His parents were just getting home, carrying shopping bags so it was obvious where the two of them had been.
"Hey, Jake," his father greeted cheerfully; Jake nodded back, working up the same expression.
"Honey, there are some more bags out in the car," his mother said, gesturing back outside with her head.
"Right," he said, turning to head for the door.
After he'd taken care of all of the bags that had been left in the car, setting them down in the living room so that his parents could take care of them, Jake turned back to them. There were some things that were more important than playing at being normal, after all.
"I'm going to take off," he said.
"Weren't you out all day?" his mom asked, giving him a sort of reproving look; Jake ignored it for the most part.
"I guess so," he said, shrugging.
"Would it kill you to have dinner with your family?" she asked; Jake held back a wince through sheer force of will.
Guilt was the one thing he didn't have much of a defense against. "Is it dinnertime?"
"It will be, as soon as I fix that salmon I picked up yesterday," she said, smiling kindly down at him. "You loved it so much the last time I made it, so I mostly got it for you."
Smiling widely to help himself ignore the guild gnawing away at the pit of his stomach, Jake sighed under his breath. "Well, you didn't tell me that's what you were making. Marco can wait. I'm there."
There was no real way that he could let Marco know what he was doing, or to ask him to do the research that Jake so obviously wasn't going to be able to in time. Something like this was too sensitive to be talked about over the phone, and they all tried to avoid using the phone for things like this in any case.
Phones were too easy to tap, and in his case it was entirely too likely that Tom could be listening in on the extension, just waiting for him to slip up; anyone else might have called that excessive paranoia on his part, but no one else had to deal with the kind of pressure that he had to deal with constantly.
Pulling out some of his homework when he got back up to his room, Jake started on it while his mother cooked and his father most likely set out the dishes. Either with or without Tom's help, Jake wasn't entirely sure these days. Hearing his father calling up to him from the living room, something about a fight that was being broadcast on Showtime, something about it being a repeat of one that his father had enjoyed from Pay Per View. So, knowing that it was something that he would have done back in the old days, and hence something that would be expected of him under the circumstances, Jake grabbed his homework and headed back down to the living room.
He worked on it there, under the eyes of his mother and father, keeping one eye on the screen just in case anything interesting happened. It didn't, not really, but it was still nice to spend time with the people he loved. Even if the four of them hadn't really been a family since Tom had been infested by the Yeerks, it was still nice; this was really what he fought for.
His father started to get into some long, involved, really boring story about what had happened while he was at work, then his mother asked him and Tom about how their respective days at school had gone, and then his father remembered that there had been some part of his story that he hadn't gotten around to telling, so he had to go back over it again. And his mother hoped aloud that he and Tom enjoyed the clothes she had bought for them at the mall, and he and Tom - or at least the thing that was pretending to be Tom - joked that she had probably been shopping at Formerly Cool Fashions 'R' Us. It was an old joke between the three of them, something that had become comfortably familiar.
Something that he had to play along with for the sake of his cover, now.
Everything was all so normal-seeming that Jake could almost let himself believe that it was real. He could almost let himself believe that there weren't layers of deception here, layers that he couldn't let anyone else know that he'd penetrated, and that he couldn't let anyone else penetrate. Could almost believe that the fate of his family didn't rest on his own acting skills.
Times like this, lately, Jake would find himself thinking about Slade and Shara, hidden away as they were inside Cassie's barn. He wondered what they fought for; or really what Shara fought for, since Slade didn't seem to have any ambitions beyond just following orders. He wondered what their family had been like, and if they had had moments like these. They probably had, since any family but the most messed-up ones did.
He wondered what Shara thought about, when she was eating whatever food Cassie prepared for her in a drafty barn, instead of sitting down at a table with the rest of her family. Did she have more brothers than just Ness and Cain, back when she'd had them at all? Did she think about them, and plan ways that she might be able to rescue them from the Radam?
He hadn't ever thought of her this much before, but after she had basically shared her mind with him, giving him just the barest glimpse of her innermost thoughts and feelings as she had tried to help keep him steady while the others worked to save both their lives, he couldn't help but wonder just what kind of a person Shara Carter had been. He couldn't really look in yearbooks for that, since they wouldn't have the kind of information that he was interested in.
He knew better than most just how little normal people really tended to see.