A/N: Two stories at the same time! I know! I haven't done this since school :o

This one has been steaming in my brain for years. One more crossed off the to do list :D

A/U where Ten, Rose and Jack are travelling together.

Chapter 1 – An Old Friend

"So you used to be a Time Agent, and now you're tryin' to con 'em?"

"If it makes me sound any better, I'm not in it for the money."

"For what?"

"Woke up one morning when I was still working for them, found they'd stolen two years of my memories. I'd like 'em back."

"They stole your memories?"

"Two years of my life, no idea what I did. Your friend over there doesn't trust me, and for all I know, he's right not to."

"Jack!" the Doctor yelled whilst simultaneously hammering on the door of Jack's hotel room on Planet Plax for the fourth time that morning. "We're leaving!"

There was a muffled moan and the clear sound of shifting bed springs. "Doctor, why the hell now?" came the ex-Time Agent's reply.

"Because we've been waiting three hours for you!" the Doctor answered loudly, glancing a side look at Rose standing in the hallway next to him.

"Doctor, seriously, a few more hours?"

"What are you doing in there?" the Doctor asked, pulling down the handle and pushing the door open. Rose watched his expression change from mild irritation to absolute horror in the drop of a hat as he stared at the sight before him...

He quickly slammed the door shut again, staring at Rose with wide eyes. "Oh dear god," he muttered, looking very green as Rose snorted with laughter. "Do you even know her name?" he asked Jack through the door seriously.

"Err... Wanita?"

Rose giggled as the Doctor rolled his eyes. "We're leaving now," he said, ignoring his reply. "I'll come back in a few hours for you. If I feel like it."

There was the muffled squeal of a woman and it was a few moments before Jack replied.

"Better make that five hours, Doc."

The Doctor sighed. "Yessir," he said sarcastically and took Rose's hand, leading her away from the room door as quickly as possible.

"He has got talent," the Doctor admitted a few minutes later in the console room of the TARDIS, hammering a few buttons and staring at the monitor. "Only Jack could find a woman on an isolated planet populated exclusively by men."

"Maybe it wasn't a woman," Rose said thoughtfully.

The Doctor pulled a face. "It was a woman," he said straight. "Remind me never to open the door on Jack's room again."

Rose giggled again. "So where we going?"

"No idea," the Doctor said, tapping at the controls as the dematerialisation column began to move. "How about random?"

"More fun that way," Rose replied, her tongue between her teeth as she grinned at him.

He beamed in return. "Allons-y!" he yelled, and yanked down the handbrake. The TARDIS suddenly lurched and Rose squealed, grabbing onto the Doctor to stop herself from face-planting into the floor. Something was wrong. The entire console room seemed to twist and turn and change shape before their eyes, the Doctor yelling at the time machine and struggling to get her under control. After a few moments of a constant fairground ride he realised his efforts were completely fruitless, and he resigned to gripping the console with one hand and wrapping his other arm around Rose, trying to make sure they at least both stayed on their feet. As if trying to challenge this, the TARDIS did a final lurch and landed with a horrendous crash at their intended destination.

Suddenly the console exploded into a frenzy of beeps, flashing lights and alerts of every kind. The Doctor barely had any time to reach forward before the lights completely shut off and the entire room was cast in utter darkness.

For a moment they just breathed heavily in unison before the emergency lights came up and the masks dropped from the ceiling.

"You all right?" the Doctor asked Rose quickly, looking at her.

She nodded. "What the hell happened?"

"Not sure," the Doctor confessed, tapping ineffectually at a few buttons before whipping out his stethoscope and checking the column. "It's like she just had some kind of fit..."

"Is she okay?" Rose asked anxiously, resting her hand on some of the console buttons gently.

The Doctor didn't reply for a moment, checking the monitor. "Whatever happened, she's been hurt. She'll need some time to heal herself. We can't go anywhere for a bit."

"But we've landed, yeah? We're somewhere?" She started over to the doors but the Doctor quickly took her arm, his brow furrowed.

"Let me," he said, and pushed her back as he walked towards the doors. He took a breath, pulled them open... "Hmm," was all he said.

"What's out there?"

"Just some broken house," he informed her, stepping forward and beckoning her out at the same time. "Oxygen's fine, no radiation spikes... Maybe she just got a bug in the system..." He stepped forward as Rose closed the door behind them, and instantly the Time Lord rose a hand to his nose and mouth. "Oh, that's not a good smell."

Rose opened her mouth, about to say, "what smell?" when a very pungent and rancid smell hit her in the face like a sledgehammer from an angry builder. She instantly retched, coughing and choking before she put her arm over her nose mouth, trying to suppress the smell. It barely worked.

They were in a room in some kind of house, definitely. All the furniture was broken, the rugs stained, cobwebs hanging along the walls which were smashed in, while the ceiling had a massive hole in it. Rose looked a little further, and suddenly stiffened, realising instantaneously what the smell was.

It was a corpse.

Some poor man who had clearly died a violent death, bullet holes riddled in his clothes that were caked in dry blood. His discoloured body was bloated with gas and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets, his tongue so swollen it looked like some kind of overweight eel trying to escape his mouth.

She immediately retched and threw up on the floor. The Doctor came up behind her, resting a hand on her back.

"Go back into the Tardis," he said urgently.

Rose nodded, grateful to be able to leave. She started moving, but suddenly from above came some shouts of men, coming in their direction.

She looked back at the Doctor. "People?" she croaked.

The Doctor's expression seemed to harden, his boyish smile now replaced by something that Rose had seen only a few occasions before. The expression that meant that this was no longer a bit of trouble that they relished when travelling through time and space. This was serious - life and death - and suddenly Rose was absolutely terrified.

She didn't need telling twice. She turned to go back to the TARDIS, when suddenly something dropped down from the ceiling, hit the TARDIS in front of her and rebounded off onto the floor. Surprised, she looked down to see a small silver metal ball, a green light flashing wildly on its side.

"Grenade!" the Doctor yelled, yanking her back. There was no time for Rose to do anything but allow him to push her into the corner next to the corpse, before throwing himself just in time as the room seemed to explode.

Immediately a high, piercing whine was ringing in Rose's ears, her eyes seeing nothing but white. She blinked repeatedly, trying desperately to regain her senses until she managed to get a blurry view of nothing but the Doctor's chest pressed against her, shielding her from the blast.

"We've gotta go!" Rose blurted out, panicking as she tried to get up. "Doctor!"

But she realised in her stunned haze that as she was moving, the Doctor was sliding off of her without any effort on his part. He hit the floor with a dull thud, clearly unconscious.

"No!" she managed to squeak out as suddenly she was panicking like she'd never panicked before. The footsteps overhead were running, getting closer.

She didn't want to find out who, or indeed, what they belonged to.

She had to run. She grabbed the Doctor under his arms, stumbling as she struggled to balance herself through the ringing in her ears. She had to get to the TARDIS. She had to…

But as she looked up she realised the TARDIS was now not an escape route. The blast had caused some of the rubble to land in front of it, blocking off the entrance.

There was no time to even worry about it. She instinctively started dragging his limp body towards the door of the room. She had to drop him momentarily to try and push down the handle, but it was stuck.

"No!" she stressed, and began to ram it with her shoulder, throwing her entire weight against it as the footsteps above drew even closer. It began to shift, inch by agonising inch, until it finally burst open and she took the Doctor again, groaning with the strain.

She didn't even close the door or dare to look back at the room, just dragging the Doctor along a rubble-strewn corridor with every ounce of strength she could muster as fast as she could. Halfway down the corridor an explosion rocked the entire building, but she managed to keep her footing, and keep dragging. She kept going, following the corridor up to a turn, past a kitchen and into a dining room. More dead people were strewn across the floor, a family, gently rotting, but she had no time for that. She kept dragging the helpless Doctor, but then realised with a very sick feeling, that there was nowhere else to go.

The people were nearly on her and she had nowhere to hide.

This was it.

They were going to die.

She dropped down and wrapped herself around the Doctor, shaking with utter terror. She entangled her hand in his hair and pressed her cheek to his, purely out of instinct. She didn't even know why. It felt safer.

The footsteps poured into the room. She closed her eyes, waiting for the inevitable. She could only hope it would be quick.

"Declare yourself!" a man yelled, but she was so terrified she couldn't even raise her head. Her entire body was shaking badly, her breath coming out in quick, panicked gasps, tears falling from her eyes as she gripped the Doctor tighter.

"Declare yourself!" the man persisted.

They weren't shooting. Why weren't they shooting?

Rose managed to lift her head, looking in the low light to find a crowd of soldiers in black armour standing in formation, all pointing guns at her and the Doctor.

"Please don't shoot," she whined.

One of the men stepped forward into the light with his gun raised pointing straight at Rose, his hair dark, his eyes a shining blue, all pearly white teeth present and correct in the face of an extremely familiar man...

"I'm Cap'n Jack Harkness," he said without any hint of emotion, staring straight into her eyes. "Who the hell are you?"

Rose stared at him for a moment, completely speechless. It was Jack. Still with the same handsome face and dark hair that had become so familiar. But his face was younger, far more innocent, far less work done... he was not their Jack.

"Well? Name and ID," he demanded, tightening his grip on the gun, finger poised on the trigger...

"I... I'm R-Rose," Rose garbled, barely able to speak. "And this... this is the D-Doctor..." She indicated the Time Lord she was holding so tightly.

Jack blinked, lowering the gun instantly. "Medical?" He didn't wait for a reply. "About goddamn time, I've been asking NeoCorp for medical personnel for months." He grabbed the unconscious Doctor's shirt collar and pulled him roughly off of Rose, dropping him carelessly down onto the floor. Rose watched him in silence as he panned his gun up and down the Time Lord with his lips pursed, regarding the Doctor's body in every aspect presented. "Oh he's pretty. Hope I didn't kill him." He knelt down, hovering a hand over the Doctor's mouth to check his breathing. "Yeah, he's all right."

"Sir," one of the soldiers suddenly interrupted, sounding slightly nervous. "We need to move."

"I'm sorry, are you giving me orders now?" Jack asked sarcastically, rounding on the soldier and pointing his gun in their face. "Tell me sir, should I pull this trigger?"

The soldier swallowed. "No, sir," he said quickly. "Sorry sir."

Jack stared at him for a moment, before turning and grabbing the Doctor around the waist with one arm and hauling him over his shoulder. He waved his gun at Rose, gesturing for her to get up. "Follow me, soldier. We're going back to the stronghold."

Rose clambered to her feet quickly, staring at the Doctor still slung over Jack's shoulder as suddenly words came into her head, something she could say:

"We have to get back to our ship," she said quickly. "All our... ermm.. medical equipment is there."

Jack was moving towards the door. "You can kiss good bye to your ship. Probably got nuked the second you stepped out."

"But..."

He suddenly turned to look at her with narrowed eyes and she stopped dead in her tracks. "Sweetheart," he began. "In case Command didn't brief you on the general situation of how things go around here, let me spell it out for you. You're in the middle of a war. The other side want to kill you. You're on the front-line. If you stay in line, follow orders and do your job then maybe you might get through the rest of it without a body bag. Let's go."

The stronghold was exactly what Rose imagined a stronghold would look like. Underground metal rooms with hundreds of soldiers running around with guns in hand, even more lying on the floor covered in blood, just left there with seemingly no attempt to give medical help. It was in a complete mess, evidence of bombs having landed on the structure with many places collapsed in. More people were lying under the rubble, obviously very dead... and the smell indicated they'd been dead for a while. Rose was forcing back the urge to throw up as Jack dispersed his soldiers and beckoned her through to a side room where there was a rug in the corner, the floor covered in various bloody medical instruments rusted by time. Even the table at the side was broken in two.

"Hasn't been used for a while," Jack informed her as he dropped the Doctor down onto the rug. "Or last doctor got impaled on infrastructure in a bombardment a week after we arrived." He completely missed Rose's horrified stare at his throwaway statement. "Both of you come to the interrogation room at fifteen hundred hours and I'll debrief you. Enjoy your stay in paradise."

And with that, he disappeared out the door.

Rose stared after him for a moment. They couldn't stay here. She didn't want to stay here. She dropped down next to the Doctor lying haphazardly on the rug and shook his shoulder.

"Wake up," she whispered urgently. "Please, Doctor, please wake up..."

She sat by him for what felt like forever, just holding his hand and flinching every time someone came near the door.