This fic was heavily inspired by Cly and their many excellent posts about Jackie Pike, her relationship with Ilya, and Ilya's relationship with Irina.

There is some mild Hayden Pike haterism in this, though a lot less than I expected when I started writing. I have not read the books but this is nevertheless set in book canon because Show!Hayden hasn't done anything to earn my ire while Book!Hayden referred to Jackie's salpingectomy as her "getting fixed" and therefore needs to die.

Title is from Tallahassee by The Mountain Goats.

It's nearly dark outside by the time Ilya slips out of the Pikes' house for a smoke. A long afternoon playing along with the latest installment in Ruby and Jade's epic saga of outcast fairy princesses—today's episode involved a bloodbath at the gnome village and a subsequent funeral pyre made of Lincoln Logs—has faded mostly into night, only the faintest lavender glow still present on the horizon.

Ilya tucks himself against the wall of the house in a discreet corner of the front yard, taking care that the kids can't see him through the windows. He's just gotten the cigarette lit and taken his first drag when the front door opens. Ilya turns, expecting to see Shane, an excuse for why he's smoking again already half-formed on his lips.

But it's Jackie Pike who's stepping out onto the stone walkway in hastily yanked-on sneakers, the left heel crushed under her foot instead of cradling it. Ilya watches as she pulls out her phone and switches on the flashlight function. Methodically, she begins to sweep the weak beam back and forth across the lawn, taking a few steps onto the grass when the object of her search can't be located from the path.

"Looking for something?" Ilya calls, words coming out in a puff of smoke.

Jackie looks up, sees the flare of his cigarette ember across the yard. Smiles at him. "Small Pig," she says, momentarily abandoning her search to walk over to Ilya. "Amber left him outside earlier."

Ilya nods. The uncreatively-named Small Pig is a realistic rubber pig the size of a tennis ball that Amber, in the way of three-year-olds, is inexplicably obsessed with. He remembers her playing with it out on the front lawn after Ruby's gnome eulogy failed to hold her attention. "Is very serious. You thinking of filing missing persons report?" he deadpans, returning the cigarette to his lips.

Jackie laughs and leans against the wall next to him, turning off her phone flashlight but not putting it away. "Oh, God," she says. She tips her head back and rolls it toward him, her eyes landing on Ilya's cigarette.

Ilya watches her. There's something in her eyes he can't name, hunger or longing or just asking for permission. In one motion, casual so it's not weird for either of them if she says no, he removes the cigarette from between his lips and holds it out to her, exhaling a thin stream of smoke.

Jackie accepts it with a pincer grip, thumb and forefinger on the filter like it's a joint she's been passed at a college party. Ilya assumes, anyway. His own schooling was mostly a formality after age thirteen or so, education a distant second priority to hockey. Jackie inhales and chokes a little, but she fights back the cough admirably. She breathes out through her nose, swallows, then brings the cigarette back up for a second drag. This one goes down smoother.

She's not a secret smoker, then. It's a shame. Ilya wouldn't mind taking smoke breaks with Jackie. He likes her, or at least he likes the flashes of conversation she manages to have with him in between kissing skinned knees and mediating arguments over toys and wiping snot and scrubbing vomit from her shirt and disentangling sticky toddler fists from her hair and getting Hayden another beer. It would be good to have an excuse to slip away and indulge in a shared vice, the children briefly their father's responsibility. The only drug Ilya and Jackie have in common is their brand of antidepressant.

Jackie doesn't know that, though. She doesn't even know that he knows she takes them; Ilya saw them in the medicine cabinet while grabbing Band-Aids for Arthur a couple of months ago, the bottle so familiar he'd briefly wondered if he'd somehow left it there on a previous visit before realizing the name on the label was a lot shorter than Rozanov.

So Ilya merely nods at the cigarette Jackie is still clutching in an awkward grasp, like she doesn't know what to do with her hands. "Very scandalous," he says. "Shane would be disappointed in both of us."

Jackie rolls her eyes and passes the cigarette back to him. "It's my mother I'd be more worried about. I still hear her voice in my head telling me I'm going to Hell whenever I have a glass of wine."

The bitterness in her voice intrigues Ilya. This is a side of Jackie he hasn't seen before. "Your mother—she was religious?" he asks, returning the cigarette to his lips and taking the smallest inhale he can manage, trying to make it last.

"Still is, I assume," Jackie says. "We haven't talked since my brother came out."

Ilya nods. "My mother was religious too," he says. "But I do not think she cared to involve other people in it." Unthinking, his free hand goes to his chest, traces lightly over the cross necklace he can barely feel through his jacket. It's still summer, technically, but the nights are getting cold already. Winter is going to be brutal this year.

His mother loved winter. Looking back, it seems paradoxical the way her energy returned as the light ebbed and the wind turned bitter. Every year, she pulled her fur coat out of storage, her eyes bright and alive, and wore it proudly to church until the last snow melted. Sometimes Ilya came with her, though he remembers nothing of the church services, only the sensation of rubbing his face against the soft fur covering her upper arm. Sometimes after church they went home and she let him try on her too-big coat and too-big heels, and she would drape her necklaces around his neck, one on top of the other, until they formed a sparkling pile so heavy his head drooped a little. Sometimes he would ask her to try on every pair of earrings she owned and model them for him, Irina sitting cross-legged on the floor so Ilya could tuck her golden hair behind her ears and closely inspect each earring one at a time. They would dress each other up like that for hours until his father came home and they had to rush to hide the evidence.

Irina waited until summer to kill herself.

Ilya thinks about his mother, beautiful and sad, all alone in a big house with no one but her children and her god for company. Clinging to a cliffside with her fingernails until she finally lost her grip and slid away.

Jackie is talking, Ilya realizes, and he forces himself to tune back in midway through her sentence. "...different when it was her kids, you know? Because being a wife and mother was her divine purpose, so if we messed up it reflected badly on her."

"And is that your purpose?" Ilya asks without thinking. "Being a wife and mother?"

"No," Jackie says. Ilya can't decide if she answers too quickly or not. "I mean, I love my kids, but—no."

Ilya could pry. Could ask, What is your purpose, then, if all you ever do is look after your children and your man-child husband? It would upset her, make Jackie think that he's judging her when what he really is is curious. Curious, and maybe a little worried in the same way he worries when Shane freezes at the thought of coming out. Doesn't your life feel small? Aren't you tired of living for other people? Don't you want to get out?

He makes a joke instead. "I understand. If you thought marriage and children were calling from God, you would have picked someone better than Hayden."

Jackie laughs and gives Ilya a shove. Ash falls from the end of his cigarette and drifts to the ground. "Ilya, have you considered that maybe Hayden and I actually love each other?" she asks.

"Of course. Is the only explanation for why you are with him," Ilya says. "That or blackmail. You would tell me if he is blackmailing you, yes?"

"You're terrible," Jackie says, chuckling. She reaches a hand out, pincer grip open in an unspoken request. Ilya passes her the cigarette again. She inhales slowly as she gazes over the darkened grass. "Can I tell you something that makes me sound like an awful mom?" she asks. She doesn't look at him when she asks it, her eyes drifting across the neatly trimmed hedge lining the yard.

"Please." Ilya wonders what Jackie could possibly have to confess. She's always seemed like the perfect mother to him, endlessly loving and patient. It's why he worries about her.

"Sometimes," Jackie admits, "I'll hide one of the kids' toys on purpose so I have an excuse to go outside and look for it."

Before Ilya can respond, she hands the cigarette back to him and sets off in a straight line across the yard, her mistreated left sneaker flapping against her heel. When she reaches the edge of the lawn, she crouches, clicking her phone flashlight back on, and scans under the hedgerow. Ilya watches as she reaches out a decisive hand and withdraws Small Pig from its hiding place.

Standing, Jackie tucks her phone into one pocket of her hoodie and Small Pig into the other, brushing her hands off on her jeans. She gives him one last smile before turning and walking back towards the house. As she opens the front door, haloed by the light flooding through the doorway, her hair looks gold.

ilya: your husband does not respect you or see your humanity but it's okay because i see you and i will rescue you mama. i mean mama. i mean mama. i mean jackie.

For the record, I don't think hiding your kids' toys or needing a break from your kids makes you a bad parent. I do, however, think that Jackie Pike would feel like it does.

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