Fic: Strangers When We Meet (5/7)
Feb. 8th, 2011 08:03 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
She could be there for him, she could be gone from him the next heartbeat. He had only just begun to learn the rhythm. In this moment she was all for him, perching on the edge of the table, letting her head fall back into the palm of his cradling left hand, opening her lips halfway and sighing with pleasure as he glided the cherry red lipstick upwards, as he pressed in, leaned in, to trace the little dip in the centre, then glided downwards to the arc's completion. Her breath smelled of tea and peppermints and brought to mind everything that was liquid and sweet and his hand shook for a second before he steadied himself and slid a matching red creamy curve onto her lower lip.
Then she was gone. Her fingers drummed a stuttering beat against the table, her eyes rolled, her head jerked. Bored. Restless. Just a few more seconds, he pleaded, and she submitted with no grace, grudging, like a child at the doctor's. He rushed the stroke and cursed himself for what he was doing.
It was January 1941. Cardiff. Not London. London, where an invisible spaceship lay anchored to the country's ticking, tolling heart. Flown free and gone forever by tomorrow.
He'd been drinking all night and could barely feel it. Couldn't feel anything, except when he looked at Estelle, when her breaths rolled warm against his face, when he could taste her on his lips. He'd haunt her like a ghost tonight, make himself real inside her, against her, make it through to the morning when the past would finally be the past again.
Jack you're a mad one, she said, with smoky clouds around her too-brilliant eyes, and do I have to wear the blond wig?
Humour me. You know I'll make it up to you.
I could catch a cold and die and then what would you do?
Kill myself of course.
He pressed against the flat of her back, pressed her towards him slowly until she let out a moan, her almost perfect face tilted back waiting for the last touchstone stroke of cherry red. Thrumming underneath her warm little breasts her steady heartbeat kept him anchored in time, such a simple, simple thrum-thud but layered underneath a vast chorus singing cycles of blood and bone marrow and the roaring rush of hormones and telomere caps at the ends of DNA spirals prophesying cell death as they dissolved diminishing towards the days marked on a compassionate clock, the days when all her songs would wind down.
He stroked her lips to perfection, capped the tube, and readied for their furtive climb up cold stairs towards the roof of the flat, up towards to the same black sky that covered London. London, and eternity, to the north.
Back in Cardiff. Twilight, and the streetlights were winking on. He watched Myrna walk into the hotel lobby. Her pace was stiff and her silhouette gaunt. Then she turned in a fluid motion, vibrant again, smiled and blew him a dramatic kiss. He reached out of the car window, picked it out of the air, blew it back to her, waved good-bye.
Jack rolled up the window and was just about to dial Alex on his cell phone when a story he'd told earlier came swirling back into the front of his mind. The grandmother that he'd borrowed from... David, that was his name, an ex-boyfriend from the 1980s. They'd been together for almost a year, even shared a flat for a summer, David was a fantastic cook and it didn't end too badly and David's grandmother had died, in Cardiff, of course, not in Colorado, in Cardiff at — she'd been at Wellcross.
How many of these people had gotten better — happier — before they died? And for how long? Maybe there was a pattern. And someone else had found that pattern. Someone who was interested in Pinkie's future, not her past.
Instead of turning right at the next cross-street after he pulled out of the hotel parking lot, he took a left and headed towards Wellcross. He could take a look at the records. Better yet, push that rabbity director to look at the records, and watch his reaction.
A red light blinked on just as the sign for Wellcross came into view. The street corner was empty, so Jack checked to the left and right as he tapped the gas pedal with his toe. He'd wasted enough time today. Tap. Change the light to green with his vortex manipulator? Tap again. Or just run the damn thing.
A black van pulled out of the Wellcross lot.
A second later, Jack's Webley was in his right hand, the accelerator was pressed firmly to the floor and the Aston Martin's engine sounded a whining snarl. The car threw itself forward. Closing on the van now, and this time Jack was going to take him down, shoot out the window and —
The van veered on the attack as it accelerated, jolting the Aston Martin half up onto the verge. Jack fought the wheel with both hands to bring it back, pulling behind, putting the Webley aside as he decided on a change of tactics. A busy thoroughfare up ahead. He keyed in a sequence on his vortex manipulator and flipped the stoplights.
The van slammed to a halt before it tipped into the river of headlights now coursing through the main road. Jack was right behind. He kicked open the door and pulled himself out just as the van reversed and crunched up onto the hood of the low-slung Aston Martin.
The van was moving forward off the hood, turning to the right, and Jack realised he wouldn't have time to make it to the driver's side.
This was going to hurt.
He slung the Webley into his left hand and smashed it through the back window of the van. That gave him enough purchase to cling on as the van pulled out into the road, sounds of screeching brakes and blaring horns flowing together in outrage all around them.
His hand didn't hurt yet. Too much adrenaline. He just couldn't feel most of it anymore.
He jammed his right shoulder into the gaping window hole and tumbled inside.
The first thing he saw was his left hand, dark with blood, empty. Then Pinkie, curled on the floor with tape over her mouth. There were no seats in the van, only a few scattered dark cases on the floor, one of them opened underneath the dome light. Coiled tubes. The dull glint of scalpels in plastic.
Jack felt a familiar sense of optimistic fatalism. He wasn't getting out of this van alive. Whoever was driving was too fast, too aggressive. In the next few seconds, they'd steady the wheel, turn around and shoot Jack in the head.
He could work with that.
He staggered to his feet from his knees, picked up one of Pinkie's legs in his left hand — now the pain came rushing in, spiking up his arm into his spine — and gripped her shoulder with his right hand. What he was about do was — the scalpels. They had no time, no time at all. He hurled her feather-light, crooked body from the back of the van, giving his throw as much spin as he could. If she hit the soft grass on the median, she might live.
Pinkie took flight and vanished to the side as the van sped on. A silver sedan trailed the van, falling behind quickly, but not before Jack noticed the horrified face of the young woman behind the wheel. He flashed her a meant-to-be-reassuring smile just as the bullet burst through the back of his skull.
Surfacing. Forcing that first breath down, quiet, from a ragged gasp into an agonisingly slow, measured sip. Then realising there was no point to subterfuge: he was outside, alone. Jack stood up, holding himself steady against a brick wall.
The handcuff around his right wrist tugged him back down to his knees.
"Fuck!"
Who handcuffed a dead body to a pipe in an alley?
The cuff was biting, bruising tight. Not police issue, more like some modern-alloy medieval shackle. His left hand was the good one now. Quick check. Wrist strap, gone. No cell phone. No gun.
Cardiff's lines rose up in his memory; like a familiar lover, he could trace them in the dark. He didn't know the exact side street, but this was the back of some Butetown warehouse. Almost no chance of passers-by, maybe for the whole night. He had to get out of here. Get to the hospital. The instinct that Estelle would be the next target hammered at him, because maybe she'd been wounded to get her where she needed to be, and it was all there right at the border of logic —
He took a deep breath and looked up at the faint stars. He thought about nothing, absolutely nothing at all, just let the night sky draw him out of his crouching, chained shell. Something scratched in his throat, crying upwards. My home, my home.
Enough. He knew what he had to do. He spiralled back inside his own mind, way inside, imagining his consciousness as the pilot of a complicated but utterly mundane vessel. The body inviolate, an unimaginable abstraction. He gave his left hand a set of instructions to pull off his braces and tie them into a tourniquet below the handcuff. His right hand had strong thick bones held together by vulnerable joints. His left hand pulled the miniature knife from the casing on the inside of his boot and began to go to work.
Tricks of the mind only went so far, and about an inch into his wrist, flesh split, blood-slippery grip on the knife loosening, he stopped holding back the screams.
He kept on, and on, working the tip of the knife back and forth, trembling, sawing. He fell backwards, pulled against the pipe, fell backwards again into a fresh wave of pain... and freedom.
The alley snaked back and forth. No, it was straight. Brick wall on the left, chain-link fence to the right, light ahead. He kept moving. Straight, straight, straight. He'd shoved the remains of his right hand in his coat pocket, let the blood blossom through the wool.
The street was empty, lined with low looming warehouses and fenced vacant lots. Jack staggered right, following the lights and distant sounds of the carriageway.
The first sign of life, unexpected: a man in blue coveralls, leaning against a booth beside a warehouse gate.
"Call an ambulance," yelled Jack. "I've been stabbed."
The man started, and made as if to come help him.
"No, call me an ambulance," he barked again. The man dived into the booth.
Jack fell onto his side, let his head rest against the cool concrete. Time for a reset. He swept the knife up across his throat.
Surfacing to harsh light and the siren's wail. Jack gasped this time, registered the absence of pain, let it echo through his body (and his hands, oh the freely curling fingers of his hands) like something close to ecstasy.
He was strapped to a gurney and an EMT was cutting off his pants with a pair of scissors.
Jack wasn't sure how he felt about that yet.
"I can't find the wound," the man yelled towards the driver. "Enough blood for a Class III haemorrhage and I can't find the bloody wound."
Jack looked down. The EMT had broad shoulders, dark curly hair and well-defined eyebrows.
"I think I'm gonna make it," said Jack, in a voice as weak and quavering as he could muster.
"Thought you were dead, to be honest," said the EMT, grinning in relief. "Don't dare move. We're almost to the hospital, mate. But can you tell me where you got hit?"
"I... don't know," said Jack. "I guess you'd better check all over."
The rest of the ambulance ride was short, enjoyable and resulted in a tentative lunch date with Ian the curly-haired EMT. But once the gurney was shuttled inside the hospital doors, Jack faced a nightmare barrage of nurses and doctors.
— "You can't just walk out." —"Torchwood? I don't care if you're MI5. Class III haemorrhage, do you know what that means?" — "You most certainly will not be provided with clothes."
He stormed out of the A&E in a hospital gown and rang Alex from the lobby phone.
"I'm on my way out of the Hub," said Alex. "Got the word from Wellcross. A man showed up there impersonating a Torchwood agent. Told the guard he was there to bring her to a safer location."
"Where's she now?" asked Jack.
"Hospital, in a coma. Some bastard threw her out of a moving car."
"Yeah, well... we'll talk when you get here. I need you to bring me something."
He slipped into Estelle's room.
The ceiling light was off, and a stained glass reading lamp someone must have brought from her home was glowing warmly by her bed. She'd propped herself up and was busy taking notes from a book.
"Hey, peaches."
"Jack, what on earth are you wearing?" she asked, frowning. "Are you... hurt? Oh dear."
"Someone bled on me in the waiting room, that's all, and I'm waiting for a friend to show up with my clothes."
"You're fine, and so am I, just as fit as I could be, so what are we doing here? I do hate hospitals. People die in them, you know."
Jack laughed.
He sat down in the chair next to her bed and held her hand. So small in his own, always so small.
Her eyes widened and grow remote.
"Jack, there's something I remembered I need to tell you, now that Myrna isn't here. It might help you. But you must understand. You can't let this get back to her. You mustn't. Please."
"I don't understand."
"Here's how it happened. Pinkie told me why she left. She didn't want Myrna to become head wife. She planned on leading her through the hills to a cliff and... and... Killing her. And going back. But when the time came, she couldn't do it, and they just kept walking." Estelle clutched his hand tightly, and Jack ran his thumb over the backs of her softly twitching fingers.
"That's some secret," he said.
"Back then, I talked her through the worst of it. I told her it didn't matter why, or how, but she'd done the best she could with her mind as sick as he'd made her. And she'd been guided by better angels. But oh, the guilt she carried. And when the Alzheimer's came, sometimes it took her back to that night in the hills, and she suffered terribly."
"You're right. It might help. We've got another lead we're working on, but it might help. And I won't tell Myrna," said Jack.
"Thank you, dear."
"Got any other secrets you've been holding onto?" said Jack, trying to lighten the mood. "Any dirt on my dad?" He paused and rolled his eyes. "No, wait. Don't tell me."
Estelle laughed now, fond and light. Her remembrance was a gift. An absolution.
"Of course you don't want to know," she said. "When I thought of my own father... well, that's the thing, really." Her laughter trailed off, and her eyes slipped from his own. He felt the cold, sterile air of the hospital slipping under the thin cotton, slipping against his skin.
"It's that I don't remember much from that time," she confessed. "I was a difficult child. I suppose nowadays they'd have given me all sorts of drugs. The things I did, the things that happened to me, they blazed through my mind, so bright and vivid, but when I string them in a straight line, they fade."
Jack, enthralled, reminded himself to breathe.
"They only began to make any sort of sense when I got a little bit into my twenties. Then I looked back and... I told my cousin the things I remembered, and she said they happened quite differently, and my version was like a strange dream, or a fiction. To be honest, I have very few reliable early memories of your father. Towards the end, the end of the war... that's the clearest part."
"And it was good," she said, remembering to smile again. "I do miss him."
Jack nodded his head and looked at the floor. What she'd told him invited an intimate revelation in return, and he couldn't go there, couldn't spin the lies that would make her happiest.
It didn't matter. She would forgive the debt.
"It's all right, dear," she said.
So easy.
"I've got to go," he said. "Don't stay up too late, now."
"Aye aye, Captain!" she said, laughing again.
Alex leaned against the wall under the same complacent clock. Eight timeless hours later.
"I think I know what's been going on at Wellcross," said Jack, feeling pleased with himself and relieved now that Estelle and Pinkie were both under heavy police guard. "And it's not a danger. Did you have to bring me track pants?"
"Yes, I did," said Alex, with patience and a remarkable lack of sarcasm.
Jack tore off his hospital gown and grudgingly stepped into the grey track pants and incongruous white dress shirt. Their corner of the lobby was almost empty; only one orderly remained to make a squeaking noise at the sight.
"And the tracker?"
"Here." Alex handed him the portable display unit.
"Once I get my wrist strap back and —"
"Jack, sit down. You need to listen to every word of this."
"Sit down?" Jack waved his arms, suddenly furious. He'd just hit his limit, hard.
"I made a call to Torchwood One. I know who did this. And I've been told not to go after him."
Jack hung at the edge of a cliff of calculated rage, about to reconsider everything this man meant to him. He stared down into Alex's unblinking eyes.
"He's a mercenary who specialises in... extraction... For biotech research," said Alex, and a ghost of a flinch shivered across his eyelids. "He's got a backer in the States who's big enough to pull strings with the Prime Minister. There are some very powerful people on both sides of the Atlantic who've been promised a cure for Alzheimer's."
"That's not going to happen," said Jack, speaking slowly, speaking only to engage Alex, to buy time as he traced maps of the city in his mind. Trajectories in time and space. Backups of backup plans.
"I spoke to Yvonne personally. She told me — Jack! Stop!"
He wheeled around the corner and pounded towards the emergency stairs.
Jack sat back against the battered black van. He'd followed the tracker's display to this drab, dusty boarded-up Italian restaurant in Llandaff North. The extractor must have set up shop somewhere inside. Lucky that the man had thought to steal his vortex manipulator.
On his way, Jack had stopped briefly at a certain locker that held a roll of hundred-pound notes and a Ruger revolver.
He loaded the revolver now. Not nearly as powerful as the Webley, but then, he was only going up against a human. A well-equipped human, that was all.
A barely audible click. Alex, crouched a car length's away.
Jack stared into Alex's gun barrel. His fingers let the last bullet slide into the Ruger's chamber, then stilled.
"You daft fucking bastard," hissed Alex. "If I have to shoot you in the head and tie you down, you will listen to me."
"Are you... angry?" asked Jack, raising an eyebrow in wonder.
"We've got to make it look like a suicide," said Alex. "Put the gun away and come with me."
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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no subject
Date: 2011-02-09 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-10 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-14 02:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-13 08:30 am (UTC)He was strapped to a gurney and an EMT was cutting off his pants with a pair of scissors.
Jack wasn't sure how he felt about that yet.
this made me LOL! :D
"I... don't know," said Jack. "I guess you'd better check all over."
& LMAO!
very good potline as well & I almost had to gag a bit when Jack cut his own hand off :(
no subject
Date: 2011-03-20 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-21 12:56 am (UTC)