A/N: First P&F fanfic, and it's certainly not along the chipper lines of the show. This story takes place about 20 years in the future. The only warning is implied character death [off-screen, pre-fic timeline].
.~.
Though her window was cracked open, Vanessa could barely hear the voice of the mayor as he continued to give the eulogy. Nor did she really want to listen anyway. All that mattered to her right then—all that she was forcing herself to care about right then, anyway—was making herself beautiful. And it was taking work.
Premature lines creasing the edges of her eyes and mouth were carefully hidden with foundation that she might have owned since she was a teenager. Cracked lips were first smoothed over with cheap balm then coloured with a too-bright shade of lipstick. Dark hollows were diminished; eyelids and cheekbones were pronounced. She brushed her hair once, twice; the glossy sheen was one of the only remaining features of her youth that remained unblemished after too many hard years.
The mournful voice that was carried on the wind from the not-so-distant city hall continued to lament the loss. Vanessa knew who the funeral was for. The fact that her cable bill had been tossed away in favour of lighting the apartment that month hadn't kept her away from the news. The gossip had been widespread over the past few days, and so it hadn't been difficult for her to discover just who had died in an unfortunate accident. She didn't need a television to find these things out.
Vanessa stood in front of the vanity mirror and smoothed both hands down the cream-coloured shirt—the best she owned, though that wasn't saying much. Her nails, carefully manicured with years-old lacquer, picked at a stray thread on the shirt and tossed it to the side. A faint smudge of eyeliner had been rubbed onto the material. She cursed, and after wetting a tissue with her tongue, scrubbed at the spot. The smudge faded, but did not disappear completely. Another curse—under her breath so that her daughter would not hear. She told herself that John wouldn't notice the stain anyway.
As if on cue, there came a knock on the door to the two-room apartment. Running a brush through her hair one last time, Vanessa went to greet the guest. Her daughter Amber was waiting in the living room, already dressed, watching the blank television screen. Vanessa paused only momentarily at the sad scene before opening the door. Welcome John; how do you do; Amber, meet your new daddy. Vanessa could tell by her daughter's sullen mood that John was most likely not her favourite person in the world, but her eight-year-old status did not grant her veto power, especially not in this particular situation. Amber had actually made it quite clear in the past that John was "creepy" and that she didn't like him. Vanessa had tried to assuage the defiant child, knowing in her heart that regardless of Amber's attitude, John was going to stick around if she could help it.
John was quite possibly her only ticket out of the hellhole that Vanessa's life had become. She sometimes dreamed of a teenage life long past, reminiscing about those carefree days of bored, teenage cynicism. That life was over two decades ago. Being in her late thirties meant that she was an adult now, and adults didn't have the time or reason to be carefree or resentful. Being an adult meant that she had responsibility and woes and bills and hardship and a well-honed sense of stoicism. Being an adult meant taking care of a child while struggling by on unemployment after being laid off from a mediocre job. Being an adult meant visiting dear old Dad at the hospital once a month—
—and what a joke that was, calling it a hospital. Those white shirts and smiles and medication were indication enough of what it actually was. The loonybin, as Amber so lovingly called the place. Maybe the inmates couldn't see past the knowing, placating smiles of the doctors as they sat in a circle and confronted imaginary fears and problems, but Vanessa was still there to scoff at the word hospital, a word assigned to the place only to instil a sense of normalcy into the poor friends and family of the people condemned to spend their time there. If they called it a hospital, then they could just pretend that their batty old uncle was unwell, as opposed to crazier than a loon. Vanessa knew better than that.
John was as cool and flippant as ever. He was the crystal-clear image of a memory unwillingly dredged up from the not-so-nostalgic portions of her past. His hair was trimmed and his clothing updated to something a tad more tasteful than the grunge-pop chic that he sported in his youth, but the attitude was still there. Vanessa knew that somewhere underneath the arrogant exterior was a nice guy—she believed to have seen it on a select number of occasions—and a part of her hoped that he had grown out of the behaviours that had repulsed her in her young adult life in the first place. He claimed to have cleaned up his act, and she chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. She could ignore the old scars in the creases of his elbows and the yellow stains between his fingers. At that moment, he was their salvation. He was a bill-payer like the rest of the middle-and-above-class portion of town. He could help, if he so chose. And she intended to make that happen.
John was more than just a saviour to her situation, though. He was also an acceptable stand-in for the missing piece in their family portrait. Though an iconic father figure he was not, he could certainly give it a shot in their otherwise male-free household. Almost anyone would suffice if it meant that Amber would stop looking at Vanessa with those huge brown eyes, imploring, pleading, begging silently to know why her life wasn't quite like the lives of the people in the cartoons that she used to watch before the television mysteriously stopped broadcasting to their home. Something was missing. Everyone on TV, everyone at school; everyone she knew, it seemed—they all had daddies, and she did not. At the tender age of five, she had asked the question outright, unbeknownst to its true magnitude: why don't I have a daddy? And Vanessa had explained the inquiry away with typical evasions along the lines of "Daddy went away before you were born, sometimes these things happen, but you will always have your Mommy there to love you, et cetera." A mother couldn't just look into her daughter's eyes and explain that sometimes mistakes are made, and things go wrong, and that we must move on and try to forget the people involved. But Amber was a bright child, and she knew that there was something more to the story than what she had been told. Though she did not mention the unknown identity of her father often, Vanessa caught the questioning look in her daughter's eyes now and then, and it hurt her every time.
John was hardly Daddy material for the young girl, but he would have to do. Vanessa only wished that Amber would soon come to embrace the man, if not as a father, then as a nice guy who made her mommy very happy. Amber need never know that if Vanessa had been given a choice, she would not have selected John as her method of getting out of debt. Seeing him again was like voluntarily accepting a plate of food containing a dish that had once made her ill, only for the reason of starvation. It was distasteful, but at the same time necessary. Desperate times called for desperate measures, as they always said. Vanessa had an idea that, to "them," desperate measures involved selling the third vehicle in order to afford repairs for the second.
Vanessa urged Amber to get her shoes on so that they could get going. John leaned casually in the doorframe, spewing idle chatter that did not interest Vanessa in the least. She smiled and laughed in all the right places, and felt that he was none the wiser. When Amber had finally slouched over to the door, wearing upon her face a scowl not unlike the ones that Vanessa herself used to don with such pride, the three of them left for their walk. Vanessa had no idea where they were headed; all she knew was that she needed to reignite the old spark that used to burn between her and John in order to convince him that they just might work out. A walk seemed appropriate for such a thing. Walks were casual, non-threatening, and enabled conversation, even of the manipulative sort. Vanessa couldn't help but feel as if everything hinged on how this date went. If John decided that she wasn't his type anymore after all, then it was back to square one; from there, options would become slim.
Their aimless walk took them closer to city hall. The mayor had finished giving the eulogy, and certain others were stepping up to the podium—friends, family, city officials. Each gave a brief but emotional speech on how their lives had been enriched by knowing the deceased. Each memoriam inevitably ended in either tears or choked-off sentences. Vanessa tried not to listen. It was not what she needed to hear. It was too difficult.
Vanessa tried instead to focus on the day itself. It was one of the most brilliant days of summer. The sun shone with a fierce intensity, but a gentle breeze kept them all comfortable. Birds could be heard in the distance, and even the murmuring sound of car engines had a sort of pleasant feel to it. The town would have been positively bustling and aglow on any other day like this, but a sombre mood had been cast upon the residents. It was as if the crowd of blandly-dressed mourners made up for the lack of clouds in the sky. They served as the fog that dimmed the city's happiness.
"This is a day he would have loved," a woman—the deceased's wife of ten years, whom Vanessa recognized from the newspapers—was saying through hitching sobs. The microphone hissed feedback as she dabbed at her nose. "Sunny and perfect. These were the best kind of days to him...he loved summer..." Her voice dissolved into incoherent cries of anguish, and someone gently escorted her from the podium.
John had paused in his remarks to listen to some of the tributes. The three of them had all slowed in order to view the mounds of flowers surrounding the jet-black coffin. After a moment of silence, he spoke again.
"Mayor Flynn must be pretty shook up about all this, huh?" he said. "Losing his brother. Gotta be pretty awful."
"Yeah," Vanessa replied, though her voice was hardly a whisper. Her eyes were locked on the assortment of photos that had been mounted in plain wooden frames around the memorial display. The familiar face looked back at her, charmingly placid as it had always been in life. It stung to look back into a memory that she had forced herself to forget, and yet she could not pull her gaze away. She forcibly reminded herself that sometimes mistakes are made—the echoes of his wife's sobs continued to ring in her mind—and that things go wrong, and that you must move on and try to forget the people involved. And she had indeed tried. Still, she felt the tears begin to burn, and she willed herself not to cry.
Almost instinctively, she reached for Amber's hand. Her daughter looked up, puzzled but also pleased at the gesture of affection. Vanessa bent down to place a kiss on her daughter's head, her lips pressed to hair just as long and dark as her own. And yet, sometimes in that fall of deep chestnut hair, if the lighting was just right, Vanessa could swear that she could see a glimpse of brightest green.
.~.
-end-
Reviews are greatly appreciated.
A/N 2: I realized that this is potentially contradictory with the canon plot of the show, according to the episode Quantum Boogaloo. Their time machine takes them twenty years into the future, and a reference is made to Phineas winning the Nobel Prize and Ferb being at Camp David. However, I have decided to scoot around this issue in two ways, and you, Constant Reader, can choose the method you prefer.
1) Treat the Quantum Boogaloo scenario as only one of a multitude of possible future outcomes. It is likely, after all, that some actions made in their youths after Quantum Boogaloo altered the version of the future that they had witnessed during that episode. Let us say that it is the butterfly effect and be done with it.
2) Accepting the Quantum Boogaloo future as canon, we can merely assume that this story takes place after Ferb returns from Camp David.