Fic: Strangers When We Meet (2/7)
Feb. 6th, 2011 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
azn_jack_fiendAuthor:
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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.
Chapters: One - The Garden | Two - The Home | Three - The Hospital | Four - The King | Five - The Knife | Six - The Deal | Seven - The Ruins
The cold wind rushed down the hill, struck off the last leaves of the copper beeches to fly circling down around them in brilliant blazing spiky spirals. Jack laughed at the glory of the leaves even as he rubbed his stinging eyes, but when he turned to find Estelle, dancing as he knew she would be — she was poised still and stretched and pointing to the sky like a music-box ballerina with the key unturned. Pointing to the bombers over Cardiff.
~~~
Jack strolled into the Wellcross Care Home waiting room and made a quick survey of the aggressively upholstered environs. They'd renovated the place since the last time he'd visited, replaced the offensive mustard-coloured carpet with a slightly less offensive minty green. Plenty of natural light, and the smell of potpourri and industrial soap wasn't too overpowering. There were worse places to hang around waiting to die. He had a list.
And Pinkie wouldn't be the first low-key alien or time traveller to end their journey in a Wellcross bed, beached by the Rift. The more pragmatic ones eventually moved away from Cardiff, but some of them clung, hoping that they'd be swept back again, as if the same wave ever rolled to shore twice.
The attendant behind the counter, a smiling woman in a pink cardigan, looked at him expectantly.
He matched her smile and amped it up a notch. "Good morning! Nice-looking place you've got here. Comfy. I wouldn't mind checking in myself. What's the rate on a double?"
She laughed more than the joke deserved, and they were off to a fine start. Five minutes later and he had a special visitor's pass and an orderly leading him to the day room where Mrs. Geraldine "Pinkie" Wiggens was currently signed up for "free time".
She sat, sunk back like a sick child, in a dignified armchair by the artificial fireplace, blue eyes and lacy blue dress and clean-smelling limp grey hair braided loosely behind her. She looked a little restless, smoothing the crinkles of the magazine spread over her lap.
"Hello again, Pinkie," he said, sitting down so that he was looking up at her. He took care to move his body slowly, with no hint of threat. "My name is Captain Jack Harkness. I'm not from around here either. Like I said earlier, maybe I can help. Where did you come from? And where do you want to go?"
No reaction. He just wasn't showing up on her radar. And the magazine was upside down.
He took the Bekaran scanner from his pocket and pointed it toward her head. Anyone watching would probably think it was some kind of PDA.
He would've bet 27th century for Pinkie's home time. Post-FTL, pre-Alzheimer's gene therapy inoculation campaign, and that left a neat, narrow window. He'd have lost: the scanner showed her gene pattern as 100% garden-variety 20th-century human.
The brain scan showed abnormal. But he had no clue how to read the symptoms of a disease that had died out millennia before he was born. Maybe it was normal for her condition. Worst case scenario, she had something else living in her brain. Something potentially dangerous that he didn't want anywhere, anywhere near Estelle.
"I'll be right back," he told Pinkie, and went to find the manager.
The office was down a hall lined with paintings of sailing ships and monkeys dressed like bellhops. Jack ran over his story once (an old friend of the Wiggenses), knocked on the door, pushed in as soon as heard a response.
The ginger-haired man with the pencil-thin moustache started like a rabbit. A pen flew from his jerky fingers and clattered against the filing cabinet to his side.
Jack's reflexes screamed blowfish. A century of run-ins and even the most drug-addled ones knew him by sight. Some of them used perception filter technology for long cons.
He squashed down the very strong urge to shove his gun in the face of whatever it was.
"Hey there! Why so nervous?" he asked. With a smile on his face, of course. He kept his right hand close to his gun, using his left to key in a sequence on the Bekaran scanner.
"Nervous? Me? No. Well, you know. I didn't... gah."
"I'd like to check out Mrs. Wiggens for a medical appointment, that's all. I guess I'll need a wheelchair."
"Oh, um." The manager took a deep breath of relief. Interesting. "There's only two people with filed authorisation. Fred Wiggens, that's her nephew —"
"Good old Freddie!"
"— And Mrs. Myrna Covington-Wong. I'd need to start the authorization process on you, Mr...."
"Smith, Jack Smith. Tell you what, that sounds like it could take a while. So I'll just give Myrna a call."
"The lady at the front desk can assist you with a wheelchair checkout form." Formal now, hands folded in front of him.
"Thanks a lot. See ya!"
Just as Jack closed the door, he saw a quick shudder pass through the man.
And the Bekaran scanner results showed yet another bog-standard 20th-century human. Jack congratulated himself for handling the encounter with subtlety, though he still felt a little wounded. He liked to shake people up when they saw him, but not that way.
He remembered the name of Myrna's hotel, and after ringing her, he spent the next hour waiting next to Pinkie's armchair, alternating between the Bekaran scanner results and a back issue of Horse & Hound that was nearly as indecipherable. At one point, a tiny pyjama-clad man full of quavering anger asked Jack who did he think he was, the bloody Queen, but an orderly swiftly steered him off to another room.
Myrna arrived, rolling an empty wheelchair. She had on mirrored sunglasses and an asymmetrical black dress.
"Sweetie darling!" exclaimed Myrna.
"Darling sweetie!" said Jack, chuckling. They air-kissed.
It took a fair amount of teamwork to nudge and cajole Pinkie out of her armchair and into the wheelchair. At the parking lot, they faced another obstacle. Jack happened to be driving an Aston Martin coupe with custom purple velvet seats. Seats that were slung low and definitely not designed for the comfort of semi-immobile care home residents.
Myrna snorted at the car.
"It's a loaner," said Jack. "Really."
Not too far from the truth: it was a blowfish confiscation.
"I'd better drive her," said Myrna. She pointed to a much less ridiculous rental Volkswagen. Estelle leaned out of the passenger side and waved at him.
Jack groaned and swallowed a string of curses.
"What's wrong?" asked Myrna. "You're a rather odd duck."
"I need to take Pinkie to see this doctor by myself," he explained. "I guess I should have made that clearer. There are some... security procedures involved."
"Then we'll drop off Estelle back at her house, I'll stay with her, and you can borrow my car. Problem solved!"
"Fine."
Myrna and Estelle kept up a steady stream of amusing conversation during the ride, but Jack was too preoccupied to join them. He'd relax after giving Pinkie a full scan back at the Hub and getting Anji — a neurologist and a five-year Torchwood veteran — to look at the results. He'd need another story to explain why he was bringing her in. Some chance encounter that left Estelle out of the picture. No need to fill in all the details: Alex trusted him enough not to press too hard on certain subjects.
Myrna pulled into Estelle's driveway, and Jack helped Estelle out of the car and put her cane in her hands.
"Thank you, dear. My ankle's almost back to normal, you know. I'll be tripping around the woods any day now."
"Let me walk you to the patio," said Jack. "It's my pleasure."
"Of course!"
They went arm-in-arm down the garden path. Jack fondly remembered how the touch of her arm felt when she was seventeen. Fire then, sunlight now. One didn't take from the other.
A crack split the air, and Estelle clutched her upper arm, a look of pained confusion crossing her face as if she'd been stung by a wasp. Jack knocked her to the grass, cushioning her bad ankle as best he could. Drew his Webley. Kneeled over her.
He heard Myrna screaming somewhere by the car.
The first rush of combat overturned the sensual world of memory, shattered the garden into isolate pieces, glued the pieces into a grid-map of bullet vectors and probabilities. Cold anger fuelled him.
"Stay down," he hissed to Estelle, and sprinted toward the car. He ran right through a wooden trellis of morning glories, one kick of his boot-heel crushing it to the ground, leaving a clear line of vision back to where Estelle lay.
The first thing he saw when the trellis came splintering down was a figure in a black helmet holding a rifle, running towards the right side of the house. Jack shot it in the back of the head. Then another bullet to the small of the back. Alex had a protocol for fleeing suspects, some sequence that involved yelling "Torchwood," and warning shots, but Jack really, really couldn't be bothered.
It fell down. Scrambled up. Kept running — "Torchwood!" Jack yelled — around the corner — "Fuck!" — and behind a group of oak trees. He couldn't follow, not without leaving the women open to another attack.
He saw Myrna crouching down by the left front wheel of the Volkswagen, clutching the keys to her chest, looking terrified, but not in shock.
"Can you go get Estelle?" he asked. "Lead her back here to the side of the car. She's been shot in the arm, but she'll be all right. I'll cover you — keep guard." He flashed her a tight smile of reassurance. She nodded and went for Estelle as Jack scanned back and forth, looking for signs of any other gunmen.
A black van — it must have been parked behind the trees — roared over the lawn away from the house, cutting towards the road. Jack put a bullet in each rear tire. The van kept rolling. Screeched and slipped when it hit the tarmac. Pulled straight. Sped away. Run-flat tires, then. And what the hell kind of armour had that thing been wearing?
Myrna and Estelle were leaning against the side of the car, Myrna pressing a scarf against Estelle's wounded arm. Estelle's face had gone blank, and her eyes were rolling aimlessly like marbles in a glass-fronted puzzle game. Now that the cold was leaving the corners of Jack's mind, the ache, the wrongness of seeing her like this, wrenched him open and came flooding in. He shouldn't have let this happen.
He reached in his coat pocket and handed Myrna his cell phone. "Call an ambulance," he said. "Might as well call the police too." He'd keep his gun ready until they came.
"I'd like to go home now, if you please, sir," piped Pinkie through an empty car window. Shards of sugary safety glass sparkled across her shoulders.
Chapters: One - The Garden | Two - The Home | Three - The Hospital | Four - The King | Five - The Knife | Six - The Deal | Seven - The Ruins
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Date: 2011-02-07 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-07 03:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-07 07:48 pm (UTC)I dislike posting chapters myself (don't mind when others do it!) but sometimes it's the only way to force myself to concentrate on finishing the rest of the story. Kudos for completing and editing first :)
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Date: 2011-02-07 08:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-09 04:30 pm (UTC)And mystery and intrique. Delightful
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Date: 2011-02-09 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 12:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-11 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 02:33 pm (UTC)