"What are you doing in Cardiff 2007?" asked Jack

"Not working." She replied somewhat sarcastically.

"Not the point"

"What are you doing in Cardiff?"

"Frienze, I am asking the questions"

"Fri"

Jack looked up sharply, his eyes questioning hers?

"That's what you used to call me….Fri…like Free."

This threw him slightly, but still no recollection of her surfaced. It suggested an intimacy between them. She could be lying he supposed, but almost immediately dismissed it. Somehow he felt she wasn't. "They really did a job on you didn't they?" She wondered aloud. "all these years and no trigger. Two years just gone." And she snapped her finger to illustrate the point. Now she really had his attention. The memory of Jack's last two years at the time agency. The last two years of his life before turning con man, just didn't exist, ret conned away. It allowed for the possibility that he really did know this woman. And that he really did deserve to be shot.

"Which brings us back to my original question, why did you shoot me?"

"Returning the favor"

"I'd like the whole story"

"I don't have the strength" there was raw honesty in this answer…as if recounting the full story would suck the life out of her, but he needed to hear it…if he couldn't remember, then he needed to hear it from someone who was obviously there.

"Find it."

"I was your partner at the agency, for the last two years you were there. I was your partner on your last mission. The partner you shot and left for dead. The lover you shot and left for dead."

Jack flinched but pushed on "What was the mission?" he asked.

She could see he wasn't going to relent. She took a deep and shaky breath and began.

"You got a promotion, Nate. You know how layered the agency is, or do you?" When he didn't answer she added, "You were an assassin."

Jack swallowed hard but remained silent. Fri realized she was going to have to spell it out.

"It wasn't always about fixing time, sometimes it was about getting rid of the undesirables who could have really made a mess of human development. You had made noise about wanting to get out for months, but you knew, we all knew, you just don't walk away from the agency, not at that level.

"Our last mission was a straightforward track and take out. A particularly nasty politician in 2180, Maleki Hurst got his hands on a bit of time travel technology, not everyone is as careful as the agency. We ran every timeline projection we could think of. They were all pretty screwed up, galaxy wide depression, famine, and death. It was decided by the powers that be that it required a take out instead of just removing the technology from him.

"2181 was projected as the optimum time, little or no repercussions within a 20 range, just as he was starting to put his plans into action. On the day of the hit I was to create a hostage situation in the ready room. You were to swoop in as a negotiator, get the rest of the staff out and come back in to finish off the guy.

"Job done, your manipulator failed when it was time to bug out. That's when I realized that word had gotten back to agency about you wanting out. Another agent appeared in that room about 40 seconds after that and you freaked. He didn't even get close to you, you just started shooting. They sent in two more. They had remote retconn on their wristbands by then, it was supposed to be instant, one got a shot off but I thought it missed you. You kept on shooting, four bodies now strewn across the room. They weren't trying to kill you Nate, just wipe your memories, and you killed them all. Agents you'd worked with for years, you just killed them. You took a wrist band from one of the bodies..." here Frienze started to cry.

"You set some coordinates then you stood facing me. I was crouched in a corner of the room out of the line of fire. You looked at me coldly, as if you hated me. We had been lovers for most of the two years we'd been working together…." Her voice dropped almost to a whisper. "And you just stared at me like a monster…leveled your gun…and just pulled the trigger. No emotion in your face, no remorse……and then you were gone"

The tears just wouldn't stop now. Jack could barely make out the words. Her anguish so real and unabashed. His heart twisted in horror at the story that unfolded from her lips. He could help himself no longer and he threw open the cell door and went towards her. He wanted to hold her to protect her, like he would do for one of his team. Too late he realized how stupid and futile that impulse was. It was him she obviously needed protection from.

When she saw him come into the cell she recoiled and started screaming at him…

"Don't touch me. Don't you dare touch me." She lashed out at him again, this time pummeling his chest, kicking him…any pain she could inflict. Jack let her, he didn't even try to hold her back, he just stood there taking the pain, almost grateful to feel it. With one gut-wrenching sob she fell to her knees. What was she doing, she couldn't kill him with a gun. What the hell are her fists and feet going to do?

He fell with her and finally she reached out and clung to his coat. Tears streaming down both of their cheeks now. A whisper tore from Fri's throat, "Make it go away."

Jack looked down into her face, did he hear her correctly, and did he understand her correctly. When he didn't answer she spoke again, "Retconn me, please."

He stared at her in almost horror. "No" was all he managed before he got unsteadily to his feet and left the cell. Locking it behind him.

Jack locked himself in his office for the longest time. He went over and over the last two words she had said or rather begged. It was worse wasn't it, not knowing at all. He had agonized over the two years they had taken from him. Not knowing what he should feel. Should he be proud, ashamed, scared. Surely it is better to know and to cope, even if it was as bad as she described, than to just have a gap. To always wonder. That was his agony, yet her memories of those years seem to be her agony.

There was more he needed to know, much more, before he could even consider her desperate request. He went back down to the cells. "Are you going to try to kill me again?" he asked flatly.

"No" she replied equally flatly.

He opened the cell door and began walking. She followed dutifully behind. All the anger seemed to have left her. She was just exhausted, depleted, defeated. He led her to his office. Jack Insisted to the rest of the team that everything was fine and for them to lock up behind them. They could have the weekend off unless anything major happened and he would see them back here Monday morning without fail.

Gwen and Ianto were hesitant, but Jack fixed them both with an 'I know what I'm doing' look, so they reluctantly followed his instructions. He turned back to his office and shut the door. When he reached his desk he pulled open the bottom draw and took out a bottle of very old scotch and two glasses. This act seemed to defeat Frienze even more and she slumped down in the chair facing him, took the proffered glass and downed it in one gulp. Jack refilled her glass and his own and sat down in his own chair.

"I need more from you," he stated. Frienze snorted at this, but didn't answer. Jack hardened up. He was talking to an enemy again, someone who believed he was responsible for her attempted murder. Someone who had betrayed her, as a colleague and as a woman.

"How did you get to 2007?" he asked.

"Rift."

"What were your last coordinates?"

"Not sure, Cardiff, maybe 5300," she sighed.

"What happened?" he persisted.

"I gave up."

"What?"

"Looking for you…..just lay down one day…. I had tracked you from the 22nd century, to the 20th, to the 200th, I got to the Game Station and you were gone. Oh not the memory of you, all those people saying you were a hero, what a joke." The smile was sardonic. "My manipulator was powering down and I thought I'd go home, give it up. Got as far as 5300 and it gave out. So I was stuck there. I tried to make a new life. Everyone I knew was long gone. Other agents had very little interest in that time period."

"Your betrayal just kept eating away at me. I couldn't let it go……." She looked him full in the face now. Tears again streaking her own cheeks, "I loved you so much Nate…," Jack closed his eyes. It was like hearing an echo. "Those times were so happy for me, working together, playing together."

"Why did you track me," Asked Jack "all that way?"

"I just wanted to know why," and she laughed again, "but you can't tell me can you?"

Jack shook his head.

"Serves me right, so," she sighed, "when the rift opened a few days ago I just went through."

"But you were falling from the sky today?" he questioned.

She looked away, there was a long paused, "I jumped."

"You jumped?

"From the top of this building." She hung her head, tears plopping onto the black leather. "You couldn't even let me get away from the pain that way."

"How did you survive?... After that day." Asked Jack

"More agents and a cleanup crew were sent in. They took me home and patched me up. The wound wasn't fatal. I was out of action for a while though." A thought occurred to her, "How did you?"

He looked up sharply. "It's a long story; let's just say I heal fast."

"Secrets."

"Fri, you have to believe I am not the same man I was back then. I don't know what happened to me. I don't know why I did those things. I do wish I could remember but I can't. So much has happened to me since then, and the years traveling with the Doctor, they changed me. He showed me another way to live. I won't hurt you again. I can promise you that." Fri looked deeply into his eyes but did not respond.

"You have nowhere else to go, no vortex manipulator, no way home. Stay here, work with us here. You can build a good life; it's a nice century, simple. You can sit back and watch first hand the time that changed humanity forever. Watch history." He rubbed his face with both hands, picked up his scotch and took a big gulp. "Let me try to make it up to you."

Jack got up and left the office allowing her to give some thought to his proposal. He wandered out into the heart of the hub. It was so quiet without the team here. He willed himself to remember the events Fri had described to him, he tried to picture it happening in his mind, but there was nothing there. What had happened to him that day? And how had he felt about the woman then? He knew how he felt now, she was hot! He pulled himself up on that thought straight away.

"Nate." She called from the office doorway.

He strode towards her, his head tilted to one side in question.

"I'll stay; I don't think I have much of a choice."

"OK, then can you start calling me Jack? Too many names will confuse the kids." Jack jerked his thumb towards the workstations to indicate his team.

"Jack." She almost whispered it. He liked the way it sounded when she said it. God she must have been amazing if just the sound of his name on her lips turned him on. He winced again at the thought. For the first time in his life he thought himself incorrigible.

The remainder of the weekend was taken up with Jack bringing Frienze up to speed on what Torchwood was about. They also shopped for some clothes and necessities for her. Living quarters were a troublesome issue. He was concerned about her being off base in a century she knew very little about, but at the same time the sensible man in him did not want her inside the hub alone just yet.

Jack kept an apartment in the city, although more often than not he ended up sleeping at the hub. He decided she should stay there for the time being and he would use his quarters on base. They walked over to the apartment with their purchases and once he turned the key and opened the door he handed it to Frienze. It was pretty obvious that Ianto's cleaning did not extend outside the base because Jack's apartment looked like it hadn't been tidied in a long, long time. Fri turned her face to him with one eyebrow arched. He just smiled and muttered something about having a busy life.

He showed her around scooping up piles of clothes and pizza boxes as he went, taught her how to use the TV, the stove, she giggled at the microwave, before plonking himself down on the sofa and putting his feet up on his coffee table. Fri frowned at the movement. Her eyes took on a far away look just for a moment. Jack spotted it though. He put his feet flat on the floor and said softly. "We were very close, then?" She nodded Fri turned to look out the window. Jack stood up and moved in behind her, he put a hand on her shoulder; she flinched slightly but didn't stop him. "I'm sorry, Fri." he said, meaning it. She knew he meant it, allowed her eyes to close and feel him near. She could hear his breathing, the breaths coming shorter the longer they stayed connected. He lifted his hand from her shoulder and ran the back of it lightly down the side of her face. In the past, or should she say the future, that would have been her undoing. She could never resist him; from the first moment he'd flirted with her, right up to the end.

"Don't" the words came out harsher than she intended, but had the desired effect. He let his hand drop to his side, breathed her in one last time, turned and headed for his front door.

"7.00am in the morning. Can you find your way back to the hub?"

"Yes."

"OK"

Then he was gone.