Ethan’s bee sting allergy at Chris, “Worry about him as a cop. I worry about him as a person. There’s a big difference there, my dear.”
“That’s fair,” Chris said after a few seconds of contemplation. Screwing his blackened and cut face up in confusion, he added, “God, how the hell do all of our conversations come back to him anyway? Wait, don’t answer that. Can we move this away from my partner, please?”
“I suppose I could let you off the hook once, seeing as you’re doing a pretty good impression of a raccoon tonight,” Lynn said, motioning with her head towards the living room as she tucked her first aid kit back into its place in the cabinet. She made her way over to the couch, flopped down on the end, and tucked her legs underneath and to the side of her body. “Come on.”
Pike let her get comfortable before he joined her, laying the length of his longer frame down on the couch. On his back, Chris let his shoulders rest against Lynn’s thighs while he pillowed his head in her lap. When her fingers ran lightly through his hair, down his neck and then over his chest, Pike felt his entire body relaxing into the cushions as the feeling of familiarity and safety washed over him. “Mmm,” he mumbled, the sound coming from deep in his chest. Pike couldn’t help the dumb little smirk from appearing on his face. “You’re gonna put me to sleep.”
“That’s the idea,” Lynn said quietly, gracefully curling her spine so she could drop a chaste kiss on his forehead. “Chris, all bullshit aside, I’m glad you both are okay,” she said as she tucked her hair up in a loose ponytail on top of her head. Laying her hands in her lap, Lynn nibbled on her lip, looked Chris right in the eye and admitted, “I don’t know what I’d do if I got a call.”
“I’m going to do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“I get that you’re careful, but it’s just…I worry,” she admitted as she squeezed his shoulder.
“I know you do, even if I haven’t always understood why,” Pike said, sighing deeply while he resituated his body on the couch. He blinked a few times, staring up at the eggshell ceiling, interlacing his fingers as he laid his hands on his chest. “But, I think I get that more now, especially after tonight. Do you remember a George Kirk at all?”
Lynn’s eyes slid across the room as she pursed her lips. Letting out a long breath, she said, “Yeah, I do. He and I went to the same high school. Why do you ask?”
“Len and I arrested his son tonight.”
Lynn’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. “Really? How old is his son? He can’t be much older than Ethan.”
Chris forced his eyes back open while he locked gazes with his wife. “The younger of the two is sixteen, actually. Jim’s his name, and he’s a little mischievous shit if I’ve ever seen one. He verbally went right after McCoy, no hesitation.”
“I’ll bet that went over like a fart in church,” she answered with an amused snort. Resuming her ministrations on Chris’ shoulders, Lynn let her eyes drift around the room while she thought. “It surprises me that George has kids that old since he was only two classes ahead of mine.”
“What do you remember about him?” Chris asked, gently leading his wife with his inquiries.
She sighed and scratched her foot with the back of her knuckles, apologizing lightly to Chris when her knee reflexively bumped him in the neck. “He was a big deal around here - the local kid who went to Annapolis to be a fighter pilot was always news. The whole town was proud of him, though I got the impression he thought the hero worship was weird. I didn’t know him well, but from others who did, I heard he was a pretty humble, down to earth guy. I haven’t heard anything about him in a long time. Makes me wonder what he’s up to now.”
“He’s dead, actually.”
“Oh my God, really? When? And how?” Lynn asked after she took a shocked breath.
“Training accident, apparently. It happened while you and I were living in Japan when I was station at Camp Hansen. I don’t have all the details - only what I could pull off the internet, but there was some kind of malfunction with his aircraft. Instead of ejecting, he guided it away from the neighborhood he was flying over to an open field, where it crashed,” Pike said with a grimace. “George’s mishap was the day Jim was born. Rough way to come into the world, if you ask me.”
“Yes, it would be,” Lynn agreed as she exhaled a long, sad breath. She looked down at Chris; her husband was thinking so hard she could hear the wheels in his head turning. Lynn ran her fingers through his hair to grab his attention while she titled her head to the side. “But why all the questions? If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that you’ve already starting to form an attachment to the young man. Any reason for that?”
“I wish you didn’t know me so well, dammit.” Chris paused, formulating his thoughts. He ran a calloused hand over the lower portion of his face. “It’s just that-I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, but he didn’t seem like a bad kid. Really smart, but misguided. Bored. Probably a hell of a handful.”
“…So what you’re saying then, if your mother’s stories are true, is that he’s a lot like you were,” Lynn concluded matter-of-factly.
“Something like that,” Pike agreed with a grimace. “Remind me not to leave you alone with my mother anymore. Damned woman has way too much ammo on me.”
Lynn laughed out loud. “She is your mother! And besides, she loves me.” She let the clock on the mantle tick away before she asked, “So, what are you going to do about Jim Kirk, now that you’ve attracted another stray?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do about Kirk, but I am telling Len you just compared him to a mangy mutt from animal services,” Pike replied, angling his neck up so Lynn could see the playful glint dancing around his blue eyes. “He’ll love that.”
“And how do you know I was talking about Len?” she asked without missing a beat while she arched an eyebrow in his direction.
Chris’ wordless dumbfounded expression said it all, though he added for good measure, “Do I really have to go there?”
“You go right ahead if you feel the need. I’ll then tell him how you were trying to sneak into your own house like a guilty teenager. Who got caught, mind you.” Smug, she added, “Two can play here, my dear.”
All at once, the light bulbs in Chris’ head went off. He raised one long finger and pointed it in his wife’s face while he exclaimed, “You! You’re not worried! My annoying shit of a partner told you, didn’t he? You were waiting for me, and I know for a fact you’re never up this late unless you can’t sleep.”
Lynn shrugged innocently. At the same time, her eyes drifted up and to the left while she formulated a proper response. With the poker face of a career politician, Lynn gave her noncommittal answer. “I might have had advanced warning from an unnamed little bird who told me that you were involved in an altercation tonight with a suspect, and had some injuries because of it. I also might have heard that while you looked worse for wear, you were, in fact, fine.”
Chris crossed his arms over his chest and huffed. The cuts and bruises from his broken nose were certainly doing their job of mitigating his glare’s effectiveness, so he stepped it up a couple of notches by using his ‘street voice’. “And did this little bird mention the hit of CS spray he took during the same fight tonight?”
“I will have to have a little talk with my little bird about being forthright about his own injuries,” Lynn said through narrowed eyes. “But, that’s not your concern.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
Lynn slithered out from under Chris’ head, learning down to place a gentle kiss on his forehead while she laughed. She gave her husband’s shoulder a pat, effectively ending the familiar, lighthearted bickering common in the couple’s solid relationship. “Come to bed, dear, before you fall asleep out here. You know what this couch does to your back.”
Pike grumbled something about age being a bitch before he hefted himself to his feet. Stretching to the very tips of his fingers and toes, he yawned loudly and blinked his eyes. “Yeah, it’s about that time, isn’t it? Give me a minute and I’ll be in.”
“All right,” Lynn answered, padding down the hall to the couple’s bedroom.
Chris flew past the kitchen table, scooped the used glass off the surface and rinsed it in the sink. He popped open the dishwasher and put it in while he reached for the bottle of booze he left on the counter. Replacing it in the high cabinet, he walked into the rarely used family room and opened the cherry wood rolling antique writing desk that belonged to Lynn’s father. He powered on his laptop and waited for the program to initialize before he logged into his ICPD email. Double clicking on McCoy’s name, he composed one quick message.
To: leonard.mccoy@icpd.gov
From: christopher.pike@icpd.gov
Subject: Important Shit
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Two things, McCoy:
- You are a traitorous asshole who talks too much, and
- It’s your turn for coffee. Make sure it’s not any of that sissy flavored shit.
--CP
He powered down the machine quickly and stood up, replacing the chair flush against the desk. Pike made a quick check of the locks of his house before he moved down the hallway towards his warm, comfortable bed. But before he could get there, his feet took him on a detour into Ethan’s darkened room. The little boy never ceased to amaze his father, nor was he incapable of drawing a smile from Pike’s lips. Chris leaned up against the doorframe as he watched his son - the one thing that mattered the absolute most in his life - spend his night curled up in dreamland.
Despite his reluctance to face his own mortality, the advantage of a little age and experience gave Pike the ability to look at his life objectively. As he stood in the dimly lit doorway of Ethan’s room, he couldn’t imagine the hardship of raising a child as a single parent. Winona Kirk had done it not once, but twice, and the prospect humbled the sergeant. It also inadvertently forced Chris take stock of his own family. It wasn’t that he thought his wife was incapable of raising their son on her own. Far from it - Lynn was the strongest, most intelligent person he knew, but the point was that she shouldn’t have to.
Call it old fashioned, but Pike was raised to believe that child should, if at all possible, grow up with both parents, and to lose a father as Jim Kirk did was incomprehensible. Though Chris’ own relationship with his father was, at times, strained, he at least knew the man. Reading about George Kirk made Pike wonder how, precisely, he would have turned out if his mother had been left to raise her son on her own. He certainly wouldn’t have inherited his father’s gift for leaping without looking, and that was exactly what he was about to do.
He couldn’t change the past, but he was surely capable of influencing the future.
Chris Pike categorized several things in his life as ‘works in progress’. Apparently, he was adding one more item to the bottom of the list.
James Tiberius Kirk.
Well, why the hell not?
--FIN-
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Cop terms: ‘OJI’ - acronym for ‘On the Job Injury’.