azn_jack_fiend

Title: Strangers When We Meet (1/7)
Author:

azn_jack_fiend
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Estelle, Alex Hopkins, OCs
Rating: R for violence, death and mature themes.
Warnings/Spoilers: Specific violence-related warnings for later chapters: cruelty to senior, cruelty to animal, amputation
Categories: mystery, backstory, gen
Summary: It's 1999, and Jack is back in Estelle's life as his own son. Something waiting inside the mind of her friend at the nursing home has finally stopped waiting, and Jack's attempts to protect Estelle will reveal painful secrets kept buried for decades.
A/N: Written for

aeshna_uk. Many thanks to betas

canaana and

heddychaa. This is a completed fic; I will be posting one to two chapters every day.
Disclaimer: Characters do not belong to me.

One - The Garden

Jack paused behind the screen of pale purple foxgloves.

Their heavy, ruffle-throated blooms reached shoulder-high. Soon they'd go to seed. Leave the last dead stalk on the ground and new ones would spring up the first year, die back to the ground in winter, resurrect and flower the second year. Then die again for good. Not that he'd ever been much of a gardener. The foxglove life-cycle was just one of many charmingly useless facts he'd picked up and never bothered to put down. No need to remember, no desire to forget.

He should use this pause to paper over holes in the story of his life. To rehearse deflections, and jokes, and questions in answer to questions. But this was the third time, and it only got easier. The easiest con he'd ever pulled, maybe.

"Jack, is that you?" called Estelle.

"I'm standing here admiring your foxgloves," he said, loud and cheerful and thankful he didn't have to fake that, at least.

"Aren't they fabulous? Come around the left, dear."

He made his cautious way around the towering bank, holding the edges of his coat to keep from bruising any of the smaller flowers around the base. The garden was overgrown, informal, stunningly fertile. Underneath the syrupy smell of living flowers curled the faint medicine smell of dead leaves soaked in sun and rain.

And there she was, sitting on a picnic cloth with a cane by her side. Almost no pain this time, just a little twinge of double vision resolving itself. The gap of fifty-five years closed. She was still beautiful, after all.

She gave him a radiant smile.

Jack shrugged off his coat and threw it down next to her. He sat down and took her hand, small in his own, delicate and speckled and fragile.

"Love your garden! It's like another world back here. I'd say a hundred years ago, but I don't think you're going for that effect."

"Oh no, the designs back then were rather stuffy," said Estelle. "I want my flowers to be free to grow into their natural selves. They need room for improvisation," and she swept her hand like a conductor, "and chaos in their short lives. I have a wonderful book of photography on — but I mustn't be rude. Let me introduce you to my other visitors."

Jack looked up at the two women. He'd been hoping to sit down in the sun and just exchange big goofy grins with Estelle for the next hour, but if she wanted to socialise, he'd socialise.

"Myrna? This is Jack, the young man I told you all about. We connected through the world-wide Internet. Isn't it wonderful how it brings everyone closer together?"

"Hello, Jack," said Myrna, sounding very self-possessed and crisply English. Her hair was silver-white, but premature, or dyed, as she was obviously a generation younger than Estelle. She had dark brown eyes and ferocious cheekbones and interesting lines under an interesting sleeveless wrap dress.

He started to rise up to shake her hand, but she was already lowering herself to sit by Estelle's other side.

"Our friend in the wheelchair is Pinkie," said Myrna. "She's not at her most lucid right now, I'm afraid."

"Hiya, Pinkie," said Jack, smiling and waving and realising that eye contact would be a lost cause: Pinkie's milky blue eyes stayed fixed to empty air somewhere above the bank of flowers.

"So how do you lovely ladies know each other? I'm sure Estelle told you about my father."

"We all did a lot of anti-nuclear activism in the sixties," said Myrna. "Pinkie and I joined a sort of commune later. That whole episode turned into quite the disaster, but we stayed in touch, even after I left for India. I live in Canada now, but I'm in Cardiff for a few weeks visiting relatives and friends."

"Were you a hippie, Estelle?" asked Jack, teasing. "It wouldn't surprise me."

"Well, I wasn't running around barefoot smoking dope, if that's what you mean," she replied with mock indignation. "But I wouldn't be ashamed of the word either. The younger people had such a passion to change the world then."

"I was the barefoot dope-smoker," confessed Myrna. "Estelle and Pinkie were the ladies in sensible shoes who actually got the work done."

"If it's worse, it's a sign it's nearly over," said Pinkie in thick, throaty Cockney. "So cheer up, Captain, and buy a flower off a poor girl."

"What?" snapped Jack, completely thrown.

"It's Pygmalion!" said Estelle, delighted. "She's speaking from Pygmalion. Oh, I wish I knew the next line. She's been speaking more and more lately. Do you have a coin in your pocket, Jack?"

Jack rose to his feet and found a penny for Pinkie. Her lost, mad eyes fully met his own as she reached out and took the penny from his hand.

"Can you help me get off-planet?" she asked, in the calm voice of a middle-class eighty-year-old Welshwoman.

"Maybe," said Jack. "Where're you headed?"

She was gone again, staring at the foxgloves. The coin slid from her fingers onto the grass. Jack picked it up and sat back down next to Estelle. He'd felt a surge of annoyance at how the weirdness of his life never fucking let up not even for a lunch break goddamnit before Estelle's steady smile swung him right back into a state of blissful serenity.

"I don't think that was from one of her plays," said Myrna. "And I've heard it before. Questions about escaping. Science fiction sorts of things."

"We're worried about Pinkie," said Estelle. "Jack used to be a soldier, like his father, but now he's a private detective." She turned to him, touched his hand. "Can you look into her nursing home? Perhaps they're doing something there that's making her want to escape. I read a story about a place in Sussex, but it's too horrible to even repeat. If it's anything like that..."

"What do her relatives think?" he asked.

"She hasn't any left except for a nephew in Glasgow. She's like me. She never had any children."

"Sure. I'll do what I can," said Jack, raising an eyebrow and grinning, crooked and noir-style. "But my services don't come cheap."

"You wouldn't!" gasped Estelle.

"At least two scones up front. And the next time I visit, I'm demanding banana bread."

"That's awfully cheeky of you, but I suppose it's fair. Agreed! Let's go inside, dears."

Jack helped Estelle to her feet while Myrna rose gracefully and took hold of Pinkie's wheelchair.

"We've been watching some AbFab tapes on the telly," she said. "Estelle hardly watches anything, but I've got her addicted. You can imagine the appeal for us."

Estelle nudged Jack's ribs with her elbow. "Patsy used to go out with Keith Moon," she stage-whispered.

Myrna cocked one slim hip to the side, squinted, and rakishly brandished an invisible cigarette. "Sort of," she drawled. "Woke up underneath him in a hotel bedroom, once."

He walked with them, laughing, down the garden path.