It was as if she had just been kicked in the stomach. She felt her heart stop within her chest, her blood lay dormant in her veins, as if the shock had devoid her of any lifelike qualities.

When she looked up at him, she felt a flare of anger. She found herself standing, slamming the newspaper down on the table. "This is sick."

Jack said nothing. At his silence, she felt a panic rise in her chest. He wasn't…he couldn't be serious?

"No," she said out loud, shaking her head. "God, this is sick. Is this your idea of a joke?"

Jack leaned forward, staring at her, unblinking. "Do I look like I'm joking?"

Samantha looked from him to the date on the newspaper, and she knew somehow that he was not lying.

"But that's-that's impossible..." she found herself saying.

"I'm sorry," Jack said, his voice quiet, "I'm so sorry."

"Twenty years," Samantha said, her voice barely above a whipser. "You're telling me that this is...this is the future?"

Slowly, Jack nodded.

Samantha at first couldn't take it in. It was impossible. It was only the kind of thing she had ever read about, people traveling through dimensions, finding new worlds to explore, searching the unknown. She had theorized and worked hard to put herself on the track to start a career that would enable her to study and theorize with other scientists, but she never did she actually think it would ever be discovered in her lifetime. She believed in them, hoped to discover them all her life, but she had never planned on actually experiencing one. The most she had ever expected was to teach those theories at a university, debate theories with her colleagues.

In a moment, all of that had changed. In one moment, her dreams, her hopes, had become a reality. She would have traded the fantasies for the reality in a second.

"But you can reverse it," she said. It wasn't until the words were out of her mouth that she felt a spark of hope stir within her chest. "Right? I mean you can just power the Rift and open it back up in my time and send me back?"

Before Jack could answer, she found herself plowing on. As long as she could talk, he couldn't dispute her.

"I mean, it shouldn't be that hard. If you open the central matrices within a designated timeframe, it should open up to same time and place it last did; you just have to reverse the signal so it goes the other way...right?"

Jack was taken aback at her logic, at her reasoning skills, but what would work in theory wasn't going to help her then.

"I'm sorry," he said. "We can't open the Rift. It's...it's beyond our abilities."

"Why?" she found herself asking. It wasn't until the word left her mouth that she felt an anger swell up inside her, ripping its way through the surface. Jack started to explain the Rift mechanics, the rules of time and space when she added, "Why me?"

Jack looked up at her, unsurprised by the question, but not having the answer. "That's the question, isn't it? Always the same question, but...I know what happened to you. I don't know why. We don't know why the Rift works the way it does. I don't know if we ever will."

Samantha didn't know what to think. She wanted answers, but she found that she couldn't even form the questions in her mind.

"My brother didn't go through with me," she stated evenly, "Did he?"

Jack shook his head. "No."

"He's...he would be..."

"He's twenty seven," Jack said before she could figure it out. "He's living in London now," he added.

"Is he...? What I mean is-"

"He's living on his own, if that's what you mean," Jack finished for her. "He's not married."

Samantha felt her head swimming with the flood of thoughts, but most of all with that former revelation. That her brother – her seven year old brother – was old enough to possibly be married.

"What am I supposed to do?" she asked, staring down at her hands. "I've been missing for twenty years. Everyone thinks I'm dead. Where am I supposed to go?" she added, unable to manage anything above a whisper.

Jack watched her from behind an unfathomable expression, but as she ran her hands through her hair and rested her forehead in the palms of her hands, he felt his façade weakening. He wanted to reach out to her, to comfort her, to tell her what she wanted to hear, but found that he couldn't do any of those.

He could see that this was all she was going to be handle for that night. Either that, or he did not want her to have to handle anything else.

"I've got a spare room in the back," Jack said after a moment of silence passed, "You can sleep there tonight."

Samantha looked up at him, but felt that the fact that she wouldn't be wandering the streets of a foreign time was of little comfort.

"But what about...?" she trailed off, unsure of how to phrase the question.

"Your brother isn't seven anymore, Samantha," Jack said reasonably. "He's not in any danger. You don't have to worry about him anymore."

His words, meant to reassure her, or at least put her mind at some level of rest, only reminded her of everything that had happened - of what she had lost.

"We'll figure everything out in the morning," Jack went on, "There's nothing you can do tonight."

Samantha didn't have the will to protest, but found that she had no strength to move.

Jack regarded her a moment before he stood up. "I'll leave you alone," he said before walking toward the door. He paused at the door, looking back at her one last time. She had not moved, nor did she look as if she had any intention of moving any time soon. He started to say something, thought better of it, and left the room.

Samantha did not know what to feel. She should have been relieved that nothing bad happened to her brother, that he wasn't lost and wandering around, wondering where she was or kidnapped or lying in a strange part of the city as she was. Yet she did not, because even though she knew nothing bad had happened to him, finding out that he was twenty years older was not what she had expected.

What did he think happened to her? Did he see her disappear through the Rift, or did he not have enough time to see what had happened? What had happened to him afterwards? How did he get from a seven year old boy lying on the sidewalk of his baby-sitter's street to a twenty seven year old man?

What about her? What was going to happen to her, now that she was ripped out of her own timeline and thrown into a world where she was proclaimed dead? Where would she go? Could she go back to her family, after all this time? What would she say to them when they saw that she hadn't aged a day in twenty years?

It only occurred to her then that maybe Torchwood had no intention of letting her return to her family. Would her abrupt return disrupt the current timeline? Would it cause a frenzy of media activity? Would it expose their organization to the government, or were they the government?

If that was the case, and they didn't intend on letting her return to her family, if she could even consider that an option, then what did they intend on doing with her? They weren't going to kill her - if that was their first objective, they would have done it already instead of wasting time explaing their organization or the Rift or even that she wasn't in her own time anymore. That was some reassurance, at least.

They couldn't keep her there indefinitely...or could they? They seemed very below the radar - she had never even heard of Torchwood before. From the way Jack had talked about it, they had been around a long time, maybe even before his time. If they were that elusive, they had to have resources beyond society's control. Did they have facilities for people like her? Did they intend on keeping her locked up indefinitely, safely kept away from society and away from the established timeline?

That thought sent a wave of fear through her, but she suppressed it, realizing that it wouldn't do her any good. She had to consider the possibility that they were going to let her go, but where would they be letting her go into? She had, technically, been gone for twenty years. She knew nothing about the world today. It couldn't have changed that much, not as dramatic as people in the 50s believing that the new millennium would bring flying cars and houses that hovered inches above the ground, at any rate. On the other hand, two decades was a long time, and she couldn't even begin to fathom what kind of place the world was anymore.

Suppose she did learn about the world and how it had changed. What then? What would she do? Get a new identity, a job? What kind of life could she make for herself here? She was only just starting her life in 1987. She had her family, her friends, an internship with an prominent astronomer which guranteed her a recomendation to a University. She had her life all planned out.

Now none of it would ever happen. A master's in astrobiology, a job at a research center or observatory, a family of her own. All of her hopes, her dreams were over.

Her life, in mere seconds, was gone.

A/N: So, yeah...Not really good with the emotional stuff myself so I'm not sure how well this turned out.