Disclaimer: I only own Doctor Who and Torchwood in my wildest fantasies. I'm only borrowing the characters.
Rated T for themes.

An Old Friend

It was the sight of the uniforms appearing in Marks and Spencers that made him think of her again. 1990 - she was four years old and would be starting school in two weeks time. He knew that he couldn't ever meet the child, but that didn't mean that he couldn't see her.
He took two days off and journeyed to London. Even with the A-Z he purchased at the station, it took a long time to find the address he recalled so vividly after all these years, a grotty flat on a council estate in Peckham that had definitely seen better days. Street corners were littered with cigarette butts and needles, and the stairwells stank of urine. All around was the sound of couples fighting and mothers yelling at their unruly children.
When night fell and teenagers started to gather in the shadows, he left and found a nearby hotel to spend the night. After a few hours spent surfing the porn channels, he paid his bill and left the hotel before breakfast, eager to return to his vigil.
He picked a spot where he could see the flat clearly, but he couldn't be observed by anyone else, and it wasn't long before they emerged; a woman with permed blonde hair, holding the hand of a small girl dressed in a pristine blue checked school dress, her mousy brown hair in neat pigtails and her brown eyes troubled.
"Come on, Rose," Jackie said encouragingly. "You don't want to be late for your first day."
"Don't wanna go," Rose said petulantly. "Mickey says school's boring."
"School's not boring, sweetheart," Jackie said brightly. "It's where you go to learn to be clever, like your daddy was. You want to be clever, don't you?"
Rose nodded. "Okay," she said, and started to skip alongside her mother as, hand-in-hand they headed to the local infants school.

Jack returned to the Powell Estate every few years, seeing Rose grow in spurts from a cute-as-a-button kid to a lithe young gymnast and into a teenage version of Jackie. Jack was fortunate enough to pick, by sheer fluke, to be visiting the day that Mickey Smith shyly leaned over and kissed her on the lips for the very first time.
The next time Jack returned to London, he bore witness to one of the lowest points of Rose's life. Now aged seventeen, and now with bleached hair, she stumbled, bruised and bleeding from a different flat on the estate. A man appeared in the doorway, clearly drunk and clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
"Don't walk away from me, you stupid whore!" he shouted at her, grabbing her by the hair and hauling her to her knees.
"I own you, bitch," he spat at her. "I take care of you."
Jack gripped the railing in front of him, his knuckles bone white. He wanted to step in, right there and then and save Rose from this terrible monster. But he knew that he would be changing established events, changing time, and Rose herself had told him what could happen if he did that. So, instead, he watched, trembling with incandescent rage. He watched Rose climb to her feet painfully, her head bowed in submission.
"I'm sorry, Jimmy," she said, her voice thick with pain. "You're right."
And she kicked him squarely in the crotch. Jack smiled, realising that this was the moment that made Rose the strong woman that she had become.
As Jimmy lay groaning, Rose limped to her mother's flat and in to Jackie's waiting arms.

It was well after midnight when Jimmy re-emerged from his flat and made a move to go to Rose's. Jack stepped into his path.
"Oh, I don't think so," Jack told him menacingly.
Jimmy made a move to go around him, but Jack threw his arm out, blocking the way.
"Who the hell are you?" Jimmy said, obviously even more tanked up than he had been previously.
"Someone you really don't want to mess with."
Sensing that Jack was not going to move, but far too drunk to realise that he would lose a fight, Jimmy took a swing at Jack. He missed, but Jack didn't.
"That felt good," Jack said, standing over the half-insensate Jimmy. "Not so much fun from your perspective, though, huh?"
He reached down and grabbed the front of Jimmy's t-shirt, dragging the young musician to his feet.
"Now, listen real good, and you never see me again," he said. "Fail, and I hit you again. You following me?"
Jimmy nodded, his eyes full of fear.
"You never lay a finger on Rose Tyler, ever again. Understood?"

Jack made sure that Jimmy stayed put until the police came for him the next morning, and after that he followed the case from the comfort of Torchwood Three. Jimmy was charged with five counts of ABH and one of GBH, his final assault having resulted in a miscarriage, and he was eventually sentenced to five years in prison.
He wondered why Rose had never mentioned that Jimmy had been such an abusive scumbag, or that she'd been pregnant by him, no matter how briefly. Was it possible that she was ashamed for having tolerated his beatings for so long? Or had she not wanted Jack and the Doctor to feel sorry for her? Jack supposed that he would never find out now.

Jack stayed away after that. It was getting too difficult to separate the current Rose from the one he knew. He wanted to visit on the day she met the Doctor, but he didn't dare. If nothing else, it would look too suspicious for him to be away in London when the Autons attacked. Instead, he prepared his team for the invasion, so subtly that even Suzie never noticed anything strange.

A month later, the police appealed for information on the BBC News. Jack wanted to call the distraught Jackie, assure her that Rose was perfectly safe. Sometimes, a certain knowledge of the future was a curse, a burden that was growing more and more difficult to bear as the years passed and he waited for the Doctor to return to him. It would be at least another two years before he would stand a chance of finding a version of his friends that coincided with him and he might finally find an answer to that burning question: why?

A/N: I don't know whether Jimmy Stone ever abused Rose, just that their relationship ended badly. It just seemed right when I was writing.