Chapter 1 : Old Photographs


It seemed like no amount of upkeep was sufficient enough to discourage the growth of plant life across the face of the tombstones. Rose Tyler reached out and rubbed away the moss and grime from the headstones, and stood, wiping her hands on her jeans. She took a step back and somberly regarded the three graves in front of her.

The three people who had been most dear to her.

She came nearly every week, when her schedule permitted, and always with flowers. Despite being her name sake, she never left roses at the graves, they were too somber, too impersonal, regardless of their loveliness, for her loved ones who lay beneath the ground.

Lilies for Jackie, daisies for Pete, but for the headstone she grieved over the most after all these years, the one engraved with the false name of 'John Smith', she always left sunflowers.

break

He had told her, on that cold day with the spray of salt water biting against their cheeks, that he had only one heart, only one life, and that he would gladly share it with her. He had told her that he loved her, with the face and voice of the man who she had loved for years, while the original had shied away from even confirming that before he left her for the last time.

Left her with her heart uncertain as to whether it would burst from the joy of this new man, who was, in a fashion, her Doctor. This new man who freely shared his affection with her, and was unafraid to hold her and kiss her in front of the whole world, consequences be damned.

Or whether it was in fact bursting with the earth shattering pain of losing the love of her life all over again. After she had come so far to find him, struggling through the coarse fabrics of alternate dimensions to find her way back to him, the only man she had ever truly loved with ever fiber of her being.

He had known this, known that she had risked her everything to find him, and he had still made up his mind for the both of them. He always thought he knew what was best for his Rose. He assumed that what she had wanted was a human life, and he could give her what she wanted by sending her away with the regeneration of him and Donna.

The pain in his eyes as he told her his decision had been almost unbearable, and Rose had wanted to grab onto him, to shake him, to scream "I DON'T WANT A NORMAL LIFE! I WANT YOU, YOU STUPID MAN! YOU!!" …

And he hadn't known about Rose's condition then, and how could he when even Rose had only the smallest suspicion of it?


Rose stepped from her shower and wrapped herself in a towel. Examining her face in the mirror she found nothing out of the ordinary, no hint of wrinkles, no laugh lines, nor even a gray hair, sure, she thought, her roots could do with a touch up, but otherwise nothing was amiss. She looked almost exactly as she had at twenty years old, and no one who she randomly met on the street was any for the wiser.

Looking in her mirror she recalled past birthdays.

"Love, you must tell me what sort of moisturizers you have been using!" Jackie had exclaimed, rising from the couch to greet her daughter as Rose entered the living room and her birthday party. Rose had smiled indulgently, trying to quell the guilty feelings she experienced whenever anyone mentioned her youthful looks.

The man who, according to all legal documentation, was now known as "John Smith", who she still could only call "Doctor", had taken Rose's hand, drawing her attention back to him.

The "new" Doctor, the "human" Doctor, at that point she had learned to love him nearly as much as she had her Doctor years and years ago.

It had been long ago that she had married him on a drizzly May afternoon. Unlike his wife, there were lines at the corners of his eyes now, and his hair was more grey then brown anymore.

By all appearances she had been the youngest person present at her birthday party. Even her younger brother Tony and his wife looked older then her, despite being basically old enough to be their mother.

One of the maids on Pete and Jackie's house staff had wheeled out the birthday cake, with fifty five candles blazing atop it.

And no one spoke a word of the fact that Rose had not aged at all.

He had promised to grow old along side her, to spend his whole life with her. And he had been true to his word. They had been married for sixty two years, that horrible September night she remembered like yesterday.

Old, feeble, and bedridden, he had clutched onto the smooth young hands of his unchanging wife. He had laughed weakly and reminded her of the time he had told her, after she had first met Sarah Jane Smith all those years ago, about how painful it was to grow attached to his human companions, only to watch them wither and die and grow old.

"I never wished that pain on you Rose." he told her, and then looking her in the eye he said "This is not your fault, I thought I had taken it all from you, I never imagined this would happen to you."

"What would happen to me? Doctor? What am I? It was supposed to be different. We were going to get old together! How could this happen?" she had cried, burying her face against the back of his wrinkled hand, still gripped in hers, and he had stroked her hair and told her that she would understand one day.

She would know one day.

Un-aging and eternal.

And alone.

The taste of immortality had grown sour in Rose's mouth long, long ago.

Though she was regarded as an anomaly, her job at Torchwood sustained her.

Team mates of hers came and went, some were killed, some grew old and died that way. Not her though, not Rose, she stayed the same, and after awhile she grew less and less inclined towards socialization with other members of Torchwood.

Everyone left. They always left.

She was Two Hundred and Thirty Eight years old, in a Twenty year old's body.

And she was bloody tired.


Rose woke with a jolt to the sound of her communication system buzzing. She rubbed her eyes and pushed her unkempt hair from her face, rolled onto her stomach and picked up the small device.

"-nnnn?" she managed in her sleep deprived state.

"Rose? I'm so sorry that I woke you, but the rift has become active again." said the quiet Welsh voice on the other end of the phone.

She groaned.

"all right, I'll be there as soon as I can"


Rose arrived at Torchwood, Cardiff dressed in a sweater and jeans with her hair pulled up into a messy pony tail. Stepping through the entrance to the hub, she rubbed at her bleary eyes and was greeted by the familiar smell of freshly brewed coffee.

She smiled sleepily at the man standing in front of her. He was decent height, with medium brown hair and dark blue eyes, despite the early morning meeting he was freshly shaved and dressed in a pressed charcoal colored suit. And he was holding a dark pink mug of coffee out to her, prepared exactly the way she liked it.

" 'morning Celyn" she said.

Celyn Hathaway had long ago been dubbed the resident encyclopedia of the team, he had knowledge of things that never failed to make his team members more then slightly dumb founded. He also made the best coffee, and everyone had assumed for years that he had more then a small crush on Rose.

"Sorry to wake you 'mum, but I thought you'd want to know…" he looked uncomfortable, it was an endearing quality of his, that and his occasional surprising and dry sense of humor.

"I's all right" Rose told him waving her hand vaguely and taking the mug from him as she walked up the short flight of stairs to the core of the room where the other two members of her team were seated. Taking a sip of her coffee she moved to stand behind them, a pretty girl in her mid twenties with brown eyes and auburn hair pulled up into a bun with a pencil, wearing a lab coat over a dark purple dress with low heeled black shoes and a sandy blonde haired, light blue-eyed boy slightly older then the girl in the lab coat, dressed in jeans, black trainers and a grey hoodie.

The girl, Delia Llewellyn, was the medical and forensics expert, she had graduated medical school in her early twenties and could practically be considered a genius in the field of medicine.

The boy, Hayden Merrick was their technology man, there was nothing computer chip or electronically operated that he couldn't find his way into, he had been hand picked into Torchwood after the apparent ease with which he had hacked into their data base, and he had been dating Delia for coming up on two years. The two were inseparable, but never let it interfere with their jobs, so Rose was unbothered by their involvement, especially since they handled their relationship quite professionally, the only indications being small things like how she had stood behind Hayden with her hands resting on his shoulders while he peered at his multiple computer screens.

"Ah! Fearless leader!" Hayden exclaimed by way of greeting as he saw Rose approach, Delia simply smiled at her, in contrast to her boyfriend the medic was much more reserved. "How much did Celyn tell you on the phone, love?". Rose set her mug on Hayden's desk and leaned over the screens.

"None of the gory details, how bad are we talking?" she asked.

"At the moment? Not so severe, we've only had two cases …" he tapped a few keys and pulled up two police report files on the middle monitor. "Agnes Parker, age 17, disappears from the Cardiff Bay Barrage at 11:15 PM last night … she was on CTV footage one moment, the next nothing…. Around 2:30 AM police picked up a man in his early thirties from the same location, in a state of near shock, no identification on him. The opposite case with the footage on him, one moment the place is completely quiet, the next big flash of light and WAM! Meet John Doe."

"But why is it getting active now?" Rose murmured rubbing at her eyes again, "There haven't been any disappearances or … err… appearances ….due to the rift in over one hundred years. Why now? It's just been quiet little spurts of energy leakage …. What triggered it?" Hayden swiveled in his chair to face her.

"I'm glad you asked that Ms. Tyler! … we have no idea." her shoulders drooped, and Delia lightly shoved Hayden and whispered to not be cruel.

"Just a suggestion …." everyone turned, slightly stunned to see that Celyn had spoken. "But what if we went through previous Torchwood records of when there were the highest amounts of rift activity, and try to determine what events were happening at that time and maybe that would give us an idea…?" Rose nodded.

"No… that is a quite good idea, it's going to take awhile though, we have centuries of records here … Hayden, you and Delia wrack through the computer databases for information, me and Celyn can go through the old paper archives… after he makes some more coffee… this is going to take bloody forever."