Hello everyone!

This story has been on for a while, and I know that I have yet to update it. However, seeing as it is the holidays, I thought I would revamp and finish it off.

Reading it over, I've found countless grammatical and spelling mistakes (written three years ago; not my fault).

This story is completely dedicated to 'Beffles', who, back in 2009 I dubbed my 'bestest fanfiction friend'. Her current username is LimitedByCreativity, so you should go and read her stories.

Disclaimer: Doctor Who, Torchwood and any other spin-offs of the Whoverse (the whole fifth season for instance…) are completely owned by whoever owns them. If the writing was under my control, Rose Tyler would not be in a parallel universe with Handy.

This is set during 'Turn Left' at the end of season four. I've ignored the last three episodes of that season and anything that comes after that.

That's about it, so please, do grab a cup of tea, and enjoy the show.

The faint whirring sound of a distinct alien ship hummed in front of a large fountain in Cardiff. The outline of a large blue box faded in and out of existence, a bright glowing white light pulsing on its roof. 'POLICE BOX' was spelt out in capital letters, lit from behind and situated above the door. Finally the box became solid and the rev of the engine stopped. A man with a mess of brown hair poked his head out the door of the Gallifreyan ship known as a TARDIS. He blinked his eyes in the light cast by the setting sun.

"Yep… I think this is Cardiff, somewhere around 2009…" he said as he stepped out of the box. He wore his usual attire of a brown pinstripe suit with a long lighter brown coat over the top of it. He promptly danced onto the pavement outside The Wales Millennium Centre, spinning on his heel to look at the surrounding scenery of the city. He had a hard time recalling when he had last been where he was standing. There had been so many visits to Cardiff Bay, and so much knowledge about time periods packed into his brain that even he sometimes had trouble sorting through it all.

Behind him, a woman rugged up in a thick black parka with fur lining the hood stepped out of the police box. She brushed bright red locks of hair from her face as wind from the sea blew vigorously passed her. For a moment, she watched him look around, before her own eyes were caught by their surroundings.

"Cardiff?" Donna Noble called out to the man, who immediately twisted his head in her direction. "Why are we in Cardiff? What's there to see here?" she asked, slightly bothered that she was only about 120 miles from where she came from.

"Because, there's a great big rift here, and the TARDIS needs to fill up on radiation from a space-time rift so we can fly around some more, usually she can just draw energy from the universe in general, but she seemed a little low today – a bit sick. I thought I'd give her a nice treat." He took a few steps back toward his companion and patted the wood of TARDIS door lovingly, smiling at the blue paint. Donna next to him raised an eyebrow and shook her head.

"A space-time rift? What's that then?"

"Almost like a crack in the universe, but not really - very good for refuelling Gallifreyan ships. What? Don't look at me like that! It's not dangerous or anything. It's practically as safe as houses."

"When you say 'safe as houses', it doesn't sound safe anymore," Donna told him. She visibly shivered at her words, either from the cold or a memory of their time on the planet of Jythora in 8709, he could not tell.

"Anyway," he tried, changing the subject. He saw general interest in her eyes and continued, "I have an old friend somewhere around here, somewhere."

He was scratching the back of his head in the way that said 'honestly, Donna, I've no idea what we're doing here', and she rolled her eyes again.

"You have 'old friends' everywhere," she pointed out; using her fingers for indication marks, before hastily shoving her hands back under her arms for warmth. "Does this one live down a dark drain as well? Because I swear, Doctor, if you get these shoes wet, I will personally see to it that the TARDIS no longer becomes 'as safe as houses' for you."

The indication marks were not needed, and he sheepishly smiled down at her. Her boots were her favourite red ones. She had told him so as he was trying to fix a wire beneath the console of the TARDIS, and trying not to listen to her inane female human chatter.

Trying to ignore the glare she was shooting at him, he turned around and began to walk away, heading toward the water.

"Oi! Where at you going?" Donna ran after him, stretching her strides to match his.

"Where does it look like?" he asked her.

"Toward the sea? Wait, you're not going to throw yourself in are you? Are there aliens living in Cardiff Bay? God." He was amused by her ability to jump to conclusions. The Doctor neglected to reply as he continued to walk. two and a half minutes and they were standing in front of a small green door beside the water that said something about tourism in its window.

"Well your friend certainly knows how to make a living. Practically does the same thing you do."

He grinned at her as he held the door open for her to pass through, and then stepped in behind her. The room was quite small, with a large wooden counter taking up most of the space. The Doctor was absolutely delighted to see a small silver bell perched on the wood, and slapped it down with his palm. A soft chime rang around the room. Donna looked less than amused. The bell, seemingly to fail at calling anyone to attention made the Doctor frown along with her, and he was about to press it again (which in his mind, did not seem like such a bad thing) when a man appeared through some colourful strips of plastic.

"Hello, can I help you?"

"Yes, indeed you can!" The Doctor greeted him cheerfully. "We're just paying a little visit to Captain Jack, and wondered if you could point us in his general direction?"

The man, among a few other things, looked absolutely stunned.

OoO

Gwen Cooper looked up from her position at the computer in the central part of the hub as the large circular door slid back to reveal a wide-eyed Ianto Jones, and two people she had never seen before. Immediately, she was up from her chair and halfway down the stairs toward them when the sound of Jack's voice startled her.

"Doctor!" the Captain called from his office balcony, grinning down at the man in the long brown trench coat.

"Captain!" came the Doctor's reply, but immediately his face went sour. "You knew we were coming."

"We have videos all around the Plass and it's impossible not to hear you coming. The TARDIS engines make a hell of a lot of noise."

"Do they? Huh, might have to fix that."

"What are you doing in this lonely part of the universe? Wait, hold on. Stay right there," Jack told them before the Doctor could reply.

The Captain disappeared back into his office, appearing again from a door to the right and walking along a catwalk around the edge of the room. He bounded down the circular metal stairs and ran straight at the Doctor when he reached the bottom, enveloping the Time Lord in a very human hug.

"It's good to see you, old man," Jack said as he pulled back, clapping the Doctor on the arm as he did so. He raised an eyebrow at Jack's remark, but shook it off with a smile.

"This." The Doctor gestured toward Donna, "is Donna Noble, super temp extraordinaire, and my best friend!"

The Time Lord grinned at his companion, who smiled kindly back, before her attention was caught by the Captain.

"Very nice to meet you," the Captain turned to face her, taking her hand in his and lifting it up to kiss her knuckles.

"Don't," both the Doctor and Ianto said. Gwen stifled a giggle behind her hand and looked away to keep herself composed.

"What?" Jack looked offended, "I wasn't doing anything!"

The Doctor just glared at him before spinning to look at Gwen and Ianto. He had to do a double take when he saw Gwen, his eyes narrowing as he scanned her face.

"You wouldn't happen to have any ancestors that lived in Cardiff, oh, say about 1869?"

Gwen had to look to Jack for assurance that it was okay that the man in front of her was probably not insane as he sounded.

"I guess so, why?"

"That is a very gorgeous piece of spatial genetic multiplication right there. Absolutely the same! Ha!" the lopsided grin on the Doctor's face told Jack and Donna that they should not even bother to ask.

"Doctor, this is Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones. They work with me."

"Torchwood, defending the Earth!" the Doctor cried, smiling. For a moment it looked as though he was going to say something else, but all of a sudden his eyes darkened and he closed his mouth, looking away from them.

Donna was intrigued, but said nothing.

"We're just stopping by for a visit" Donna told the Torchwood team. "The Doctor said something about refuelling and a spacey crevice?"

"Space-time rift, Donna."

"Well, while you're here, you might be able to help with our Weevil infestation. We think they're coming through the rift somehow," Jack told the Doctor. The Time Lord's brow furrowed.

"What on Jythora is a Weevil?"

"Ah, come with me, I'll show you one."

"Wait!" The Doctor turned to face Donna. The pity-smile he sometimes used on her began to spread across his face.

"What?"

"Chips; we need chips in newspaper." For such an odd request, he looked quite serious.

It had either been the smile, the wide brown eyes, or the fact that the Doctor had been acting a little less bouncy than usual (something the Donna was surprised to see), that made his companion finally roll her eyes and agree to fetch him chips – in newspaper.

"Gwen?" she piped up, after a moment of silent staring between her and the Doctor. The black haired woman blinked with attention.

"Wouldn't be able to show me to the nearest chippery, would you?"

"Sure. Follow me Ms Noble." Together the two women made their way back through the prison-like bars and were almost through the circular doorway when Donna heard the Doctor's loud voice behind them,

"You're not telling me you've locked them up, are you?"

Yes, the Doctor had been acting a little stranger than usual the past few weeks, but whether he meant to or not, he never failed to make his companion smile.

OoO

"He's totally loopy. He speaks at ninety miles an hour, and you can't understand a single thing he's saying because it's all alien mumbo-jumbo. All you can do is smile and nod when he takes a breath, but then he's five enormous steps ahead of you, and you have no bloody idea what's going on!" Donna was telling Gwen as they walked back toward the 'less mundane' Torchwood entrance.

Gwen had pointed out that there was in fact a lift down from the middle of the Plass and though Donna was a little sceptical, she was willing to see how it worked.

Both of them had two wrapped packages in their arms, as Donna had had trouble with the Italian owner of the shop, who had mistaken her 'two' for 'four'. How he did so, she had no clue, but apparently he had only charged them for two.

"God, you should see Jack with pot plants," Gwen giggled.

"Do I want to know?"

"Probably not."

The pair of them burst out laughing as they crossed the Plass toward the invisible elevator, passing the TARDIS as they did so.

What happened next completely threw Donna, who thought she was only in for a night of chatting with Gwen and watching the Doctor and his old friend bond over adventures.

One of the parcels fell from her arm to the cold paving as she watched.

Right before them, a woman appeared. Dank hair, which may have once been blond or at least light brown, with a pale face and what almost looked like rags wrapped around her body. There was no sound effect as she materialised in front of the two women. As though from nothing, she appeared.

But the woman was not completely there. Donna thought that it was because her eyes were tired, it was extremely hard to focus on the woman. The edges of her were fuzzy, faded.

Gwen and Donna had stopped dead in their tracks, neither one making a sound.

The blond woman blinked at them, and then her attention was caught by something to their right. Donna, following her gaze, found her transfixed by the TARDIS.

"Hello?" Gwen called out over the thirty feet between them.

The woman's attention was drawn back toward them, but she did not reply.

"It's probably fine, harmless things pop through the rift all the time," the Torchwood agent told Donna quietly.

The Doctor's companion tried to nod, but a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach was starting to make her feel nauseous. There was something wrong.

"Are you all right?" Gwen called again.

The ghost-woman continued to stare at them. Then, with fluidity that almost seemed unnatural, she began to walk forward. To Donna, she seemed completely harmless, but Gwen pulled her back by the elbow. Still, she advanced toward them.

She stopped when she came to the abandoned newspaper packaged lying on the cold pavement. Carefully, the woman leaned over and plucked the small bundle from the ground and brought it back up to cradle in her own arms.

"Chips in newspaper."

Her lips did not move as she spoke. Her voice was an echo, growing and fading as though she was close and then drawing away. However, it commanded respect, with a noble edge to it, even with the innocent way she had said the sentence. She stared down at the parcel in her arms, lovingly, as if it were a child, and not just some greasy chips wrapped in week old newspaper.

"Who are you?" Donna asked suddenly. She shocked herself by asking, unaware that she was even planning to do so.

The woman tilted her face back up toward them, and smiled.

"Donna Noble, take care of him for me."

A moment later, there was only air where she had stood. The woman had vanished, taking the chips with her.

The feeling in Donna's stomach abruptly vanished with the woman.

She felt dazed.

"Ooh. What are we doing out here, Donna? Come on, the chips will be getting cold," Gwen told her. The sound of her voice jolted Donna into movement and she twisted and turned her head around to look for a trace of the girl.

"Did you see where she went?"

"What? Who?"

Donna glanced at Gwen, expecting her to be joking, but she was not. The Torchwood agent was looking at her as though she had just started spouting the names of alien technology and how Martian physics worked; the way the Doctor did.

"Donna?"

Something was wrong, and she needed to tell the Doctor. People did not just vanish into thin air. Not humans anyway.

"It's nothing. Let's get these back to the boys, hey?

OoO

"Yeah, it's cosy. It may need a little bit of work. You know, some plaster on the walls or something. It seems a bit grey." The Doctor was gesturing to the surrounding hub when Gwen and Donna returned. He did not seem particularly pleased with the large guns haphazardly placed on odd surfaces.

"We don't have time to paint it, Doctor; we barely have enough time making sure Earth stays safe while you're away."

"Oh! Pah! You're fine. Don't need me hanging about getting in your way." The Time Lord eyed a gun, "You're doing just fine…"

"We're back!" Gwen called.

All three men standing by the base of the water tower looked up at their entrance.

"Chips!" The Doctor cried, bounding over toward them. He went directly to Donna, plucking the warm parcel from her hands and turning it over in his fingers, trying to find the best place to prise the sticky tape back.

"There were four packages, but one…" Donna began to say, though she trailed off. She frowned at herself.

"We got three, remember Donna? You asked for two, but he gave us three, because he couldn't understand your accent," smiled Gwen, handing the two bundles she was holding to Jack.

"Yum," the Doctor stated suddenly, his hand pulling a long thick chip from inside his opened newspaper package. He pushed it into his mouth, licking his fingers one-by-one.

"No. There was this blond girl, remember? Gwen?" Donna looked to the other woman for answers. Had she just been imagining the woman? No, that could not be right. Whoever the woman had been, she had been there, talking to them. Gwen had seen her, Donna was sure of it.

"In the shop? I didn't notice her."

"No, in the square above us, next to the TARDIS," corrected Donna. She turned directly to the Doctor, "There was this blond girl, and she appeared out of nowhere, right in front of us, all pale and in rags. She said something about the chips… and then… god… I don't know…"

The Doctor, though appearing to be completely occupied with the bundle of pure bliss in his hands, had been listening, and snapped his head up when Donna trailed off.

"She said something about chips," he prompted, urging her to continue.

"Sorry?" she blinked at him blankly.

A concerned look came over the Doctor's features, his brows furrowing.

"Jack, hold this," the Time Lord ordered, holding the parcel for his friend to grab. As soon as his hands were free he whipped out his sonic screwdriver and began scanning his companion.

"Oi! What are you doing that for? Remember that conversation we had? Stop buzzing me!"

"Hold still."

"What is it, Doctor?" Jack asked.

"Retention jammer, I think. It sort of disrupts brain activity to do with making new memories. The hippocampus, temporal lobe, that sort of area," the Doctor told them. "Whoever has done this has done a brilliant job. I'm talking absolutely fantastic. I can, maybe, it's possible, that I might be able to kick-start the memories that have been dampened. Sort of like rubbing at a foggy window to see what's on the other side. Here's the question though, what kind of person appears out of nowhere and then disappears again? Seems a bit much to steal some chips, don't you think? Especially with the – AH! Donna, face me?"

"Why?" she asked obstinately, folding her arms.

"It's fine, it'll be okay. Remember when we were with the Ood? I'm only opening up some parts of your mind so you can access the memories that have been blocked. I promise that that is all I am doing. We need to know what you've seen. Just to see what's so important that it needs to be blocked. "

Without her compliance, he took her face in his hands, holding his index fingers at her temples.

She closed her eyes, unable to manage with seeing both the real world and the memories in her mind's vision. As much as she had hated the sorrow that had bombarded her thoughts last time the Doctor done the telepathy thing, Donna also wanted to find out what was going on. She did not like the thought that someone was purposely messing about with her memories.

She could feel the Doctor bumbling about through her thoughts, and then -

"Is that better? Blond woman in the Plass; go."

"She was in rags, er, pale? She had hollow eyes, like she was the most tired person in the world. God, Doctor, you should have seen her." Donna frowned. "She told me to keep you safe or something, and then she just disappeared. But her voice! She didn't speak with her mouth, but it was like she was in my head."

"Telepathy," the Doctor supplied for her. "Anything else?"

"She knew my name. She said 'Donna Noble'. She knew me, Doctor."

He stared at her, unblinkingly for a few moments longer and then he looked to Jack, his expression unreadable.

"How can you not know that there are people appearing and disappearing right above your base? Don't you have scanners? It's not much of a defense for Earth if you can't pick up simple alien psychokinesis and plasma manipulation." The Doctor said to the Captain, and then waved at Donna as though she was to dismiss what she had seen.

"But Doctor –"

"Donna, don't worry about it. The rift is constantly active. If it's not some rogue ship trying to mess around with humans for the fun of it, it'll be some spectral thing trying to cross through to Earth."

"Doctor!" They all looked toward the Time Lord's companion as she cried out. She looked agitated and slightly disturbed.

"She knew my name, she was inside my head. I can't just pass that off as if it never happened. Clearly something is wrong if Gwen doesn't remember what she saw, and I had trouble with remembering. No one just does things for fun, alien boy, not even you."

It took the Doctor exactly three seconds to respond, "Right then! Let's go and see what we can see, shall we?"

His companion nodded in agreement, and took in a shaky breath, shooting a quick smile at Gwen when she noticed.

OoO

Ianto and Gwen opted to stay in the hub, to see if anything had been picked up on their scanners while no one had been monitoring the video surveillance. Jack accompanied Donna and the Doctor out to Roald Dahl Plass, mostly for the benefit of Donna, but also to find out what was going on with his rift. The Captain had not had an adventure with the Doctor in a long time, and though Weevil relocation sounded fun, disappearing blond women seemed to just about tick all the boxes.

"So she faded?" he asked the red-headed companion.

"Yeah, she was standing just about here… well until she moved."

The Doctor stopped his scanning at that.

"She moved?"

"Yeah, walked towards us as though she was going to leap at us or something, but she stopped when she got close to the packet of chips I dropped."

"She walked? As in, she wasn't just static, Donna, but she moved? One foot in front of the other?"

"That's what I said isn't it?"

"Ghosts can walk though, right? It's not as though they're stuck in one particular place."

"Plasma manipulation is different," the Doctor started. "You can't just make a ghost move if you're controlling it. Limbs are tricky to operate externally. As a child you have to learn, and it takes practise, but when you've mastered it, it's like you can never forget. External direction is almost completely impossible in terms of individual muscle movement for spectres. It's like trying to juggle while keeping a tennis ball balanced on your nose as you ride a unicycle across a tightrope while peeling a banana."

He promptly went back to scanning the area with his sonic screwdriver, bleeping the pavement every few feet.

"We could wait for her to come back," suggested Jack, rocking forward on the balls of his feet, his hands buried in the pocket of his coat.

"Ugh!" The Doctor straightened, not facing them. "I hatewaiting."

"So what is she then?" Donna enquired hesitantly.

"Alien probably; some form of phantom race."

"Are you sure she's alien, because she looked pretty human to me," Donna explained. At that, the Doctor turned around and grinned at her.

"Do I look pretty human to you, Donna?" he asked her. She was silent.

"So she was blond, hey?" Jack addressed Donna. "Anything else? She can't have been as gorgeous as yourself."

"Stop it!" the Doctor warned, pointing his sonic directly at Jack, before returning to his task. Donna had turned a shade of deep scarlet and looked away from the Captain, though she smiled ever so slightly.

"We wait then," announced the Doctor.

OoO

"Would you like a cup of tea?" Jack asked Donna.

She sat on a low bench beside the water tower, aimlessly looking through her hair for split ends (though she promptly dropped the strand of hair when he approached her). He placed a cardboard cup of tea beside her and sat down on her left, leaning forward to lean his elbows on his knees. The Doctor had disappeared inside the TARDIS more than half an hour beforehand, and had yet to emerge. It had grown dark as Donna had waited, stars sprinkling the dark sky above. Gwen had called Jack back inside Torchwood Three when she thought she saw a blip, but had mistaken it for general rift activity.

"Thanks," Donna smiled at him.

"So…"

"So… were you with the Doctor long? Before you left him, I mean."

"Oh, I didn't leave him. He left me on a game station in the future. Just took off in the TARDIS with Rose, leaving me with a truck load of Dalek dust and not even a note."

"A game station though, that can't have been too hard."

"It is if it's orbiting the Earth and you've no way to get back on the planet. I used to have a Time Vortex, and I was able to travel back to Cardiff, but I ended up in 1869. I just waited for the Doctor to fill up again. I knew he would have to one day. I joined Torchwood Three in the meantime."

"1869? What?"

"It gets a little hard to explain. But I can't die."

"Oh…"

"Yeah…"

Donna, though a little taken a back, decided to move the conversation along. Jack did not seem all that comfortable talking about his inability to die.

"Dalek, I've heard of that before."

"Dalek, gas-masked children, Slitheen, you name it, he's probably seen it." Jack grinned at her. "I've probably heard of it though."

"So how did you meet the Doctor?"

"I saved Rose from falling out of the sky," he began to chuckle. "A blond English girl with a Union Jack stamped across her chest in the middle of the Blitz. We had fun. The Doctor danced, in fact. What about you though? Miss Noble, how did you meet our Time Lord?"

"He abducted me in the middle of my wedding."

"What?"

"It's okay though, the groom turned out to be a bit of a prat."

"Oh…"

"Yeah…"

"I should make sure he hasn't fried the TARDIS, I've seen him do it before. This form spends too long tinkering." Jack stood and disappeared around the side of the ship. Donna let out a sigh when she heard the door shut. What had he meant by 'form'? In fact, how could a man just not die?

"Donna."

She tore her eyes away from her fingers laced in her lap to stare up at the blond woman in front of her. Donna was about to cry out when she spoke again,

"I need your help, Donna. Come with me?"

Seeming to forget the tea placed beside her, Donna got up, and followed the mysterious woman.

I hope you enjoyed the first chapter of the revamp. I'm particularly pleased with it, as opposed to what it originally was.

It's also longer! Hooray!

More coming soon! But remember to review! (Even if you already have) Tell me what you think about the new, shiny version of this story.

FlyFlyxoxo

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