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The young blonde girl looked very like the one from his childhood - same smile, same nose, same eyes. He nearly swore that she was the same girl but of course that was very unlikely, Jamie knew. He knew that the girl he could see across the park had to be different; it was the twenty-first century now, and the woman he remembered had been older than this girl back in 1941. The world was a different place now; it sometimes amazed him that he had almost missed seeing this world. He had almost stopped this world from ever existing, too, but it had all been saved by that blonde woman and her two strange companions. Jamie sat in the park, watching the young girl who looked almost familiar interact with a woman that he assumed must be her mother, and let his thoughts wander back to his traumatic childhood.

He thought about them sometimes, late at night when he had little else to do or after nightmares. The man in the leather jacket; the blonde in the Union Jack shirt; the Captain with the foreign accent. His heroes.

After the nightmares - and it took quite some time for them to stop - they were his greatest comfort. He always held onto the core belief that he would be okay because he had those three. He never saw them again but he knew that they were out there somewhere and that made it better; they were out there and his mother was right there with him.

He addressed Nancy as his mother now that he knew the truth. He wasn't exactly surprised but it did take a few months for him to completely stop calling her by her given name, as he always had when she was acting as his sister. As a child he could never understand her reasoning for doing so but as he grew older, Jamie came to realise that Nancy had been afraid and unwed and too young; she had just tried to make life simpler for both of them. It was not her fault that it had backfired in the worst ways imaginable.

It was not his mother's fault that he followed her out one night, not her fault that a bomb fell on him and definitely not her fault that those little yellow creatures - he did not know what to call them - had turned him into a monster.

Jamie still had vague, fuzzy memories from that time. He couldn't really remember exact details or his surroundings but he did remember the emotions he felt. Fear was a major part of his psyche at the time; fear mixed with confusion, desperation and ever-growing anger. All he wanted was his mother. All he ever wanted was his mother. But nobody would admit to being his mother and his altered mind couldn't understand, so he simply kept searching. All the while he was going back to Nancy, again and again returning to her, because deep down he already knew the truth.

After she told him the truth and he became human again, their relationship was rocky. Both had to adjust to the new honesty between them; Jamie had to deal with the nightmares and the lingering fear; Nancy had to deal with the fact that it took a long time for her to stop being scared of him.

Oh, she loved him and she didn't turn him away. She treated him well. But he could tell that she was afraid of him still, even if she was trying desperately to get over it. He could see it in the way she hesitated before taking his hand, if only for a split second. He had to keep his gas mask with him - there was still a war on, after all - and any time he was required to put it on, he could see the terror creeping into his mother's eyes. During that time, she had very seriously asked him to call her 'mother' or 'Nancy' and nothing else; by that she meant, of course, that he was not to use that word. He could call her that at other times but not while wearing the mask. Any time he slipped up and called her 'mummy' while the mask was on his face, Nancy's eyes would slide immediately to his hand, the one that had been scarred, to reassure herself that the ordeal was over and that he was truly Jamie and not that monster. After the war ended many people kept their gas masks or stored them; Nancy destroyed Jamie's.

Over time, their relationship repaired itself until the whole ordeal seemed like a bad dream. It certainly seemed like a nightmare to Jamie, who would wake from horrible dreams in the middle of the night - bombs falling, searing pain, skull cracking, then he wasn't himself any more, he couldn't think about anything other than his mummy and he knew that he had to find Nancy, get Nancy, ask Nancy because she would know, she had to know, he just wanted his mummy - and cry out for his mother. He was so glad to have his mother; he just wished that she didn't look haunted so much. She wasn't scared of him any more but he did have vague memories of her face staring at him with sheer terror and pain and guilt. After Nancy managed to stop being afraid of him, she still looked haunted because the ordeal would never be forgotten. She could never forget the horror that she had witnessed and it took a great deal of effort to try and hide that from her beloved son.

Jamie's memories of that part of his life were hazy. Afterwards, he could still vaguely recall meeting other children, sitting with them and eating stolen food with them and his mother, whom he called Nancy in front of them. The children were scared of him too; they never stopped avoiding him and if he ever touched them they would freeze instantly. It had probably bothered him but Jamie was old enough now that he had simply forgotten how it had felt.

As Jamie grew older, he and Nancy's relationship evolved into that of a regular mother and son. He attended school and she was proud; he went to university and she was pleased; he married his wife and Nancy was overjoyed. His wife never heard about the incident of his childhood; she did not need to know. Jamie kept that from her and he kept it from his children, all three of them. It would do his children no good to hear about the time their father had become a monster which had the potential to end the human race and repopulate it with a warrior race of zombie-like creatures that had only a single obsession. And when Nancy died - aged 64, an age she considered to be a damned lucky one considering the trauma of her past - Jamie was left as the only person who still remembered, the good Doctor Constantine having died many years beforehand.

Constantine had cared from them in the weeks after the incident; Jamie had hated the hospital so much. Nancy hadn't been terribly bothered - she had not been inside during the plague's worst time - but Jamie felt that every second he was inside was a bad reminder of the last time he'd been there. At first he remembered - hazily - lots of things about being a monster but as he aged, the memories faded until he could remember only small details. All in all he would have liked to have forgotten all about it but there are some things the mind just cannot block out.

In fact the clearest memory had had of the incident - save for perhaps the feeling of becoming angrier and angrier over his desperation to find his mummy - was of the man in the leather jacket and the blonde woman standing with he and his mother. The man had seemed ecstatic, so very pleased with the outcome, and the woman had seemed both confused and happy at the same time. He knew that they, along with the odd man who had appeared in the sky on a bomb, were the closest the world could come to actual real-life superheroes.

Nancy did not like to talk about the incident but when she did, it was those three that she spoke of. Although she could not forget about what had happened she did push it to the back of her mind and wasn't keen on being reminded about that time, but nevertheless she spoke fondly of the man in the leather jacket and the blonde woman. Jamie knew that they were her heroes as much as they were his; they had given them both their lives back.

He would never forget them.

Now, in the early twenty first century, Jamie stood up from the park bench and began his slow walk home. He had a visit with his eldest daughter and his grandchildren that evening and did not want to be late. As he passed by the girl - fourteen or fifteen, maybe? - that seemed to resemble the blonde from 1941, Jamie smiled. He had lived a good life and it was all thanks to them. He may never be able to see them again to tell them thank you in person but he prayed, daily, that wherever they were, they knew that his gratitude was undying. Because he had died and come back and been saved, and it was all down to them that he had actually gotten a chance to live.

Please R&R