A/N: Finally finished! Thanks for reading.

Chapter Six

I need your grace

To remind me

To find my own.

They sit outside, oblivious to the cold, and watch the snow whirling thick and fast. Big fat flakes, pure white against the pitch-black sky. Real snow, Rose thinks. Not the falling ashes of a burning ship. She can almost see Christmas. Jack is quiescent next to her, wrapping himself in an artificial pretense of safety, and all around them the night is still and cold and calm.

She idly tries is count the snowflakes, but soon has to leave off. There are too many, and the numbers get away from her.

"Last time I saw snow," Jack is saying, "I woke up face-down in an avalanche of it." He looks wistfully reminiscent. "Now that I think of it, I can't remember what planet that was...bet it was a hell of a good story, though."

Rose looks at him, and sees memories. "You're not so different from my Jack."

"You miss him."

"I miss a lot of things," she says tonelessly.

"Tell me about it." Jack pulls his overcoat tighter around himself. "You know," he continues, thoughtful, "here...the Time Lords, they're a myth. A story, something told to children. A pretty fairy tale."

Rose knows, she's done her research. "Fairy tales don't exist anymore," she says, matter-of-fact. "An' if they do, then they haven't got happy endings." Wonderland is gone, or maybe there was no rabbit-hole in the first place.

Jack doesn't bother to reply, because he knows this all too well.

"Did you lose a lot of people?" she asks softly.

"Yes. Too many." He has spent a long while trying to drown out the screaming that echoes dully and persistently in his mind.

She nods and casts her gaze skyward. The snow has not slackened. The trees and grass and Rose's car are pristine beneath it. "He was the last," she says. "His planet died. We watched my planet die." But still kept running. Because the wonderful always eclipsed the terrible. Endless stars spread out beneath her feet. She smiles faintly. "He was the last, and he was my life. Never did get to see Barcelona."

"It's gotten touristy," Jack says off-handedly. "Pompeii, on the other hand..." Pauses. "I can't stay on this planet for much longer. If the Time Agency catches up with me here, well...there'll be hell to pay, and Torchwood won't get off lightly."

"I know." She flexes her fingers, starting to become numb. "How long are you going to run for?"

He narrows his dark eyes, anger flares up. "You think I enjoy it? I used to think that I'd rather die than run like a coward." And he has seen too much, and has too much pride, to give into fear. He's not running because he's afraid, but because he wants to live. Life wins out any day.

And Rose understands this, what he isn't saying. And understands why he believes her and why he is sitting with her still. Bad Wolf, inscribed on the marred and battered ship, waiting in the dark. So maybe it doesn't matter if fairy tales are real or not.

"Would you go back an' change what happened, if you could?"

"No," he says instantly, without hesitation. "I'd rather be here now with nothing than be ignorant of the universe falling apart." And what use is it, he thinks, staring into the past? He's already made up his mind, and so has Rose.

"I'm not goin' to let them destroy Torchwood," Rose tells him firmly. There is always a choice, she knows. A choice to refuse to obey.

Jack raises an eyebrow at her. "You got fleet of time machines and an armory hidden down your shirt?"

"Ha. No." She takes a deep breath of air so cold that is hurts her lungs, and there is clarity all around. "But Torchwood is the one thing I've got, an' I'm not going to lose it. And they've taken too much from you already...and from my Jack. I'm not here to sit by and do nothin'. Just tell me what I can do."

He looks at her, sees purpose, and feels the beginnings of resolve. And elusive hope. The corners of his mouth turn up in a sly grin. "If you're going to help me, Rose Tyler, then you can start by busting my ship out of your bunker - and whatever weapons you have buried there."

Later that night, Rose curls up tightly in her bed and cannot sleep. She sits up in front of the window, watches the snow fall by the outdoor lamps. Past her door and down the hall, the floorboards protest faintly underneath Jack's feet. In an attempt at practicality, she has convinced him to rest while they both still can, while it is still quiet, before returning to Torchwood at dawn. She knows Mickey and Jake are still there working very late, and opts to wait for the shift change, feeling mercilessly guilty because she knows she will not tell them.

So she sits in her room and listens to Jack pace, and tries with great effort not to consider what the implications will be of what she is planning to do. Or of what the consequences will be if she doesn't do anything. A small key, long unused but not forgotten, glints quietly in the subdued glow of light falling across the windowsill.

Jack yawns until his jaw cracks, rubs his eyes. He is exhausted, but uneasy and cannot sleep. Wants to be back on his ship and far away, to have his feet well off the ground again. Thinks about the strange girl in the next room whose name is buried in the remains of Torchwood Tower thirty centuries from now, and about the plan that he doesn't quite have.

"Rose."

"Hm." Rose stirs, opens her eyes, disoriented. Jack is standing in the doorway, and she blinks at him and tries to focus her eyes in what little light there is. "Fell asleep."

"We need to leave," Jack is telling her, the urgency clear in his hushed tone. He holds out his arm, and she can see a pinprick of red blinking insistently in the shadows. "Radar," he says succinctly. "Picking up on the Agency's ships. We have to get out of here now. And fast."

She throws a hurried glance at the clock - not quite the time she had planned, but that can't be helped, and she springs out of bed to gather clothes and shoes, moving as quietly as she can manage. The rest of the house slumbers around them, and for once the stairs are silent beneath her feet.

Jack has shot outside like an arrow in front of her, and a flurry of powdery snow swirls and blows into the house and settles softly across the floor. At the door Rose halts abruptly, turns on her heel at the front of the great, tall, ticking grandfather clock. Pauses for a millisecond, then resolutely reaches out a gloved hand and stops the swinging brass pendulum. The tick tock ceases, the ancient hands on the clock face slow and stop. And she follows Jack out into the night, tracking footsteps across the flawless white path.

They pile wordlessly into her car, and she breathes a sigh of relief when it starts up immediately and keeps her foot pressed to the floor, knuckles white around the wheel, until Torchwood comes into view.

Rose drives to the far side of the tower, where the lot is blessedly empty, and kills the engine and flicks off the lights. "Right," she breathes, looking sharply all around. "Plan?"

Jack looks faintly bemused. "Do you need one?"

She glances at him, with enough sense to be mildly exasperated. "Don't try an' tell me that Captain Jack Harkness doesn't have a plan."

He leans over. "Right. The general idea is to get the hell out of here before my ass is vaporized. Want more details?"

"Uh-huh." She unbuckles her seatbelt and pockets her keys, trying to ignore they way her hands shake ever so slightly. "I'll make sure the airdock is clear. Give me five minutes."

Rose is relieved to find the hangar is nearly empty, and she easily dismisses the sole couple of technicians on her way across the scuffed and cluttered floor. They leave quickly and without question, grateful to go home to rest. She sees Jake moving around the far side of Jack's ship, and takes a deep breath and goes over to him, thinking absently that she'd give an arm for some psychic paper.

Jake hears her footsteps, and looks up with a frown. "Not doing anything I shouldn't be, am I?" He holds his palms up, clearly conveying annoyance. "Mind explaining to me what's going on?"

Guilt seeps in, and it feels familiar. After all Jake has done, she knows he doesn't deserve to be lied to. "Probably nothing."

"Probably nothing is why you had to stop my work earlier without an explanation?"

"No." She pauses. "I'm sorry, I am...is Mickey still here?"

"Went to get coffee," Jake says, rubbing a hand across his face in a tired gesture. "Think he's on his way out soon."

"Why don't you go as well?" Rose suggests, keeping her tone as light as possible. "Take a break, you look exhausted...I'll keep an eye on 'fings here."

Jake shrugs, exasperated but admittedly too tired to start an argument. "Not much to keep an eye on, anyway."

Rose hurries to shut the door quietly behind him, overrides the lock, and thinks ridiculously to herself that Torchwood security shouldn't be this easy to breach, even for her.

She leans over a computer and taps out a hurried sequence of numbers on the keyboard, furrowing her brow in consternation. The security codes for the building are immensely complicated, out of necessity. Mickey knows them, has in fact set most of them, but Rose is well aware that her abilities are still quite lacking in comparison.

Jack's footsteps echo across the floor in the cavernous space as he strides up to her at a half-run, having decided that it is far past time to go. "Outdated," he comments, hefting a bulky, unidentified alien weapon out of one of the piles of equipment Rose had been trying to tag the previous week. "But it'll work."

"I'm trying to shut down the alarms for this room," Rose tells him, pushing her long-hanging hair back from her face in frustration. "We'll 'ave every guard in 'ere in ten seconds otherwise."

Jack casually leans over the keyboard and scoffs at the twenty-first century technology. "No, we won't." He rapidly punches in a series of keys, too quickly for Rose to follow, and the computer beeps amicably in reply and quietly shuts down, along with the alarms and cameras that flicker and die inconspicuously . "Who programmed that, anyway?"

Rose is mildly indignant. "We 'ave the best security in the country."

"Well, obviously." He shoulders the weapon, and she watches as he turns and presses a button on the device strapped around his wrist. "It won't be offline for long, though."

"You'd best hurry, then."

Jack's ship, Bad Wolf, shifts and moves and creaks slightly, and along the rusted underside a barely-visible set of doors slide open, a barred ramp unfolds and touches the floor with a metallic clang.

"Remote control," Jack acknowledges as he springs toward it. "The very best in technology from the Time Agency."

Rose cracks a smile, watches with a feeling of distant familiar longing as the machine comes to life. "Very Spock," she comments absently, and resolutely places both hands on the lever mounted on the nearby panel that opens the entire far wall of the airdock, and pulls.

She winces at the glaringly loud noise, knowing it won't go unnoticed by about the entire complex. Her heart is in her throat - she has had enough trouble trying so arduously to explain her actions in the past, when she couldn't really claim to know all the how's and why's.

Jack pauses, halfway up the heavy grated ramp, and turns back to her expectantly. "You coming or what?"

The sounds fades out all around and the walls fade away, and there is just Jack standing at the entrance of this rusty and dented time-traveling ship with a beguilingly simple question.

And Rose stands very still, and breathes, and looks up at him. At the doorway behind him that holds the promise of so much, at one more chance at everything. At her world's future.

Jack shrugs at her reticence. "You can't save Torchwood in the fifty-first century standing around in this one, Rose. What's it going to be?"

All of the time she could ever want, within reach. The opportunity to change what will be. There is always a choice, and now there is nothing but a crystalline clarity all around. I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself. What does it matter if there are no fairy tales? Perhaps we write our own, and maybe there are no endings.

And Rose, without a further thought or backward glance, bolts forward up the ramp, feet clanking on the metal, and past Jack, and into the ship. The door slides shut behind them with a smooth quiet click, and Rose cannot hear the sound of Mickey shouting after her on the ground, yelling over and over.

The inside of Jack's ship is cluttered, dark, and Rose has to duck past a bit of low-hanging ceiling on her way in. Smells faintly of metal and something like motor oil, and she makes her way to the very front of the ship with its broad domed window and worn panels with a multitude of controls that appear to have been thrown together haphazardly.

"Welcome aboard," Jack announces, maneuvering past her. "We'll have to save the grand tour for another time."

She presses a finger to something that looks like an old computer keyboard, and looks all around, taking everything in. "Feels like home." And she blinks at an errant twinge of familiar bittersweet nostalgia. A hand wrapped tightly around her own, her cheek pressed against a battered leather jacket. But you never take time to imagine the impossible - maybe you survive.

Jack bustles around her, gracefully sliding into the wide pilot's seat. He swiftly flicks multiple switches, pushes buttons with practiced ease and the curved console is suddenly illuminated with rapidly blinking lights and glowing screens. Numbers and symbols flicker and scroll. The interior is filled with a gentle humming that grows in volume until the entire ship springs to life, rumbling and shaking around them. Rose wraps her hands around the back of the chair and tries to plant her feet steadily.

"Ready?" Jack throws her a manic grin, and for a moment the shadows are chased away from underneath his eyes and he is young again, in love with the thrill of it all.

And Rose smiles back at him, a true smile, full of anticipation. She is nearly giddy, and her mind is too cluttered with the here and now to focus clearly on what she is leaving behind, or who. Unfairly, perhaps. But there is a universe out there that needs saving, and the opportunity, and Jack and this ship, and she has nearly forgotten just how badly she needs to be out in the middle of it. Backwards or forwards in time?

"Yeah," she confirms, "Let's go." And feels full of intent and purpose and reason. The ship lurches all around them, and within minutes lofty Torchwood Tower shrinks far into the distance, along with the innumerable glittering pinpoints of the city behind them. Sunlight begins to seep over the horizon, pale and luminous - it is dawn.

fin