Chapter 4.
World War III
Three weeks passed before Rose was woken by her alarm blaring from across the room. Over the past year, she, River, Mickey, and Jack had taken to sharing a flat deep inside UNIT HQ, and the empty bed across the room startled her for a moment before she remembered that River was out of town on a mission to track down what seemed to be a Cyber signal originating in America, of all places. The timing was awful, but they couldn't just ignore it, even if today was the day—she, Mickey, and Jack would just have to stop the Slitheen and save Harriet Jones themselves.
Upstairs in the conference room, Jack was briefing his team. "Tosh, I need you to cover for Owen—he's a no-show today, and I'll have his ass for it later, but UNIT's going to need someone to inspect alien remains. I'm going to be on-site and I want you on the inside at Albion Hospital. Mickey Mouse, you're here, on base with the computers. I need you on the sub's weapon systems, ready to the fire the minute I give the word. Ianto and Rose have been working with administration inside Downing Street for the past several weeks, so we have our in. I'll be invited in as part of the panel of experts called in once the party really gets started. I'm a Code Nine, which will give me immediate access. I'll lead the Slitheen on a merry chase, ending up in the Cabinet Room with Rose, Ianto, and Harriet Jones. Once that happens, Mickey will issue the UNIT evac, getting civilians and all UNIT personnel out of Downing Street before he launches."
"And you're positive, Captain Cheesecake, that Rose and Ianto are going to survive this?" Mickey asked. The old nicknames had come out at some point over the past year, revived by Jack, and whenever things were particularly tense, the two reverted to them as a way of lessening tension.
"I'll be fine, Micks," Rose said. "Remember, all of this has already happened. We're just doing it a bit differently. If I have any say in this, once the Slitheen vacate the Cabinet Room, me, Ianto, and Harriet will take up residence in there and initiate the lockdown. Jack can flash himself in with his Vortex Manipulator, and we'll never even come within reach of those things." She shuddered.
"Bog monsters," Mickey muttered. "They look like bog monsters, right?"
They'd deliberately not shown the team pictures of the Slitheen, so they wouldn't fear the massive green aliens, and Rose raised an eyebrow at Mickey's description. It was exactly how he'd described them in the other timeline.
"Yeah, Micks," was all she said.
"I don't like this, babe, you know I don't, but I got your back. Anything happens to her, Cheesecake, and we'll see how long it takes you to come back to life when your head is in space and your body's burned to ashes."
Rose's eyes flashed gold for a moment, and everyone stared at her. "Rosie?" Jack asked, but she shook her head.
"Nothing," she said, brushing aside the timeline that had flared before her, a vision of a box with a preserved head—a preserved live head—and a headless body that moved on its own, a warrior for the Papal Mainframe's cult of Silence. Winking at her from the box was a handsome face she recognised all too well. "Just—a timeline flaring into existence. Shouldn't have recognised it without River here to help, honestly, but it was very strong."
Jack looked at her oddly but nodded. "Well, you and Ianto need to head in for the last day of your internship if you don't want to rouse suspicions about what you know will happen."
Rose and Ianto left the room and took a bus into 'work' together, chatting about the fictional lives they'd created as covers for their 'characters'. They were mates from uni, according to their records, and they lived near one another, so they often commuted together. Rose was having boyfriend trouble, so she often asked Ianto for advice on the morning trip, and Ianto admitted to being attracted to someone at 'work', despite being engaged—Rose suspected that was not at all made up. She'd been watching Jack and Ianto for the better part of the past year, and the attraction on Jack's part was far from one-sided.
Granted, Rose ceded to herself, one would have to be blind, deaf, and mute to be completely immune to Jack but it was more than that with Ianto. Ianto wasn't just attracted to Jack—he looked after him, and Jack let him; which was more than he'd ever let anyone, except perhaps Rose, do for him.
She remembered that, hours later, as she, and not Jack, gave Mickey the command to fire the missile. Too slow—funny little human brain, how did she get around in it?—she hadn't thought, hadn't remembered that sometimes, not everyone lived. Someone had to die for her and Harriet to escape the Slitheen inside the Cabinet room the first time. There'd been a low-level lackey, a secretary of some sort in the original timeline—and this time there was Ianto Jones.
Ianto who was cradled to Jack's chest as her ageless friend wept, rocking the body of what he'd confessed was his lover in the other timeline—his lover he'd failed to save—while they waited for a missile to come and blow them all up. And Harriet Jones, brave, indomitable Harriet Jones, holding tightly to Rose's hand when the blast hit, ordered Jack to his feet as though she were Prime Minister already.
"There will be a time to weep later, for your brave friend and all the others we lost, but now, Captain, it is time to rebuild," the woman said. Rose nodded. She, too, would weep. Mourn her mistakes, her carelessness, and move on.
"Take him back to HQ," she told Jack. "I can handle cleanup."
"You never handle cleanup," Jack said. "I can do this." Rose shook her head and hugged him.
"You shouldn't have to do it alone, not all the time," she argued. "No one should. Not you, not me, not River—not even the Doctor. That's why we have each other. Now go, Jack. Take him back, and let me handle this. And make sure Lisa knows what he really died for. None of the usual UNIT bullshit, yeah?"
"I'll tell her the truth," he promised, heading back into the steel room that should have been their salvation, not the promising young man's tomb.
The rest of the day was spent at the side of the up-and-coming star of British politics as she gave countless interviews about her harrowing experience inside Downing Street. Harriet Jones was being hailed as a hero, and the woman was certainly happy to share that status with those who had been trapped in the room with her until Rose pulled her aside and asked her to keep her own name and Jack's out of it. Ianto was given all the praise a hero of Earth, who had sacrificed his life so that others could escape, could be given, and before the day was out there were offerings being made to a large memorial in his honor. Before day's end, there was an astounding amount of support for Harriet Jones to become the next Prime Minister. By the time Rose finally made it back to her little flat inside HQ, she was exhausted.
River was in the sitting room, her eyes red, the chairs they'd moved up from the library a little over a month ago circling a round table in front of the fireplace where a merrily crackling fire was reflecting off a battered old silver tea service.
"Did you know?" Rose asked, pulling her sensible boots off by the door, stretching out her senses to see if Jack or Mickey were anywhere nearby.
"Jack's still with Lisa," River said. "Owen took Mickey to the pub to get him very, very drunk. The rest of us might be used to this life, but it hasn't happened to Mickey yet."
Sock-clad feet making no noise as she crossed the room and curled up in 'her' chair, Rose repeated her question.
"I knew it was a possibility," River admitted, closing her eyes. "Ianto Jones died in 2009 during the 456 incident. There was always the possibility that while his death wasn't a fixed point, exactly, that he was not going to survive to see the Doctor's return. Sending him with you on this mission was a calculated risk, but it wasn't my decision."
"You could have warned us, River," Rose snapped. "If we'd known that Ianto could have died, then we could have protected him better!"
"Whose life would you have given in his place, Rose?" River demanded, opening her eyes to glare at her. "Whose husband, whose son, whose brother would you have sacrificed so that Ianto Jones could live?"
Rose let the tears she had been holding back since the Slitheen had snapped her friend's neck earlier in the day free. "It was always going to be someone, wasn't it?"
She wasn't surprised when River didn't answer. River never did when Rose already knew the answers.
"Who else?" Rose asked.
"Owen," River said, her voice dull, eyes lifeless. "Tosh. Possibly Gwen. Jack will die in more ways than your or I could ever have imagined. But you saw how it happens—the final separation."
"They take him as a weapon against the Doctor," Rose said, remembering the flash of a timeline she'd gotten earlier. "He becomes the first Headless Monk."
"Exactly," River said. "It's so far into the future as to be almost not worth worrying about—they'll steal him out of time. The Doctor will rescue his head, of course, but by then it will be too late. They'll have advanced far enough that Jack's body will never be able to reform."
"And he'll evolve into the Face of Boe," Rose said, laughing a bit as she imagined her vain friend as a wrinkled, tentacled head. "He'll be older than the Doctor someday."
"Perhaps," River admitted. "But there will be others. Jack is capable of evolving so much, because of course, when anything lives that long, evolution is bound to take effect."
And Rose remembered something, from Satellite 5, from before she'd met Jack, and she started to laugh. "Oh my god," she managed to gasp. "He gets pregnant!"
River just smiled and sipped her tea, grimacing as she did. Rose picked up her own cup and took a sip, making a face as she tasted it.
"In five hundred years, River, I think you'd have learned by now to make a decent cup of tea," she grumbled as she picked up the pot and headed for the kitchen.
"Sweetie, I never told you how old I was," River called and Rose spun to look at her.
"How did I know that?" Rose asked, staring at her.
River grinned. "As painful as today was, for all of us, we've strengthened the timeline, just a bit. We've tightened the connection between this unwritten history and the history the Doctor wrote with you, and by doing so, we've brought the Doctor one step closer to returning. Your Time Sense is a bit stronger than it was before, and I haven't been shielding. You picked it up."
London mourned for Ianto Jones, but none more than the four UNIT agents who shared a flat inside HQ, who had relied on the Welshman for tea, for backup, for a shoulder to cry on in times of need. Ianto Jones had been the center upon which they all spun, and without him the entire team was threatening to fly off at any moment.
They barely had time to recover from his death before it was time to confront his murderer. Even River was not forgiving.
"I thought you said we had to preserve the timelines," Rose said, looking down at the smoking hole in the head of the Slitheen who had been masquerading as Margaret Blaine, wishing she could feel something other than pleasure that this creature, this thing, that had tried to kill her, tried to rip the TARDIS apart, and had killed Ianto, was dead.
"And so we should have," River said, shrugging as she tucked her gun back into its holster. "Sometimes, though, it's worthwhile to get a little bit of revenge."
Rose stared at the other woman, whose eyes were lit with a sort of disturbing enjoyment, and she wondered what it was River was seeing as she stared into the distance, through the Blaidd Drwg sign in front of them.
They cleaned up their 'mess' and Jack took them all down to his old Torchwood base, which was there, just—empty. "This is where I stood, listening to the Rift opening over my head, knowing that an actual mortal me was up there, with Rosie, Mickey, and the Doctor, and knowing I couldn't do anything to stop what was happening," he said, staring up at the ceiling.
His eyes seemed to catch on something, and he faced an office that appeared to be suspended from the ceiling. "That was my office," he said, pointing. "Ianto…" he turned, and River reached for him, allowing him to cry without saying a word.
"We should leave, Jack," Rose said, reaching for his hand, but he seemed to pull himself together and shook his head.
"I've already asked UNIT to take over this location," he said. "We'll all be moving here before the year is out. I don't think any of us could live in that flat for much longer, and I've had to live here without him before."
"We're not living at the Hub, Harkness," River said, swatting his shoulder. "I'll have a flat for the four of us by week's end. You can handle the movers," she told him, and Rose wondered if she saw herself as the mother of this rather odd family—her, Jack, Rose, and Mickey. A rather disloyal thought that perhaps she'd have liked River as a mum better than her own crossed her mind, but she pushed it away.
Life in Cardiff was—different—than life in London, at least for Rose. Jack seemed more relaxed, more at home, and she realised how much he'd really hated living in London all those years. Gwen Cooper joined their team, and with Tosh and Owen, they were almost like a family again.
There were a lot of days where life seemed to be in slow motion for their quasi-Torchwood team, made up of UNIT members who mostly didn't remember the Doctor, didn't remember the timeline they were doing their best to preserve, and Rose would remember her second Doctor telling her mother that trouble was just the bits in between; it had never really seemed that way as they stumbled between one catastrophe to another, but here, in Cardiff, it actually seemed true, and she wondered if this was how it was really supposed to be, and quashed down the disloyal thought almost immediately each time it sprung up.
River was spending more time in her proper timeline, only popping in when she was needed for something, or to comfort them when they had an exceptionally bad day. Jack, Gwen, Rose, and Mickey spent most of their time running various missions that kept the Earth safe, completely off the radar of the vast majority of the planet's inhabitants.
After the Krillitanes, which was surprisingly easy given what they already knew about the creatures and their vulnerability to their own oil, they were able to bring Donna Noble into their little team; it was a meeting Rose had been looking forward to for the past few years.
"Cardiff," the redhead said, looking around the underground Hub in distaste. "Almost as bad as Leeds."
"Actually, it's really rather worse," Jack said, giving his signature grin. Rose just rolled her eyes.
"Time and a place, Jack," she said.
"I was just -" he started, but she cut him off.
"Saying hello, I know," she waved him off. "I've heard it a thousand times before. I'm borrowing your office for this interview, yeah? Keep Owen away from her—I don't want to scare her off before she even decides if she wants to come work for us."
She led Donna further into the Hub, grinning as the older woman shrieked at the sight of pteradactyl flying overhead. "It's alright—completely harmless—well, mostly," she assured the other woman as she steered her towards Jack's office.
"What kind of place is this?" Donna asked, clearly shaken, as she dropped into a chair across from the cluttered desk.
"This, Miss Noble, is UNIT—United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. We're something of a special tasks branch, stationed here in Cardiff, and our goal is to preserve a timeline that has been erased from existence," Rose said watching the other woman's face for any flicker of recognition. "You are here because you played a crucial part in that unwritten timeline, several times over, in fact."
"Yeah, pull the other one, blondie," Donna said, bitterness creeping into her voice.
"Best temp in Chiswick, aren't you, Donna?" Rose asked, leaning forward with her elbows on the desk, smiling at this woman she remembered so vividly as a broken woman, screaming at the Universe regardless of how little difference she thought it would make, at such odds with her other memories of the Doctor-Donna, brilliant and aware of it, proud of herself and not afraid to show it—all of that potential was held inside the mind of this woman, who was staring at Rose as though she'd lost her mind.
"And what's that have to do with the price of tea in China?" Donna asked.
"You've heard of Ianto Jones, yeah?" Rose asked.
"Who hasn't? Whole country's heard of Ianto Jones—the man's a hero." Donna rolled her eyes.
"Ianto Jones was a member of our team," Rose said. "He was our—secretary, for lack of a better word. He helped us organise, made us tea—god could that man make tea—kept our spirits up, and eventually he started going into the field in places where the rest of us wouldn't fit in so well, like Downing Street as an intern."
"So—what, he was undercover for you lot when he died, is that what you're telling me? And you want me to replace him?" Donna's eyes got wide. "I ain't gonna die for no job, blondie!"
"We're not asking you to, Donna," Rose assured her. "Ianto should never have been in the field—he didn't have the training for it, and it was our fault for sending him. But we do need someone who can stay in the office. Someone to coordinate missions. Someone to make tea, because quite frankly, we're all rubbish at it. Even River's tea is—oh god, I didn't think anyone could burn tea, but she manages. Jack prefers coffee, dunno how you are with that. Point is, we need you, not just some secretary, because the day is coming, Donna, when that timeline that we're protecting comes back. And when it does, I can promise you that you'll want to be here, with us."
"But it's Cardiff," Donna said, and her inflection was almost a perfect imitation of Rose's first Doctor's, once upon a time, as they were trapped in a basement together, that Rose couldn't help but laugh.
"Yeah, it's not my favorite place in the world, either," she admitted. She continued to coax Donna along, focusing on the conversation with half her mind, the other half delving into the other woman's, attempting to find any traces of the song.
Her stomach clenched; in the very back of Donna's mind she found what she was looking for—a sickly, sour yellow web of the song, holding back—oh, gods—it was holding back so much. All that was, all that is, all that ever could be. Donna could have been so much and it was all held back by a sour yellow song in her head that she couldn't even hear.
"S'wrong," Rose muttered, not really aware that she was speaking aloud. "Need River, need Jack—god, I might even need the TARDIS to sort this out."
"Sorry, what?" Donna said, her head snapping up, and for a second, Rose could have sworn she saw recognition in them.
"Sorry, just—you're hired, of course, if you want the job," Rose said, brushing away the traces of the web. "You'll have to meet River and Jack—they'll give the final okay, but I know they will. I was just—remembering a project that I need to consult with both of them on."
"Don't think you can fool me with that, Blondie," Donna said, rolling her eyes. "Been lied to by better than you, haven't I?" Rose looked at Donna carefully, making sure that the other woman understood what she was saying, but the redhead continued on blithely unaware. "Talk for days, that one could, never saying anything at all. God, you're just like him. By all means, I'll come to work here. Better than temping, anyway, even if it is in bloody Cardiff."
And Rose understood; Donna's disdain for Cardiff was his disdain for Cardiff, leaking through, spilling over. The web, the wrongness of it—without the TARDIS, without the Doctor, the web was weakening, and bits were leaking through. If she didn't find a way to shore it up, or better, find a way to let the Doctor-Donna exist in full, Donna would burn long before the Doctor returned in 2010.
As she bustled Donna out, giving her a start date for her new job, offering her a place in their rapidly-filling flat (really, they were going to have to get a proper mortgage on a proper house soon, the lot of them, and part of her simply rebelled at that thought, or they were going to have to split up, and she didn't know if she could bear that either), she ran different scenarios over in her head of how she could possibly save Donna with only herself, River Song, and Jack Harkness at her disposal.