I've been in a writing slump. I wrote this while doing a mini challenge whilst listening to America. I now hate this song.

Sister Golden Hair

Jack missed them. His life had been long and confusing and not necessarily happy, but he remembered those times on board that blinking blue spaceship as the best he'd had.

He missed the Doctor, of course. But finding him again felt more possible than running into the blonde on the barrage balloon. He'd looked for her, at random interludes, getting her ice cream when she was nine, paying for her theater ticket when she was fourteen. Finding her wasn't hard: it was finding her as he knew her that proved miserable.

So when he ran into her on a Monday morning-literally smack-glab into her as she walked out of nowhere and into his reflex open arms-he couldn't help being a little hostile. With a knee pressed into her sternum and a revolver in her face, he noticed she looked older, thinner, and haunted.

"That's quite the defense mechanism," she said, hands held up on either side of her face. "I don't recall you ever teaching me that."

She smelled strange. Jack leaned forward and took a whiff of her hair. She smelled like stale air and a mucky side street. Another sniff made him think of blue vortex energy and something that could only be described as time.

"Where the hell did you come from?"

"Jack, do I need to give you, of all people, a lesson in biology?"

He cocked the revolver. "Don't fuck with me."

"Pete's World," she said with a smile and a shrug.

"And where's that? In the universe of Beatrix Potter?"

"S'nother dimension. You know parallel worlds, yeah? Got stuck in one where my dad, Pete's still alive. We call it Pete's World."

Jack pressed into her harder, waiting until she winced. "And you, what? Shot yourself out of that universe and into his one?"

"Yup." She popped the 'p' and gave him a tongue touched smile. He backed off a bit at that smile: shifted his weight onto his left knee. "With a cannon," she continued.

There was a moment of silence between them before Jack dropped his gun and laughed, tilting his head back and slapping a hand over his face.

"With a cannon?" he repeated, waving the revolver above his head. "What, you hop in, set some coordinates, and launch?" He got off her and stood up but offered no hand.

She sat up, leaning back on her elbows. "Pretty much. And without even a helmet."

Jack nodded, crouching down next to her, a smile still touching the side of his mouth. She angled her head back to look up at him. "So what're you doing here?" he asked.

Something in her eyes changed: he'd already seen the sadness and determination but now he saw a desperation and hope so high it almost broke his heart. "I'm looking for him."

He sighed and scratched at the back of his head.

"Am I in the right time?" she asked and moved to sit up straighter, maybe stand. "I've been so far and in some many wrong places."

"No, you're right. You're in the right place. He's here." The instant he said it, he regretted it. The hope in her eyes seemed to turn them gold. "I don't know where. But-but he's around."

She stood up and adjusted the blue leather coat, pulling it tight over her shoulders by the lapels. It fitted over her back like a second skin: Jack could see the outline of her tank top through the material. She wore it like armor.

"Could you…" she hesitated and looked down, probably knowing she'd see the declination in his face before she asked her favor. "Can you help me find him?" She met his eyes from under her lashes.

Jack shook his head. The wind picked up off the wharf and blew blonde hair across a gaunt face and blue shoulders. She bit her lips into a line and nodded.

"I haven't seen him since-since the year that didn't happen." He read the alarm in her face as panic of maybe being in a very wrong place. He rephrased himself before she could interrupt. "It was The Master. Did he ever tell you about the Master? Do you remember hearing about Harold Saxon?"

"No. Not here at least. In another place, yes." She paused to watch the sun struggle out from behind thick gray clouds. "You know, he swore there weren't anymore of him anywhere else. I found them. Almost all. And learned so much I never could have from him. From the ones that didn't try to kill me."

"He doesn't kill."

She smiled. "Ours don't. I made sure of that."

"Oh?" Jack pressed his hands into his coat pockets. "How'd you manage that?"

"In a basement. With a Dalek. In America."

The Cardiff Bay crashed against the dock. Sunlight peaked out and fell over her face. Ocean spray shone around her like gold dust.

"Want to tell me what's going on?"

She dropped her head back, staring up at the pearl gray sky and drew a deep breath, swiping at an eye with the edge of a hand. "The stars are going out. All of them, everywhere. They're slipping into a void. Or at least that's what my team believes."

His lips quirked back into a smile. "Your team?"

She glanced around them. "Torchwood. Sector 1 in London. Pete, Mickey, and me set it up after the Cyber Wars."

He nodded. "Who's with you?" He half hoped he was among them.

"Harper, Ward, Cooper, Jones, Peth. We lost Sato last spring. Owen's still not over it."

Jack laughed at the irony. "Our Owen barely knew Tosh existed."

She smiled. "They were going to be married."

He crossed his arms and nodded. "Can I help?"

"Help me find him."

"He finds you."

"I can't wait."

"You'll have to."

She drew her hands through her hair, pulling at it, knuckles turning white and her wrists covering her face. Jack gripped his coat to keep from moving toward her. When she put her arms down, she was smiling again. "It's been a long time, Captain," she said. "You've changed."

Jack swallowed. "You know, I thought you were dead. For a long time."

"Funny. I thought you were, too," she said. Jack kept his mouth shut, voicing nothing of what she did to him at the Game Station, about the gold light he sometimes saw in his dreams, about the blue box that was the stuff of dreams. Her smile slanted downward, that sadness back in her eyes. "C'mon, Jack. Has it been so long? Have you forgotten my name?"

Jack choked on unshed tears: red bicycles, moonlit serenades, multicolored scarves, lonely girls on Council Estates growing up without fathers, abusive boyfriends, and gold dust filling his lungs every time he died, every time he woke from nightmares-and gathered her into his arms. He cradled her gold head in one hand and grasped the blue leather at her waist, dripping his sorrow onto her shoulders.

"Rose."