Based on the chapter plan I have at the mo, this should be about the halfway point, which just goes to show how beginning heavy this story is! and how the action is predominantly fixed on the second half! Still, never mind. That's what you get for just writing as you go along etc etc.
Erm... oh yeah, I think I want to rewrite my summary for this story, so any ideas, drop me a line!
Thanks for all the reviews and hits and favouriting and alerting and other such appreciated stuff. Makes me smile :D
Jackie leapt up off where she was perched on the edge of the sofa when she heard the front door open. She didn't need to say a word, one look was all it took.
"We didn't find her." Rose shook her head, exhaustion suddenly taking over. Still dressed in last night's clothes, she found herself longing for a hot bath and bed. It seemed wrong to even be thinking like that with Janie gone, but she supposed human instinct always won out in the end.
"Then what now?" Jackie looked amongst the faces in front of her. "Who are these two?" she asked, gesturing towards Gwen and Owen.
"My colleagues," Jack replied smoothly. "We're working on finding Janie, Mrs. Tyler, our other colleagues are working on it as we speak." Gwen rolled her eyes as she saw him give Jackie the infamous Harkness smile. Charm personified, that one.
"I'm going to have a bath," Rose announced. Jon was sitting in the living room and looked up when she said that, accusations in his eyes. "I just really need to get changed," she explained, knowing he'd never understand. In the last few hours a wedge had come between her and her son that she feared would never mend. Her beautiful boy, the one she'd always depended on, was gone, replaced by this suspicious young man, who was eying his father with contempt. Fireworks would fly between those two, Rose could just see it. Funny; she'd always assumed that Janie would be the first one to have a fight with the Doctor.
"Take as long as you need, love." Pete stepped in, reminding Rose why she loved her surrogate father so much. Remembering that made her realize that she needed to explain that to Jon too. So many lies.
As she headed upstairs, Pete turned back to the motley crew. "So what's the plan?" He addressed Jack, but the Doctor answered.
"There isn't one," he replied flatly. "No plan, no leads… no traces."
"We should call the police," Jon decided suddenly, standing up and reaching for the phone. The Doctor placed his hand firmly over his son's and disconnected it.
"No police," he said firmly.
"Then what?" Jon demanded, facing him. He was taller than his father now, by a few inches. Anger oozed out of his every pore. "We just give up, forget about her. She's my sister!"
"And my daughter!" The Doctor glared at him. "And I say no police."
Jon gave him a withering look, his eyes moving slowly from head to toe, scrutinizing every inch of the man claiming to be his dad. "Never been much of a father though, have you?" he muttered, before pushing past him and heading upstairs.
"Someone should go after him," Mickey ventured.
"Then why don't you?" The Doctor turned on him. "Why don't you go and play the hero everybody wants?"
Mickey barely flinched; he'd grown used to being trodden on over the years. He held the Doctor's gaze for a few seconds before heading up the stairs after the teenage boy.
Jackie hesitated. "Maybe I ought to…?" She looked to her husband for an idea of where they should go next.
Pete looked at the Doctor, and then round at the others standing in the hallway of his daughter's house. "We'll go home, get things sorted," he decided. When they all looked at him puzzled, he explained. "Well, this place isn't big enough for all of you to stay in, is it? We'll get the spare beds made up." Jackie looked about to protest when Pete gave her a firm look. "Come on, love, lots to do."
As they left the Doctor gave a snort of laughter. "Huh. Finally someone can keep Jackie Tyler in check."
All three pairs of eyes landed on him, with varying degrees of disgust on the corresponding faces. Gwen left the room, followed quickly by Owen. Leaving the Doctor and Jack once again.
"What?" The Doctor looked at his old friend.
"Is all this a joke to you?" Jack asked incredulously.
"No, of course not…" the Doctor backtracked quickly. He sighed. "It's all just so new, it's all…" He shrugged and looked up the stairs. "I suppose I ought to go and check if he's alright."
Jack raised his eyebrows. "You really think that's a good idea? After the look he gave you? I'd let him cool off." He couldn't hide the slight smile that crept into his voice. "You don't want a broken jaw to go with that nose, do you?"
The Doctor touched his nose, wincing. "No, I guess not." He sighed heavily again. "Jack, what are we going to do? How are we going to win this one?" He was aware of the role reversal between them, the strange changing of places where he was the one asking advice of Jack for once.
"The Doctor I knew would have known," Jack said softly, then closed his eyes as he realized his mistake. "Sorry, I didn't mean that, I…"
"No, you're right." The Doctor shook his head. "He would have done. But I'm a bit out of practice, a bit…" He shrugged. "So I'm asking."
Jack nodded slowly. "Okay. I've been thinking. And there's only one plan…"
Upstairs, Rose towel dried her hair and tried to listen to the hushed voices in the next door room. She'd seen both Jon and Mickey disappear into there, and she suspected there'd been some kind of argument between her son and the Doctor. Before she could start dwelling on it all though, there was knock at the door. Gwen poked her head gingerly around the doorframe.
"I just came to check if you were okay," she said in her quiet gentle way. Rose couldn't help liking this woman who seemed to understand her whilst barely knowing her.
Rose forced a smile. "As okay as I can be. Come in," she encouraged her.
Gwen closed the door behind her. "Sorry to come up, but I had to get out from downstairs. It was all getting a bit testosterony."
"I bet," Rose agreed. "Must happen to you a lot, what with Jack and Owen."
Gwen shrugged. "Off and on." She didn't mention that she usually gave as good as she got, but Rose could imagine. She seemed ballsy, like Rose had once been herself. She wondered what had happened to that part of her, the part that had gone for whatever she thought was right. It had died around the same time as she'd had the twins; more important things had come up than being ballsy.
Rose pulled a comb through her hair and considered her words carefully before she next spoke. "I suppose you think I'm an awful mother."
Gwen looked at her in alarm. "No, no!"
"Leaving my son like I have today… never mentioning who their father was…" Rose shook her head at her own mistakes. "It's just… God, it's been hard." She felt tears welling up in her eyes again, as she thought about how she'd felt in that van today. Part of her had believed Janie was truly only a few minutes from salvation, that Jack and company would destroy the enemy and they'd all laugh about it in years to come. The more cynical half of her had known life was never that simple, that bad things happened to good people. Part of her now believed they were already too late.
Gwen didn't hesitate in putting her arm around the other woman. "I don't think anything like that," she insisted. "Listen, it'll all be fine, Toshiko knows what she's doing, we'll have found Janie by this evening, I'm sure."
Rose sniffed, and smiled. "Thanks, Gwen, but please don't patronize me. I know how these things work. I tried so hard, you know, tried to protect them. But I guess I wasn't good enough in the end."
Gwen rubbed her back. "Rose, don't upset yourself," she advised, knowing how ridiculous it all sounded. "I've seen things like this before, I've seen hopeless situations and there's always hope. Always."
Rose rubbed her eyes. "You sound like the Doctor. Or me, once upon a time." She shook her head. "Anyway, look at me, going on like this. Is Jon alright?"
Gwen pulled a face. "He was the one getting testosterony," she admitted. "You know what teenage boys are like."
Rose sighed. "Don't I just? Is Dad with him?"
"Your mum and dad have gone home, they said to follow them, that we can all stay there until…"
Rose nodded. "Right." She let out a long breath and stood up. "We better get ready then. Is the Doctor okay?"
Gwen hesitated. Would it really benefit Rose to know the truth, that the man she loved had snapped at her son, best friend and quipped about her mother, all at the same time as admitting that he had no plan for saving his daughter's life? She fixed a smile on her face. "He's good, yeah. Getting ready for action."
Rose nodded. "Good." As Gwen headed out the door she called her back. "Gwen?" Gwen paused. "Thanks."
"You want me to do what?" Rose stared between Jack and the Doctor, unable to believe her ears. "Are you mad? How can I go to work tomorrow when my daughter is missing?"
"That is a bit much," Gwen agreed, only earning herself a blank look from Jack.
"Rose, believe me if there was any other way…" The Doctor began, his face a picture of pain at putting her through it.
"There must be, so find it!" Mickey launched an attack on his friend's behalf. "You can't seriously expect her to go in and act like nothing's happened?" When neither of the two men in front of them replied immediately, Mickey shook his head. "You're crazy."
"There is no other way," Jack replied firmly, shooting the dissenters a glare. "We need all the information we can get, anything that could help. You might just find the missing piece."
"Can't Tosh do it?" Owen asked awkwardly. "I mean, it's a bit rough, isn't it?"
"Tosh can do as much as our equipment will allow," Jack explained. "But this is a different world, different space, different readings. All our equipment's working on borrowed time. We need your readings."
"Our readings are useless, though," Rose insisted. "They all get filtered out, everyone just ignores it." It was true; anything of any importance nearly always got glossed over in favour of the more exciting and scandalous supposed alien sightings, which always turned out to be a low flying Frisbee or a kid having a laugh at someone's expense. Even the collapse of the star yesterday had, by all accounts, been explained away as 'just one of those things'. Knowing what she knew now, Rose wanted to punch whoever had come up with that diagnosis. "Me going to work would solve nothing, I don't even work on the right department."
"Me neither," Mickey added. "Not since they made it all official. Even Pete's been shunted to one side since the Government took it over."
"That's where we come in," Jack continued.
"Who?"
"Captain Jack Harkness and John Smith, Government Inspectors of Torchwood." Jack grinned before delivering the punchline. "GIT for short."
"Oh dear God." Gwen buried her head in her hands. "That's it, you've actually lost the plot, haven't you? Just gone and lost it. What exactly is 'GIT' going to do?"
"We're going to investigate all the hidden files, all the small print, every single document that could hold any clue to what's been happening in the last few days."
"And how exactly?" Rose looked between them. "It's all password protected, you can only get into the files they want you to. They'll never let you see it all."
"Unless you've…" Mickey's jaw dropped. "The master password. You've got it, haven't you? The universal master password."
"Right. Give the boy a Blue Peter badge." The Doctor nodded, unable to resist the jolly aside and wincing as he said it. "I guess we should add 'good with inappropriate comments' to the list," he said apologetically to Rose, and even she managed a smile as she remembered his excitement that Christmas Day so long ago.
"See, that's the thing, I'm the Doctor, but beyond that I – I just don't know. I literally do not know who I am. It's all untested. Am I funny? Am I sarcastic? Sexy?" He gave Rose a cheeky wink as he went by, much to Mickey's disgust. "Am I an old misery? Life and soul? Right handed? Left handed? A gambler? A fighter? A coward, a traitor, a liar, a nervous wreck? I mean, judging by the evidence, I've certainly got a gob."
It was strange; it was only now she thought about it that she realized he was all those things in one, and so much more.
"But how?" Mickey shook his head incredulously, bringing Rose back into the present. "I've been working on that password for years, on the side. But I never even came close."
"Did you ever have a go, Rose?" the Doctor asked her, and she felt something of the old chemistry between them again, something warming the tips of her toes. His voice was gentler than she'd heard it in the last few hours, more directly talking to her.
She shook her head. "No, why?"
He smiled and nodded. "Figures."
Rose frowned and looked between the two of them in front of her, and glanced at Mickey. "What is it? What's this password?"
"Toshiko found it," Jack said.
Rose raised her eyebrows expectantly.
The Doctor dropped his voice even lower as he spoke again. "Bad Wolf. The password's Bad Wolf."
Rose felt the floor shift underneath her slightly as her eyes locked onto his and she felt the old feelings make themselves known again. The time she'd have done anything for him, the time she'd half-killed herself to save him. I am the Bad Wolf.
"You what?" Owen looked utterly lost. "Bad Wolf? What does that even mean? Is this some old private joke of yours, because if you're going to start trading old stories, I'm going to head off and help Tosh."
Rose smiled, silently thinking that, in his own way, Owen was as rude and inappropriate as the Doctor. "It means there's some hope," she said softly, not taking her eyes off the Doctor's face. "It means we can still do something."
