Chapter 2
Jenny breathed a sigh of relief as the door closed behind Rose and her father. Even though she hadn't wanted to, she had forced herself to fill him in on the most pertinent details of what had happened in the hospital room. She had been afraid that he might go looking for it and she wanted him to know what it was he was dealing with. Or at least as much as she knew, which honestly was frustratingly little. She also wanted him to search for those who had been in the room with her at the time of the attack: two other patients, Rosemary and Samantha, plus their nurses Louise and Barbra, as well as Doctor Stevenson.
So she'd told him the basics. She had collapsed in the supermarket a fortnight ago and been brought to hospital. They'd placed her on strict bed rest until the babies arrived. Everything had been fine until the thing had found her. It had burst through the window, attacking Rosemary first and then Louise. After that. mayhem had broken out and Jenny wasn't quite sure what had happened. She remembered hearing screaming, thuds and shattering glass before everything had gone dark and she had awoken on the TARDIS.
She was positive that the Doctor knew she wasn't telling him the whole story, but she'd told him the most important parts. The rest could come later, when she was ready – once she'd figured out just how to explain it all.
Jenny heard vibrant female laughter coming from another area of the TARDIS and it made her smile. She'd liked Rose instantly, and even though they had never met before, Jenny felt as though she knew her, as though they were somehow connected. She was looking forward to getting to know her better.
Her thoughts turned to her father. Although he seemed much more at peace than he had on Messaline, Jenny had sensed deep sadness within him. She wasn't sure how she knew, but she was certain that he had suffered great losses and pain since she'd last seen him. She was also positive that he hadn't told her the whole truth about Donna.
Beneath the sadness, though, there had been a glimmer of something else. Something lighter. He was happier, she realized. Something had happened that had started to heal the pain of his loss and if she wasn't very much mistaken, that something had to do with Rose. Jenny had not been able to miss the warm looks that they'd exchanged throughout the conversation. Nor had she missed the tender way in which Rose had comforted the Doctor with a gentle touch. When she'd first met her father, Jenny had observed a comfortable rapport between him and Donna, but it had been much different than what she'd just observed between him and Rose. No, unless she was incredibly wrong, and Jenny was never wrong, her father was in love with Rose Tyler.
*****
As soon as they left Jenny's room, the Doctor and Rose returned to where they'd first found her to search for any sign of the other people Jenny had mentioned. But other than a few drops of blood and some broken glass and medical equipment, they found nothing.
From there they did a sweep of the rest of the floor, finding it completely deserted and empty. It looked as though whoever had been there, had left in a hurry leaving a trail of tousled beds and scattered medical paraphernalia in their wake. A broader search yielded similar results: the entire three story building had been abandoned.
"How does the population of an entire hospital just vanish?" Rose wanted to know.
"Indeed." The Doctor tugged gently on his right ear. "If they had been attacked by the creature Jenny described, then we should see bodies, or other signs of carnage."
"But that's just it, Doctor. There's no sign of any kind of fighting. Besides the broken glass in Jenny's room, it just looks as though they left in a hurry. But why? Did they evacuate? And if they did, why was Jenny left behind?"
"All excellent questions! Something isn't quite adding up. What am I missing?" He ran his hands through his hair, pulling gently on the ends. "Think, think, think!"
He began to pace in front of the TARDIS. Suddenly he stopped pacing and sniffed the air. "Do you smell that?"
"What?" Rose frowned and sniffed but all she could smell was a faint twinge of bleach. "I smell bleach but that's all."
"Exactly."
"Exactly what?"
"'That's all.'"
Rose stared at him, baffled.
"This is a hospital. It should be all kinds of smelly. Hospital food, medicine, sick – it should have those smells. It should be smelly."
Rose's eyes widened. "So you're saying - "
"Someone else has been here and they cleaned up the creature's mess."
"Do you mean…" Rose swallowed. "Do you mean it killed all those people and they just covered it up?"
"I don't think it killed them all, or even any. But someone has been here. Who? Who would come in and try to make it look like nothing happened? Who would clear everyone out except for Jenny? Who --"
"Torchwood!" They both exclaimed at once.
"Yes! That's it! This has Torchwood's faulty fingerprints all over it. They must have intervened. But why?"
"Because it's what we do." Rose jumped nearly a foot as Captain Jack Harkness stepped out of the shadows. He walked toward them, his open jacket flapping behind him.
"Jack." The Doctor said stiffly.
Jack smiled but it wasn't exactly friendly. "Doctor. I've been waiting for you."
*****
"We've been tracking Jenny for quite some time." Jack explained as he took a biscuit from the plate Rose had just set on the table next to the tea. He winked at her. "Thanks, Love."
"Why Jenny?" the Doctor wanted to know.
"For the same reason we track anything that crash lands on Earth from outer space."
Rose choked on her tea. "Jenny crashed?"
Jack nodded. "In a great big fancy rocket ship." He took a sip of his tea. "Luckily she landed in the middle of nowhere."
The Doctor contemplated the news silently for a moment. "When was this?"
"Exactly seventy-nine days ago."
"Just over three months then."
"That's right." Jack's voice softened. "She was a mess when she landed, Doctor. Pregnant, disoriented, and terrified."
Rose blinked back tears. "Poor Jenny."
Jack nodded. "She bonded with Gwen quickly, but even she couldn't get Jenny to divulge any details of what happened to her. It was only after we ran some tests and discovered she was a Time Lord that I let her go." Jack shot the Doctor an angry look. "You could have warned me that you two had a daughter out there. I would have given her a better welcome."
"She's not mine," Rose whispered sadly.
"She's as much yours as she is mine," the Doctor insisted. "She may have technically only come from my DNA, but you were on my thoughts – you were always in my thoughts, and I think the machine used that data to help form her. My first thought when I saw her was, 'She looks like Rose'."
Rose swallowed hard, deeply touched by the Doctor's admission. She had felt an instant connection to Jenny, but she'd never imagined that the Doctor basically saw her as Jenny's mother. If Jack hadn't been there at that moment, she might have kissed the Doctor right there and then, consequences be damned, but since he was present, she settled for reaching for his hand beneath the table and squeezing it gently.
"Thank you."
The Doctor wove his fingers between hers in response and looked back at Jack. "I didn't tell you because I thought she was dead."
Immediately the hostility that Jack had been emanating since he'd shown up, melted away. "I'm so sorry."
"It's okay. She's back now, that's all that matters. Please, continue."
Jack took a deep breath. "When we let her go, we set her up with a human identity and a flat. We also found her a physician. She had no way of leaving the planet, since her rocket was irreparable, so she did her best to start trying to live a normal life."
"We kept watching her, and Gwen visited her on a regular basis. We were never able to discern anything about what had happened to her prior to landing on Earth, though. Gwen tried a few times to get her to tell her about the babies' father but every time, Jenny would shut down completely and get a haunted look in her eyes."
"Do you know what it was that attacked her?" Rose's voice was filled with concern.
"We do now. It was a Xevengow. It's a horrific-looking scaly creature with horns and poisonous sharp teeth. We think it followed Jenny here, possibly from its home planet of Bedangowlen."
"What does it want?"
"We suspect it wants her children."
Rose's jaw dropped in shock and she stared at Jack. "The Xevengow wants Jenny's children? Why?"
"We don't know. Our most current theory is that maybe the Xevengow eats babies. One of the women in the ward with Jenny was attacked before we could get there. She's all right but she told us that the creature was focused on her stomach."
Revolted, Rose buried her head in the Doctor's shoulder.
"What about the other women?" The Doctor's voice was strained. "Are they okay?"
"Yes, they're all fine. One of the nurses ended up with a broken arm, but other than that we managed to get everyone out with nothing more than a few bumps and bruises."
"What about Jenny?" Rose asked, lifting her head and eying Jack wearily. "When we found her she was alone."
"Minor oversight," Jack said quickly with a wave of his hand. "We think she was accidentally hit with a tranquilizer when we were trying to detain the Xevengow and she fell out of sight."
The Doctor was outraged. "You think? You were monitoring it. How could you have possibly missed that?"
"It was chaos in there," Jack hissed defensively. "The Xevengow tore through the hospital and was nearly out the main doors before we managed to stop it. It took our entire team to take it down. In all the craziness, none of us realized that Jenny had been left until after we'd completed our clean sweep of the building and were on our way back to Torchwood."
"If that's the case, then Torchwood is even more inept than I thought," the Doctor scoffed.
"Hey. That creature was extremely dangerous. Our priority had to be the threat. If that thing had managed to get loose…" Jack shuddered.
"Really, Jack, I expected more from you."
"Doctor --" Rose cut in.
He spun his head toward her, his eyes dark pools of fury. "She's my daughter. Keeping her safe should have been the first priority."
"But Doctor, what would you have done?" Rose placed her hand on his arm. He flexed it tensely beneath her fingers. "You know Jack couldn't let that creature loose in the city."
The Doctor sighed and gradually Rose felt him relaxing beneath her touch. "Maybe," he said doubtfully.
She dropped her hand and they both focused on Jack as he spoke again.
"As soon as I noticed Jenny was missing, I ran back here and found you."
Both the Doctor and Rose stared at him incredulously.
"Just how thick do you think I am?" the Doctor asked coldly. "Torchwood does have a tendency to screw up, but you would never be so thoughtless as to leave the building without your charge. You'd have made sure Jenny was secured before finishing up." He stood glowering down at Jack, his face livid. "What's the real reason you left her?"
"I told you--"
"Wait." Rose narrowed her eyes at Jack suspiciously. "You were waiting for us."
"No. It was just a coincidence that I ran into you," Jack insisted.
"No. It wasn't." The Doctor held Jack's gaze as he came around the table stooping over until they were eye to eye. "We've been here for a few hours. You knew we were coming. You even said you were waiting for me."
Jack opened his mouth to argue, then sighed, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. "I left her on purpose," he admitted, causing Rose to gasp and glare at him. He continued quickly, "I hoped that if I left her in apparent danger, the TARDIS would bring you to her."
"You put my daughter in jeopardy for something you'd 'hoped' would happen?" The Doctor glared at Jack.
Jack glared back. "She needed her father. She's pregnant, by an unknown species, and some kind of nasty being from another planet is trying to attack her. She needed you Doctor. So yes, I took a risk, but I had no other option."
"Of course you had an option. You always have a choice. You should have found another way."
"There was no other way, Doctor!" Jack shouted. "There wasn't time."
Rose noted the fear in Jack's voice and frowned. "There's something you're not telling us." It was a statement, not a fact.
"No, I --"
"Jack, she's our daughter. Tell us why you couldn't wait."
Jack still looked reluctant, but he spoke. "There are more Xevengow coming. I don't think they'll stop until Jenny and her children are dead."
Rose felt her blood run cold. Across the table she heard the Doctor's breath catch in his throat.
She and Jack stared at the Doctor as he swallowed hard and seemed to pull himself together. "I don't agree with how you did it, but clearly we don't have time for anger right now." He returned to his seat and took a sip of his now cold tea. "Tell me everything you know about the Xevengow."
TBC
