Part One

Cardiff, July 2004

Four years and things were beginning to come together. As Captain Jack Harkness leant over the gantry rail looking down over his team, he watched them with a considering eye. Just over four years ago he's looked down from the very same spot, his ears ringing with the silence of an empty Hub. Abandoned workstations, closed doors. The smell of blood and betrayal still lingering in the air.

So long ago that no one human's memory should have to stretch that far, Jack remembered an old woman he'd met in passing. A grandmotherly alien of a race that humanity would not meet for at least another thousand years. She'd been no-one special really, just an old lady he'd sat next to on a transport, mumbling to herself and sharing her home-made cakes with anyone in reach. He'd been so much younger then, older than a child but nowhere near being a man. His mother's teachings about manners had kept his mouth shut and his mockery tight inside his head, but he still remembered one thing the old woman had said.

She'd turned, looked him in the eye and said. "There can be no birth without blood. No new beginnings without pain."

He couldn't recall his own reaction to that, but four years ago the words had oddly come back to him as he'd looked down at the bodies of his teammates, murdered by one they trusted.

For one hundred and thirty years (give or take a few decades where he'd managed to slip out from Torchwood's clutches) he'd lived and worked here. For one hundred and thirty years he'd bitten back bile and revulsion and stamped on the voice inside his head that objected to the ignorant hatred and arrogant presumptions of his so called superiors. He'd made his own mistakes of course, had his own regrets, fallen foul of his own arrogance on more than one occasion, but inside, deep inside where the voice lived, he'd known from the very first day that this place, that Torchwood, was wrong. Not in what it was trying to do, but in the way it went about it.

He'd thought himself powerless. Held over a barrel. Condemned by the deal he'd signed with the devil back in the late 1800's. He'd been wrong. It had taken the slaughter of his colleagues and the memory of those words by an old woman to make him realise.

She'd been right. There could be no birth without blood. Could be no new beginnings without pain. But out of the ashes of blood and pain there had been a birth, or at least a rebirth. He'd done what he'd never found the nerve to do before. He'd stood up. He'd stood his ground. He'd taken control of Torchwood Three, and although there were still battles to be fought and the war was far from over, so far he was winning.

He'd built his own team. Built his own Torchwood, and ran it by his own rules. He'd seen off the stooges of Torchwood One on more than one occasion. The other offices left him alone, but didn't labour under the false sense of superiority that One did. So he'd fought tooth and nail to protect what he was trying to achieve and One hated it, hated him. But when hadn't they hated him?

They had good reason to. Their misguided purpose was at odds with his own. The Doctor. If there was one person in the universe One despised it was him. He also just happened to be the one person in the universe Jack Harkness believed in absolutely. It was in accordance to the ideals The Doctor and Rose had taught him - it was in their honour - that he'd reshaped Torchwood Cardiff. They'd changed him, shown him something, made him listen to the voice for the first time in too long, and when Torchwood Three had crashed and burned on millennium eve, he'd been able to do what he'd wanted to do for so long.

Now Three was back. He'd found people. Good people. People who hadn't been touched by One's lies. Who hadn't been corrupted and left hollow by the sheer inhumanity of One's methods. They were broken people though. Fringe people. Like he was. Touched by darkness and pain. They all had their stories. They'd all suffered as a result of their first brushes of what lay beyond the protective confines of the solar system. But they were decent people on the inside, and he hoped they could find some of what he had in Rose and the Doctor, in what they were doing here. Redemption. Purpose. Reason. He certainly wasn't the same man he'd been back when he'd first met them; he wasn't the con-man, the selfish and opportunistic deceiver he had once been. He'd stolen Captain Jack Harkness' name and identity to pull off a scam for financial gain, but perhaps now the man whose life he'd slipped into would be proud of what his name had become.

Jack was certainly starting to feel that pride in himself and he was beyond proud of the small team he was watching now.

Suzie Costello, Owen Harper and Toshiko Sato. In no other way would these three have ever been brought together, and at times it showed.

Like now.

The hub was filled with raised voices. Angry voices. Two voices. Owen and Suzie were at it again, and caught between them was dear sweet Tosh, too quiet and too desperate not to be noticed to be able to get away. It wasn't that Suzie and Owen meant her to feel discomfort, Jack was pretty sure of that, it was just that they were both incredibly passionate people, and quite vehement in their opinions.

As Jack watched, Tosh sank lower and lower in her chair at her terminal, the raging argument between the two senior team members getting louder and more heated above her head. Jack was about to call out, call a halt to the discussion before Tosh completely crawled under her desk, when an alert sounded across the hub, effectively cutting through every other sound in the room.

"Rift activity." Tosh announced, sliding back up in her seat, unaware that her actions made her team-mates take a step back from where they'd been crowding over her, pointedly looking at the screen rather than each other.

Having slipped quickly into his office to grab his coat, Jack started along the gantry towards the stairs calling out instructions as he went.

The team mobilised. Not the height of clinical efficiency, like some scene from a movie or American cop show, but with enough surety that it would be obvious to anyone watching that they knew what they were doing. It made him smile. Made him proud.

It didn't matter what they were going out to find. Four years and finally things were coming together.

~Tw~~wT~

The young man stared down at the words carved into smooth stone. Someone had been here fairly recently. There were dried out flowers leant against the grave-stone, next to the fresh bundle he'd just placed down.

He'd come here a lot once. It seemed like a long time ago now, although really it was only a few years. Things had changed since then. He'd come here a lot once; for answers, trying to find some kind of hope or guidance. He'd come for the comfort he hadn't been able to get elsewhere and hadn't realised then could never be found on the damp ground surrounded by cold stone.

She'd been gone such a long time. He could only barely remember her now. He knew her face, could sometimes remember her voice but he couldn't really remember her. Not the way he wanted to.

He was old enough to know now that she hadn't left on purpose. She hadn't left him on purpose. Life was just cruel like that sometimes. Still she'd died, and everything had changed. It was different now though. He had something he hadn't really had before.

Hope. Promise. A chance at a real life and a real future.

Just not here.

He'd come to say goodbye. Say his last farewells to all that had come before, so he could step into his future without it hanging over him. He hoped she'd understand. He was pretty sure she would.

With a small pained smile, the young man brushed his fingers one last time over the letters of her name and then stood, straightening his neatly ironed T-shirt as he stepped back onto the path and towards his bright and happy future.

That was when he saw the light. Saw the golden glow like the very air was on fire. He could only stare as the world tore in front of him. And then the lightning came.

~Tw~~wT~

Jack wasn't the biggest fan of cemeteries. He wasn't the biggest fan of rift alerts in bright daylight under clear skies either. Everything was just a bit too harshly real in daylight. Especially when they arrived too late.

The cemetery looked like a bomb site. Or more precisely, like it had been the epicentre of a gigantic thunderstorm, condensed down into a tight ball. Perfect pristinely kept graves all around, and then splat, an area about five metres in diameter completely decimated. Grave-stones shattered or flattened, trees splintered and felled. A bench in fragments. There were scorch marks everywhere – like lightning strikes, broken vases, bits of debris, and few inches from his foot, just inside the blackened blast area, a teddy-bear lay smouldering. That wasn't what made his stomach clench though.

No that was the body Tosh and Owen currently crouched over. They'd brushed past him just moments before, having run back to the SUV for their hazmat suits. Tosh had picked up some unusual readings as they'd approached the blast zone, and it was only wise to use caution entering the unknown.

Hazmat suits or not, Jack didn't know why they were hurrying. There was no way anyone could have survived in the middle of all this. Especially given those readings Tosh had been picking up on her PDA. Rift Energy, radiation, other strange patterns, spikes and fluxes that were way off the scale. He couldn't say he'd ever seen readings like it, so he wasn't surprised when no-one else knew what the hell it was, or had been, that had ripped through this place.

As he watched, Jack began to frown. Tosh and Owen weren't looking over the body like they were investigating a corpse. No, they were working with the body like the poor guy was...

Just as the thought trickled through the immortal's mind, Owen tore back the hood of his Hazmat suit and yelled. "He's still alive!"

Tbc...