As they ran for the hub, Jack was thankful for the early hour. No one to see them sprinting, full pelt, across the plass, and the city seemed calm, bathed in the dawn light.

He considered the lift down, but it moved too slow, confined their location, and put them at risk. He didn't know, yet, what had breached the facility, so he grabbed Gwen's hand and tugged her towards the public entrance.

They stepped into the tourist information centre cautiously, and Jack let his eyes flicker over the room, assessing it quickly. There was no sign of a break-in, and none of the perimeter alarms had been tripped.

"Code?" Gwen hissed, pointing at the concealed keypad, and Jack nodded, waiting until she'd punched it in before sliding through the door ahead of her.

Whatever had come through the rift, had come through inside the hub and Jack wanted to be the first thing a potentially aggressive alien took a swing at.

The device strapped to his wrist was still issuing soft beeps of warning, and as soon as they were inside, Jack had pulled his weapon, and snagged Gwen a gun from the first weapon cabinet they passed, handing it to her with a murmured "Just in case."

He'd only taught her how to shoot the previous day, the last thing he wanted after the night she'd just been through was for the woman to have to pull the trigger on a hostile alien, so Jack stayed ahead of her as they moved through the hub, checking rooms and offices as they went.

"What are we looking for?" Gwen whispered, and Jack forced himself to shrug.

"Anything out of place. Whatever it was came through inside the hub. The rift energy spiked in here, but nothing had tripped any of the perimeter alarms."

"Animal, vegetable or mineral?" she asked, and he could hear the sarcasm in her tone and had to fight back a grin.

"Might be all three," he teased, and he could practically hear Gwen roll her eyes.

The pair fell silent as they kept moving through the hub, directing each other with hand signals more than words, and checking each section before moving along.

It was only as they stepped into Jack's office that they stumbled over the rift debris, and Jack felt his heart still in his chest and his blood run cold.

He could see Gwen aim her gun at the figure, but he lowered his own weapon in shock.

Blonde hair, wide jaw, and even sprawled out, unconscious, on the floor of his office, Jack would recognise her anywhere.

"Rose—?" her name escaped him in a strangled groan. Jack didn't remember moving, but he was suddenly beside her on the floor, his weapons holstered as he gently turned her over, fingers searching, brushing her hair away from her familiar face.

"Oh please, please don't be dead," he whispered, hands shaking as they sought out a pulse. A strangled but hope-filled exclamation escaped him when he found one, and he carefully slid his arms around her form, her face twisting into a mask of pain as he moved her.

"Hold on, Rosie," he whispered, lips pressed gently against her forehead. She was thin, too thin. Half-starved, but so very, very alive, and Jack carefully settled her head against his shoulder while he eased the rucksack off her form, leaning it against his desk.

One arm slid around her waist and braced her back, the other hooked beneath her knees, and Jack was back on his feet, mind racing ahead. She might be alive, but she was in dire need of a medical professional, and that wasn't something he could help her with.

"Gwen, call Owen. Get him— Get him in here right now!" he ordered,

voice cracking as he cradled the blonde in his arms carefully, and marched directly for the morgue, refusing to consider that it might end up being used for that purpose.

If he had to give up the remainder of his freakishly long life, Rose Tyler was going to live.

As soon as Owen had arrived in the hub, grumpy and irritated for being dragged back so soon after leaving, Jack had sent Gwen home for some rest.

Rest was what she needed, he'd told her, and it had nothing to do with the multitude of questions he could see gathering behind her eyes.

None of the others would question him, but Gwen... she was so much like Rose. It's one of the reasons he'd recruited her, but now her insatiable curiosity and propensity to challenge him would be a detriment.

Until he could speak to Rose, he didn't know what answers to give. He'd all but ordered Owen to make sure Rose stayed alive, and then retreated to his office to wait. Sitting beside the phone, waiting for any news from the doctor down in the morgue.

Time had never seemed to move so slowly before, not in all his hundreds of years of life, and all Jack could do was stare at the phone, begging it to ring with good news.

He desperately needed some good news.

Riii—

It didn't even finish the first ring before Jack had scooped it up and pressed it to his ear.

"Tell me."

"You'd better get down here. She's waking up," came Owens voice over the phone, and Jack dropped it back into the cradle before running from his office.

Down the stairs, weaving his way through the desk stations. The hub was a mess, how was he supposed to manoeuvre this mess in an attack? He'd have to speak to Ianto. The morgue lights were down low, and as he headed for the back of the hub he could hear Owens' voice. Low and quiet, and he almost skidded to a stop at the top of the ramp, eyes fixed on Rose.

Eyes away, talking quietly, and he could feel a grin split his face.

"Rose!"

The moment he called her name, she almost shot up off the bed, her head snapping around to stare at him, her jaw dropped in surprise or shock, he couldn't tell, but with a delighted laugh, he vaulted over the rail and into the morgue proper.

Screw the ramp, there was a Rose Tyler in need of a hug.

He wasn't sure if he ran or flew to her side but the next moment he was pulling her into his arms, her hands were clinging to his coat, and tears were streaming down her face as she choked against his shoulder.

"Jack!"

It was the kind of hug she'd given after a near-death escape. It was the kind of hug Rose had given when she'd thought she was about to lose someone. Jack had been on enough adventures with the Doctor and the blonde in his arms to recognise the desperation in her grip and he held her tighter.

"Damn it, Jack!" Owen was snarling furiously, "Her senses are hyper-enhanced! You could be hurting her!"

His heart dropped to his stomach, and Jack released her instantly, stepping back with wide eyes and panic in his throat, but Rose gave a sharp wordless sound that stilled his movements.

The last thing in the universe he'd want to hurt was this girl, and Jack stared at her, scared to move closer and scared to move away. The fear in her voice had torn at his heart, and both her hands were clinging to one of his like a lifeline.

"Don't— Jack, please. Where am I?" she all but begged, eyes wet with tears of relief and fear locked onto his face and she seemed to search his expression desperately, waiting for his answer and Jack swallowed hard.

He lifted his free hand to her cheek, brushing away the falling tears, his heart aching with emotion. He'd missed her. Guarding over her childhood from afar wasn't the same, but then he'd hurt her... but it wasn't about him right now.

He still had to be careful. He didn't know where, or when, she had come from. Jack took a steadying breath before tilting his head towards Owen.

"Rose Tyler, meet Doctor Owen Harper. You're at Torchwood Three, Cardiff Office—"

"Torchwood?" she asked, tensing quickly. Jack could see Owen's eyebrows raise at the clear recognition in her voice, but Jack ignored him and shifted his free hand to settle on her shoulder, keeping the touch light and reassuring.

If she recognised Torchwood, then she was probably at the right point in her timeline.

"Rose, if I say Canary Wharf..."

"It's in my past," she muttered and felt himself relax, before nodding.

"Torchwood Cardiff is my branch. Torchwood One and Four were both destroyed, and Torchwood Two is just one man in Glasgow. You're safe here."

Rose stared at him for a long moment, and fear curled in his stomach for the first time. She and the Doctor had left him behind on Satellite Five. What if she didn't trust him anymore? What would he do if she ran? But then she blew out a relieved sigh and the tension leaked from her form as she nodded.

She shifted slightly, her lips twisting into a grimace, and she turned her attention back to the doctor.

"Will this... fade?" she asked, letting go of Jack's hand just long enough to gesture down at her own body and Jack took the opportunity to shift closer, to stand beside the bed she was still perched on, and gently lacing his fingers together with the hand that had still been clinging to him.

"The hyper-sensitivity?" Owen asked, arms crossed and apparently making a concerted effort to keep his voice low "I don't know, depends what caused it."

It was delivered with his usual bluntness, but his tone seemed to relax Rose, her shoulders dropping some more tension as Owen studied her with a hawklike gaze.

"What, exactly, happened to you?" Owen asked her shooting Jack a half-hearted glare, a warning to not interrupt again. Like Jack had ever listened to his orders.

She didn't answer him though, glancing up at Jack quickly, and he offered her a small smile, and a soft nod of reassurance, his heartwarming once more at the display of trust from the blonde. He didn't know what he'd done to be left behind, but he was determined not to do it again.

With his silent confirmation that Rose could trust Owen, she loosed a sigh and turned back to the doctor. She paused, hesitated, lips pressing together, but eventually Rose answered his question, speaking slowly as though unsure if they'd believe her.

"I was travelling... through the void."

Fear for her flooded him, and he wanted to demand to know what the hell the Doctor had been doing letting her anywhere near to void, but he could read the hesitation on her face and silenced his own questions.

"That's impossible—"

"Owen, you might want to re-evaluate the meaning of the word 'impossible if Rose plans on sticking around," Jack cut in quickly. He forced himself to sound teasing, but the gentle smile she sent told him he'd not been entirely successful in hiding his worry.

"I was trapped... in a parallel universe," she continued, her words cautious and slow, but her voice remained steady, "I was offered a way to come back, and I took it." Rose glanced between them as she spoke, but as her lips twisting into a half-smile she let her whiskey-gold eyes settle on Jack. "I didn't spend a lot of time asking about things like side effects. It was possible to come back and survive the trip, that's all I needed to know."

Of course that had been all she needed to know.

Despite the defensive lift of her chin, Jack didn't call her on her recklessness, and Owen didn't know her enough to care. Jack would wait hundreds of years, thousands, to find the Doctor again. By comparison, crossing the void with guaranteed odds of survival would be a walk in the park for the blonde who held the Time Lords' hearts.

"So, you're originally from this universe?" Owen continued, pulling a pen out of his lab coat and scooping up the clipboard hanging from the end of her bed to make some notes, "Why'd you come back?"

Jack almost snorted. The Doctor, of course, but he wondered what story Rose would spin until she growled instead.

"That's not relevant."

Jack froze, eyes wide and he stared down at her in surprise. Not that he'd never heard her angry, but there was a thread of command to her voice that was new, and Jack suddenly began studying her face carefully.

How long had it been for her? How many years had she aged, matured, and grown? There was a confidence to her he'd missed in his elation at finding her again, and he added it to the growing list of questions in his head that he needed to ask her when they were alone.

She must have felt his tension because she glanced up at him again before clearing her through and her features slipped quickly back into a soft smile, but Jack could see it for the mask it was.

"Sorry," she offered, turning back to Owen, "'s been a long... trip. It's really not important though, I just— I just didn't fit. It wasn't right there, and I had to leave."

The room stayed silent for a moment, and Jack swallowed. He carefully disentangled his hand from hers and watched as her smile vanished, replaced with silent panic, her head snapping round just as he slid his arm around her waist and pulled her into a gentle hug.

Time might have passed, Rose might have changed, but so had Jack. It didn't mean he loved her any less, and he refused to think it had changed the core of the compassionate young woman he'd travelled with. He couldn't say any of it with Owen right there, but he hoped Rose could feel it.

The hug seemed to snap Owen out of his thoughts too, and the doctor cleared his throat sharply as Rose sank into Jack's side.

"Right, well. S'just a theory," Owen began, carefully hooking the clipboard back onto the end of her improvised morgue slab turned bed. "Considering nothing's supposed to be able to travel the void—"

"Almost nothing," Jack corrected, and Owen glared at him.

"Nothing good. The void's nothing, completely nothing. No light, dark, no sound, sight, taste, touch, texture—"

"There a point to this, Owen?" Jack cut the Doctor off again, feeling Rose begin to tense again where she was pressed against his side, a shudder travelling across her form.

"A human body going through that could react in the same way it would do to prolonged use of sensory deprivation," Owen said with a heavy sigh.

"Extreme levels of sensory deprivation, and not just some of the senses, but all of them. If that's an accurate diagnosis, and if there's no additional side effects, your body could probably adapt to normal sensations again over time, and become less perceptive, muting things back down to a normal, human, level."

"That's an awful lot of 'could's' and 'if's'..." Rose forced out, her voice was light but a shaky laugh escaped her as her words trailed off, and Jack let his hand rub soothingly along her arm, keeping his touch light as Owen simply shrugged again, carelessly.

"We've pulled a lot of shit outta the rift, but I can't say we've pulled a person out before. Gotta say, you might be one of a kind, sweetheart."

His comments managed to pull a startled laugh from Rose, and that was the only thing stopping Jack from reminding Owen about his abysmal bedside manner. The doctor seemed to get the message just from the glare Jack had shot him, however, and sobered quickly, continuing to explain his findings to Rose, minus the cheap shots.

"You might always find yourself more sensitive, long-term heightened senses. It might take a few weeks or a few years to fade entirely, or never. Really it would depend on how long you've been deprived of stimuli and how unused to that stimulus your senses are. But what with there being no time in the void either that's even more difficult to predict."

Silence fell in the morgue as Rose seemed to consider his words, a frown marring her features, but the irascible doctor quickly lost patience, and let loose a loud sigh of exasperation.

"In other words, I can pretty accurately diagnose the cause, but as far as I can tell there's no cure other than the highly likely expectation that you will recover on your own in some indeterminate amount of time."

"Gee, thanks," Rose drawled, a dry sarcasm to her tone that brought a genuine grin to Jack's lips, and even Owen laughed.

"At last, someone down in this pit with a bit of spirit! You'll be fine," Owen declared with a casual wave of his hand, before pulling the latex gloves from his hands and tossing them carelessly into a nearby bin while Rose laughed, and Jack watched her.

He couldn't help it. Could barely tear his eyes away from her. She was like a miracle brought to life. He had about half a million questions, only half of which he suspected she could answer, but he held them back. Now wasn't the time, and he'd waited this long. Waiting a bit longer wouldn't kill him.

He hoped.

Instead, he turned to Owen, asking him about which tests he'd run and the results. Making sure there was nothing that could reveal Roses' secrets, and nothing abnormal in the results that the doctor had garnered.

It was when Owen hissed that she was as healthy as he could make her without a miracle, that Jack finally relented, apologising, and letting the doctor go home for the remainder of the day.

When he turned back to Rose, he found she'd settled back against the bed and succumbed to sleep once more, and Jack let himself smile down at her for a long moment, before leaving to make preparations.

His team could do with a day off. Gwen and Owen had made it home until the early hours of the morning, and after the Ghost Machine, Tosh and Ianto could do with a day off too, barring any emergencies.

And then there was Rose. With the small blonde officially dead, he knew she had nothing but the clothes on her back and whatever was inside the rucksack she'd had strapped to her.

No name, no money, and nowhere to go and Jack wasn't about to let that situation be what she awoke to the next time her honey brown eyes flickered open.

On the third morning that Rose woke up on her makeshift bed in Torchwood's morgue, she stretched out under the soft blankets that Jack had supplied her with. Rubbing her cheek against the barely-there fabric of her pillow, it took a moment for consciousness to settle against her mind, but when it did Rose froze.

Cautiously, she shifted again. The weight of the blankets didn't feel like they were bruising her skin anymore, and the pillow that had scratched against her face just the day before now felt like she was resting against a summer cloud.

Rose stretched a hand outside the blanket, and a grin lit her face. The air was cool, she was still sleeping in the morgue, but the cold against her skin no longer felt like knives carved from ice slicing against her nerves.

She sat up, and stood from the makeshift bed, standing still for a long moment as she waited for the pressure against her feet to morph into a constant, dull ache, but it never came and Rose couldn't smother a delighted laugh escaping her.

To celebrate, she made a pot of tea, waking Jack with a hot cup that she wouldn't have been able to hold onto the previous day, let alone drink.

It took the sleepy Captain a moment to realise what her small hand holding a hot cup of tea meant, but a moment later he'd pulled her laughing form into the tight crushing hug that they'd both been craving since their impromptu reunion.

With touch once again under her control, Rose could move, stand, sit and run. She could hold hot drinks and handle cool metal tools. It also cleared her head of the constant discomfort caused by the simple act of walking or wearing clothes. It allowed her to think.

Her hearing was still sharp, and light hurt her eyes. The combination of the two exacerbated inputs gave Rose a near-constant headache, but she was controlling that with carefully regulated pain killers.

The heightened sense of smell and taste were forcing her into at least three showers a day, and restricting her meals to bland, simple foods. The only thing she was able to stomach easily was her morning cuppa.

Despite the restrictions, this laced on her, the mere fact that her touch sensation had returned to a normal level had Owen more confident that her other senses would also recede given enough time and careful stimulus. More or less, he'd added with a grin that had earned him a swift punch to the arm from Gwen.

It was a week before Owen decided there was no need for her to stay in medical and be monitored. An hour later, Jack had shown her to a decent-sized room that he'd furnished with a simple but comfortable bed, a desk, a small wardrobe and enough shelving that Rose was convinced it had previously been some kind of storage room.

While the Captain didn't confirm her suspicions, he also didn't refute them.

It took her a few days to get settled into the room Jack had given her and to explore the easily overlooked passageways inside the Torchwood hub. The underground institute held everything from archived alien artefacts to the state of the art shower rooms, all the better to remove alien blood, goo and other secretions, Jack had told her with a grin that made the blonde roll her eyes.

Slowly though, Rose learnt the routine within the hub and began to wake early enough in the morning so that she was up, showered, dressed and halfway through her breakfast by the time anyone other than Jack arrived for the workday. With an ease that surprised everyone, Rose had been able to slide herself into the Torchwood team, barely causing a ripple.

The first time they'd needed to go out on location, Rose had sat herself at a workstation, used Jack's details to log in, and proceeded to patch herself into their comms. She'd made herself useful by tracking them through CCTV and monitoring atmospheric readings from the hub, relaying the pertinent information to the team, and despite Jacks' grumblings about changing his passwords her eye-in-the sky help had aided the teams' investigation.

While the team worked in the hub, Rose busied herself with maintaining the armoury, checking the weapons for damage and cleaning them regularly.

As her senses slowly began to dull down, she could be found in one of the training rooms attacking a punching bag with jabs and kicks to keep her reflexes sharp and help rebuild the muscles that had wasted away within the void.

Sometimes, when neither of them could sleep for nightmares, Rose and Jack would spar until one or both of them collapsed in exhaustion, but he never asked her the question Rose could see hovering behind his blue eyes.

It was only six weeks after she had landed unconscious in the middle of Torchwood, and Jack handed her a wage packet, that she realised he'd officially added her to the staff list, and after some scolding for not telling her about it, the two spent the evening with beer and pizza, creating an alias that Rose could use outside of the hub.

She was still looking for the Doctor, but so was Jack. It was obvious that not only did Torchwood have the best resources to locate the elusive Time Lord, but that Jack had set up the Cardiff base on the rift specifically because it was inevitable that, eventually, the Tardis would need to refuel.

Until then, Rose decided as she lay on her bed, inside her room in the hub of Torchwood Cardiff, she would bide her time helping Jack and being 'Defender of the Earth' for just a little while longer.