Fic: Strangers When We Meet (3/7)
Feb. 7th, 2011 08:24 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: gen, mystery, backstory
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, and 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
Back over the cold Atlantic on leave from the war, back to warm himself by the heat of his summer girl. She burned too bright too hot before her season, and it made his heart seize when the sirens wailed, when the wardens came calling, that the bombers might set their sights on her light, even in deepest night, even in the blackout black felt tamped down over all the windows, even wrapped in blankets even with his body wrapped around her, over her. Even then.
"Should have called me before going to Wellcross," said Alex, leaning against the wall of the waiting room.
"Yeah. Well. The work/life balance thing, you know..." said Jack, making a vaguely symbolic hand motion.
"You'll give me a few pointers on HR, will you? You cagey bastard."
"I'm hearing that you need to work on your active listening skills." Jack grinned and took another drink from his miserable styrofoam cup of hospital coffee. The soapy aftertaste twisted his mouth into a grimace.
"All right," said Alex, putting his wry face aside and putting on his serious one. Not that most people could tell the difference. "Let's get down to it, then. What's your theory?"
"The gunman was going after Pinkie. He wanted her alive. He was staking out the house, waiting for another visit. He shot Estelle for a diversion—" an aftertaste of cold rage, now "—and went to drag Pinkie from the car. Myrna locked the car doors before she hit the ground. Smart girl. So he had to break the window. And by that time I was on him."
"Why didn't he take her from Wellcross?"
"Maybe he didn't want to be seen," said Jack. "Maybe he can't take off that helmet. I'm not saying it all makes sense to me yet."
A nurse came by, saying only "She's ready," in a harried voice before walking on.
Jack immediately stood to attention.
"I'd rather you stayed here," he told Alex.
Alex shrugged. "I'll wait."
"Thanks. And you'll keep this to yourself? I know it's a lot to ask. But you know why, now."
Alex knew a hell of a lot. Alex knew where some of his secrets were buried, knew where some had gone walking, knew he kept a rucksack packed and ready, hidden by the Hub. But not why. Jack trusted Alex more than most leaders he'd served under, but he liked to keep a... balance. Keep something.
"I won't bring in any other operatives. And no word to Torchwood One. Any bodies, and I can't hold to that."
"That's good enough." Jack touched Alex's shoulder, smiled, and walked off in search of Estelle's room.
He spotted her through the open door, sitting up on the gurney, her dress sleeve already covering her wounded arm.
"Jack! You wonderful man, you saved Pinkie!" she called out.
Damn straight, he thought, and felt very warm.
"Your father would be proud of you."
Hold on to it, he told himself. Take what you can get.
"Hey, I do what I can. God, I'm so sorry you're hurt. How bad is it?"
"Oh, I've had worse accidents. Did I ever tell you the story about the angry badger, and how I wouldn't let my old landlady kill it? Barely a graze, they said it was. But they want to watch me overnight. I'm terribly worried, Jack. I'm supposed to hold a planning party tomorrow afternoon for the Kosovo refugee volunteer tutoring group. How will I ever... I suppose..." She trailed off with an uncharacteristic lack of focus.
"Can you give me a shopping list?" asked Jack. He sat down next to her, reached out to touch her shoulder, remembered in time and smoothed his palm over the back of her head. Then took out the Bekaran scanner. It made a better PDA than his vortex manipulator. "Paper plates? Lemonade? Canapés? Sound good?"
"Oh yes, three trays, vegetarian --"
"-- Of course!"
"You're such a dear."
"And you're a tough little badger," said Jack.
Estelle's laughter rang like music, like wind-chimes. She rested her head against his shoulder for a while, and he stared down at the shining white strands of her hair.
They finished the list together and Jack said his good-byes.
On his way back to the waiting room, he stopped by the nurse's station. "Hi there. Can you tell me why she's being held overnight?" he asked.
The nurse looked up from her chart. "She's better now, but she was very disoriented on check-in. Couldn't say what year it was. It wasn't a concussion. It could be shock, but they'd like to run some tests tomorrow before releasing her. Does she have any history of dementia?"
"No," he said, a sliver of panic stabbing into his chest at the thought. His right arm twitched, wanting to reach for his gun. He couldn't stop it, couldn't shoot it down, couldn't do a damn thing.
The nurse didn't see his reaction, or more likely, had seen it so many times she didn't care; she'd already gone back to her chart.
Alex was still leaning against the exact same spot, hands in pockets. As if Jack had never left to see to Estelle. Strange, but time always went strange in hospitals, looped and crawled and skipped. It felt like midnight even though the clock on the wall read noon.
When Alex saw Jack, his eyebrows twitched a little. "Is she all right? You look —"
"She's fine. They're keeping her overnight. Can you set up a guard for Pinkie at Wellcross?"
"The police are already leaning that way. I'll make sure it happens."
Jack stood still for a while, at a loss for words. He'd been hit hard back there, out of nowhere.
"So why'd you leave her?" asked Alex. "You never said."
Jack would have laughed or lied him off under different circumstances, but talking about the past seemed an attractive option right now.
"I didn't want to endanger her, mainly. And she's tied to people and places. I cut off civilians every decade, at the longest. I don't have a choice. It doesn't matter if they're my hairdresser or my friend or my lover. I'm gone." He looked off into the corner, not wanting to see Alex's reaction. "She wouldn't be happy living that way. Living a ghost life. And I know I did the right thing. I hated it, but I never regretted it." His confidence came rushing back, and he bored straight into Alex's eyes. "Every time I see her, I know it all over again. She has a good life."
"Practical," said Alex, simply. No pity. Good.
"Yeah, that's right." Jack took a deep breath. He glanced at the clock again; the red second hand swept forward at a smooth, reassuring pace. "I'll go to the lobby, talk to Myrna. The police should be done with her by now."
"I'll call you if anything comes up," said Alex. "But why'd you come back to her? It's mad, you know."
"Have you ever had a 60-year relationship?" asked Jack with a crooked smile. "No? Let me know when you do. Until then? Fuck off. Sir." Oh, how he loved cheerful insubordination.
Alex didn't even bother to sigh.
Jack took the stairs down to the lobby instead of the elevator, taking them two steps at a time, the sound of his boots striking up a harsh echo in the empty stairwell. By the time he reached the bottom, he'd set the pace of his thoughts to that martial rhythm, looking forward to staring down the police and giving them every bit of the bastard Torchwood they loved to hate.
But they'd gone already. Well, no matter, he'd burn it off on the firing range later.
He found Myrna just outside the entrance, cadging a fag from an off-duty EMT. When she spotted him, she twitched as if to throw it away, but took a defiant drag instead.
"I know, I know," she said. "I nagged my son into quitting a few years ago, and here I am."
"I figured you were hiding a terrible secret," said Jack. He couldn't help noticing that Myrna looked a lot like Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect. Trim. Very trim. He wondered how often people told her that.
"Really, you're the one with all the secrets," she said. "Where'd you get a license for that gun? And what's Torchwood? Funny sort of war-cry, if that's what it was."
"Consulting," he said, nodding like the word meant something.
She tightened her lips, frustrated, but let it pass.
"I work with the police sometimes," said Jack. "Can you tell me what you told them? What you know about her past?"
"The time we spent together... We're both survivors. That's why we still kept in touch. There was a man — it's all so bloody pathetic, really. I find it hard to talk about. I'm not sure the policeman who interviewed me quite understood."
"I'm good at listening," said Jack. "Try me." He leaned back against the wall, a little to the side so that Myrna didn't have to look straight in his eyes.
She sighed, sucked in a lungful of smoke. Coughed, not used to it. Let the hurt surface in the lines of her mouth. Shifted the neckline of her dress up, shifted it back again, and started.
"I'd dropped out of uni and my parents wouldn't take me back. I knew Estelle and Pinkie through protests. They were renting a house together in Butetown, back before they tore down all the houses. They'd both got divorced around the same time, which was a bit scandalous back then, for their age. They let all sorts of people crash at the house. There was a Czechoslovakian conceptual artist in the basement who told us to call him, 'The Snakecharmer'--" Myrna chuckled as she made quotes in the air, "-- but we never could, certainly not with a straight face, and a rock journalist in the attic. And another man who used to stay the weekends and said he came from the future."
Listening, listening. Jack wanted a clue, badly.
"He'd talk all night about how there wasn't any war, or suffering where he came from, and people were like gods, and they all loved each other. And we could all make it happen sooner if we learned how to live the right way, and he could show us how. Some of us... fell in love with that idea. Or with him, maybe. He was a striking man. There was Pinkie, and me, and James, and Richie, and Carol, and Harmony. Estelle never liked him much, though. Always said that something felt off about him, that she didn't like his energy. He told us the Americans would land on the moon in 1969, and when they did, somehow everything he told us made perfect sense."
"We put all our money together and bought a farm near Llandovery. Carol came from old money and she had rather a lot of it. We moved, and once we were cut off, everything got to be darker, and stranger, and before I understood -- well, he raised himself up. Said he was a druid king, and we were all his wives. He'd run off the men. It's an old story, really. Old as time, and desperately stupid, and sad."
Jack pointed to her hand. Her cigarette had burned down almost to her fingers. She started, threw it away from herself, took a deep breath.
"Oh God. Anyway. It went on for years. And then one night, Pinkie woke me up. She said she'd tied him to the bed and it had all gone wrong, and it was time for us to go. I was drifting in a fog, I could barely remember my own name, but I trusted her. We walked miles over the hills to Llandovery and hitchhiked back to Cardiff and knocked on Estelle's door at midnight and she took us in and made us tea."
"You took your life back," said Jack. "Didn't you?"
"I suppose so. Yes. Yes, I did." The lines of her mouth softened. "It hasn't all been a bed of roses since then, but it's been... my own."
"And the cult leader?"
"He's still out there on the farm. I kept in touch with Carol's mother for a while, until she died last year. They always wanted to get her out, and never could. I told the police that the attack might be connected, but I didn't know how. They didn't seem too keen to follow up. Pinkie never would tell me what took her to the tipping point, and now she never will. Now that she's faded so far."
"I wouldn't mind driving out there and having a talk with the guy," said Jack.
"Ugh." She shivered, but he could tell by the set of her shoulders that she'd found her balance again. "I'd go with you. I'm terrified of the man, of course, but I'd like to see Carol. And he's probably only a danger to impressionable women."
"I'll shoot him if he acts up," promised Jack. "Or maybe I'll just shoot him anyway."
"I rather think you're serious," said Myrna, with a sharp-toothed grin. "So let's go. We'll have to take your ridiculous purple car, of course. Who loaned that to you? Prince?"
Chapters: One - The Garden | Two - The Home | Three - The Hospital | Four - The King | Five - The Knife | Six - The Deal | Seven - The Ruins
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-02-08 01:42 am (UTC)"I cut off civilians every decade, at the longest. I don't have a choice. It doesn't matter if they're my hairdresser or my friend or my lover. I'm gone."
Also, you really have me in suspense about the mystery you are building here. Can't wait for the next part!
no subject
Date: 2011-02-08 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-08 05:16 pm (UTC)"Have you ever had a 60-year relationship?" asked Jack with a crooked smile. "No? Let me know when you do. Until then? Fuck off. Sir."
I love these little insights that you give us into what it means to be Jack Harkness.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-08 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-13 07:26 am (UTC)"So let's go. We'll have to take your ridiculous purple car, of course. Who loaned that to you? Prince?"
that really cracked me up & made me think of Jack driving a little red corvette ;D