Mickey vowed that the next time Rose came into his office, smiled enticingly and told him that she had a brilliant idea he wasn't going to listen to her. He may even go so far as to stick his fingers in his ears and hum loudly.
"Let me see if I've got this right," he said gesturing around the hanger bay that Torchwood had constructed under the employee car park. "You want us, to steal that."
'That' was a huge silver spacecraft which had crashed into the ocean six months earlier leaving no survivors. In the stark brightness of the hanger bay it looked better than it had when Mickey had watched it being hauled up the beach in the Outer Hebrides, someone had thought to remove the seaweed from the fuel vents for one thing.
"Borrow it," Rose corrected. "But yeah."
"Rose..."
Mickey's doubts were interrupted by Jake, who'd been wandering around the inside of the ship, sticking his head out the hatch. "Bit small," he said, "but you two shameless heterosexuals can always share a room."
Mickey shot an annoyed look at Jake, which he entirely failed to clock. Jake was a good bloke but he wasn't always a helpful one.
"Have you thought about this properly, how do we fly it, how would we even get it off the ground?"
"Me and the Doctor landed on a ship like this once, it practically flies itself, you just tell it where you want to go."
The Doctor, yeah, course. Mickey sighed and dropped his chin onto his chest. Rose didn't notice and carried on talking.
"And as for getting it out of here, well Jake practically designed the Torchwood security systems. That only leaves the computers and," Rose was standing behind Mickey and gave him a playful shove between the shoulder blades, "we've got Mister Computers here."
"I'm still not sure about-"
"Oh, go on," Rose wrapped her arms round Mickey from behind. "Please, please, please, please, please." Between entreaties Rose dropped kisses on the back of Mickey's neck.
"Alright, I'm in." Mickey never had been able to refuse Rose. He'd once ended up naked and freezing in the sea off the coast of Ayrshire because he hadn't the heart to tell her that her plan to catch those aquatic aliens was daft.
Rose bounced over and high fived Jake, "Told you I'd get him onside."
---
Later in the pub Rose and Jake refined their plan to relieve Torchwood of one alien spaceship.
"You alright mate," Jake asked when Rose had gone to the loo, "you've been dead quiet."
"I'm fine, just thinking."
"Ah, does it hurt?"
"Funny," Mickey shouldered Jake lightly.
"Do you two want another drink?" Rose asked when she reappeared.
"Nah," Mickey said, drinking the dregs of his pint and pulling his coat on. "I'm going to head off."
Rose and Jake gathered up their things and caught up with Mickey outside the pub. They bid farewell to Jake at the nearest tram (this universes version of the underground) station. When Rose was heading back to the Tyler mansion she got on the tram with Jake, but tonight she looped her arm through Mickey's and tugged him down the street towards his flat.
Mickey's flat in this universe was well nicer than his place in his original universe, spacious with a balcony. Torchwood even paid well enough that he had been able to buy his Gran a new flat one street away from his.
"Tea?" Rose asked, Mickey nodded and she went into the kitchen. Mickey flopped down on the sofa and turned the telly on with the volume down; Harriet Jones was delivering a speech.
In the kitchen he could hear Rose talking about the ship.
"I'm not coming with you."
"What?" Rose said, appearing in the living room doorway.
"I'm not coming with you on the ship. Look, I helped you look for evidence of Time Lords in this universe, I helped you send out a signal for them but I'm not going to leave my home and my job and my Gran to run off looking for the Doctor with you. Jake can if he wants, but I won't."
Rose looked hurt, and angry. Make that very angry, she picked up a cushion from the armchair and heaved it at Mickey. "You idiot," she said.
For a moment she looked like she was about to storm out of the flat, then she decided that hurling another cushion at his head was a better idea. "You bloody jealous idiot, we're only going to Pluto. What, do you think we're going to find the TARDIS parked behind the moon?"
Rose looked for something else to throw at him but she'd run out of cushions. This gave Mickey the opportunity to get in, "What do you mean you're only going to Pluto?"
Rose looked at him blankly for a second then burst out laughing. "Did Jake not say?"
"I guess not."
"Once they cleaned up the ship and I got a good look at it I realised how easy it would be to fly, so I said to Pete that we could use it as a sort of early warning system to get a look at some of the invading aliens before they actually invaded."
"That's not a half bad idea," Mickey conceded.
Rose rolled her eyes at him and continued. "Pete didn't think so, reckoned it would take too much time and need more people than we have. I was telling Jake all this at lunch the other week and he said that we should pinch the ship and take it for a sorta shakedown cruise, show Pete and Harriet that it can be done."
Mickey picked up the cushion that had landed at his feet and handed it back to Rose, "you can throw this at me again if you like."
Rose did, but only gently. "I don't want to leave either. I like my job, I like my house. And my mum would go mental, that ships only got a hyperdrive engine, she'd catch us up."
Having lost the desire to beat him to death with cushions Rose walked over to the couch and straddled Mickey's lap. "I'm not looking for the Doctor, haven't been for ages. And even if a Time Lord did turn up I wouldn't go."
Mickey ran his hands up Rose's back, under her top. "You did before."
"I was dazzled by his time machine."
"Oh, and you wouldn't be now?" Mickey asked with a smirk.
"Nah, got a time machine of my own these days." Rose was referring to the impressive and occasionally time travelling motorbike that had fallen through the Cardiff rift and was locked in the Torchwood R&D labs.
"Oh, and I'm going out with the defender of the Earth," she added as an afterthought.
"Well," Mickey said with false modesty, "there is that."
Rose planted a brief kiss on his lips and jumped to her feet. "Come on, let's go to bed. Get your kit off."
"You really know how to talk to a bloke, yeah."
---
The Torchwood computers were temporarily diverted, the security patrols had been distracted by Jake's false alarm. And Rose, Mickey and Jake were strapped in and ready for take off.
"To infinity," Rose said, hitting the control that would roll back the hanger bay roof.
"And beyond," Mickey finished the quote. Jake looked at them strangely, both Mickey and Rose had been giving him tutorials on the pop culture of their home universe but they hadn't reached Toy Story yet.
"Everybody ready?" Rose asked her hand hovering over the autopilot control.
Mickey and Jake answered that they were. Rose reached out and took Mickey's hand, she squeezed his fingers and slammed her other hand down onto the autopilot control. The hyperdrive engines started and the ship shot up towards orbit.
The three passengers were forced back into their seats by the acceleration but Rose and Mickey managed to hang onto each others hands.