RIP Robin Williams.
Rose sat in the chair in front of Jack's desk, hugging her legs to her chest. Jack sat across from her, leaning back in his chair. They stared at each other—or, rather, Jack stared, and Rose looked at him for as long as she could, looked away, then looked back again—a thousand questions burning between them and neither knowing where to begin. Finally, Jack cleared his throat and leaned forward, folding his arms across his chest and resting on his elbows.
"That shirt." He nodded to her. "Not yours, is it?"
She looked down at it then shook her head. "It's the Doctor's. But if it was in the backpack I had then the TARDIS put it there.
"I wonder why it'd do that." He mused with a straight face belied only by the mischievous glint in his eyes. Rose only shrugged in response but a smug grin slowly spread across his face anyway.
Rose rolled her eyes. "Oh, shut up."
"I didn't say anything."
"Yeah but you were thinkin' it."
He laughed, unabashed. "What the hell took you two so long? The tension in that ship nearly drove me crazy back then. I'm surprised the TARDIS herself didn't go nuts from it. Good for you, Rosie. Though, if you two ever decide you want to spice things up, give me a call."
"Jack!"
Jack grinned, unabashed. "Last I checked, though, the Doctor only wore jumpers."
"Well, he's…he's a different man now."
Jack raised his eyebrows. "He regenerated?"
"You know about that?"
"Everyone in the Agency heard tales of the Time Lords. Legend had it that when one of them was close to death he or she could rewrite their entire cellular structure and, essentially, create a new body for themselves." Jack smiled at her. "But you're one of the last people I need to explain that to, right? When was did it happen?"
Rose looked at the clock on the wall. "Right after the Gamestation. I…did something, Jack. I wanted to save you both, and I did, but the power was gonna kill me so the Doctor had to turn right around and save me afterwards. He regenerated just after we left. Scared the hell outta me!"
"I'm sorry."
"Yeah, well, it's alright now." She smiled at him. "I got to fall in love with him all over again. I've got a few pictures of him in my wallet; I'll show you later. If it's with me, that is."
She frowned, wondering just what exactly what was in that backpack. It had simply materialized next to her while she was hiding in her room and she'd shouldered it without even looking inside, trusting the TARDIS's judgment. Though she wasn't sure if the ship would've considered her wallet a necessity. She hoped so. She really hoped so. With her mobile crushed in the fighting, her wallet would be the only place she had pictures of him.
"But…he…I mean, Rose, what did you do?" Jack asked, drawing her back into the present. "On the Gamestation, after you left, the Daleks attacked. They exterminated everyone, even me."
"I—" her lips trembled "—know. I'm the one that brought you back."
Jack stared at her for a long minute, eyes wide, before he slumped back in his chair in shock. He exhaled once, his mouth open in an 'o' of disbelief. His head shook back and forth slowly, an action he didn't even seem to be aware of. She wondered if ever in all his decades of wondering, imagined it could've been her. That little Rosie, the smiling 21st century Earth girl, had been able to reach beyond the threshold and pull him back into life, and not just once but again and again over the years that followed.
"You?" His voice was horse, like he hadn't spoken in weeks.
Rose nodded.
"But…how?"
She shrugged. "I dunno. I can't remember much but I remember that I felt you dead and I couldn't bear it. So I just—I just made you not dead anymore. I wanted to bring them all back, everyone in the satellite, but the TARDIS stopped me. Good thing too, I suppose, considering that you can't…." she glanced up at him.
"You know." It wasn't a question.
"Yeah."
Jack licked his lips, pressing them together tightly, and stared at papers on his desk in silence. She waited nervously for him to speak again. The Jack she'd met before hadn't seemed angry with her but he'd also been protecting the timelines. "I just have one question." He raised his head. "Did you know what would happen to me?"
Rose shook her head in denial. "No. I didn't even know I'd done it until very recently. The Doctor never said. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—well, I did, but not forever."
"Can you fix me?"
She shook her head again. "I don't have that power anymore."
"Could you possibly…get it again?" Jack asked hopefully.
"Yeah, I reckon I could. But even if I did…it'd probably end the same way."
"You mean you'd die?"
"Yeah."
"Then don't you dare," he ordered, suddenly very serious. "Never the mind the fact he would kill me for it, you saved me. You convinced him to give me a chance, and you made me better." He reached his hand across the desk, palm open for hers, and she slowly lowered her hand into his. He squeezed it tightly, reassuringly. "And then you saved me again. I don't want you to ever feel sorry for bringing me back. Do you understand me?"
She nodded.
"Good."
Rose smiled in relief as the weight she'd been carrying since she heard the Doctor talking to Jack was lifted from her shoulders. "Thank you."
A piece of his conversation with the Doctor in that room came to mind so she added hastily, "But the Doctor might."
"That's what I've been thinking," he agreed. "Remind me to ask him next time I see him."
He doesn't know, she thought. He still didn't realize she was from his future yet.
"Though, out of curiosity, what did you do? He said he sent you home in the TARDIS."
"Tricked me into going home, is more like it," she growled. "But I wasn't havin' it. You know how the TARDIS is alive and everything? Well, you see, back then, I couldn't talk to her, not like I can now. So I figured if I could open the Heart like Margaret did we'd be able to communicate, I could convince her to take me back. So I looked into her, and she looked into me. I absorbed her Heart, Jack. The Heart of the TARDIS: the Time Vortex, the huon particles, everything. It was all in me."
A funny look appeared on her face, as if she was remembering something half-forgotten. "I turned the Daleks into dust. All of them, every single last one, even the Emperor. I scattered the words Bad Wolf throughout time and space. Bad Wolf isn't just a random phrase: it's a name. I'm the Bad Wolf. Me an' the TARDIS together. The Doctor took most of it out, but a few huon particles got left behind. That's what Owen's scans picked up. I've got a bit of the Heart in my body and her mind is bonded with mine."
She smiled at him and for a moment, her eyes flickered. They were wild and yellow and she was Rose but she was someone—something else entirely. He heard the song, the song that always welcomed him back life, it flowed through his mind making his entire body feel completely weightless, like he could float away and gravity would not stop him. She blinked, or he did, or maybe they both did, and the connection was broken. Her eyes were normal and the song was gone, leaving Jack unsettled, but also strangely at ease. Rose looked equality disconcerted and she sucked in a sharp breath. He swallowed and tried to think of some way to break the sudden tension between them. He settled for humor.
"And neither of you could bear to just let me die." He joked. "It's the jaw, right? Once seen, always yearned for."
Just like that the ice was broken and Rose Tyler grinned at him, really grinned, her tongue poking out from between her teeth, and, oh, how he'd missed that smile. "Once you go Jack…"
"You never go back!" He laughed and she did too, her legs slipping off the chair as she relaxed, and it was just like old times again. Except they were missing one crucial member of their trio. This seemed to occur to both of them at about the same time and their laughter slowly died into quiet chuckles and sighs.
"Who hurt you, Rose?" he asked.
Rose bit her lip. "Um, see, this is where things get tricky. I'm from the future, Jack," she said. "Your personal future, I mean. In about…a year or two, I think, we land up there to refuel again."
"And I go with you?"
"Yep."
"For how long?"
"A bit."
"A bit," he repeated flatly.
"Timelines, Jack," she reminded him.
"Alright, so you can't tell me how long I'm with you before you get…here. Anything you think you can risk telling me? Like who hurt you and where he is so I can kill him?"
"His name's the Master," she said and flinched, expecting the universe to go boom. When nothing happend, she continued on, "and he's…an alien. Completely mad and a murderer and he wants me."
"Why?"
"To get at the Doctor. That's why I'm here. He tried to take the TARDIS with me in it and I tried to stop him. And I was winnin' at first, but then…well, you saw what I looked like when I came in. You can probably guess."
Jack clenched and unclenched his fists. "Yeah, I can."
"I know he hates the Doctor. I don't know why but the TARDIS made it very clear that they are old enemies."
"But how did you escape?"
"The TARDIS knocked him around for a bit so I could crawl away and then she hid me in my room until he went in to look for me, and then she put my door right next to the console room and I just started runnin'. I realized I was in Cardiff so I came here like you told me to. Will tell me to. You get what I mean."
"He's still after you, isn't he?"
"Probably. He knows how the Doctor feels about me. I'd be his best weapon."
"So you came here because I told you to come here, because that me already knew all of this and knew you had to come. Nice simple casualty loop. Alright, next question: where is the Doctor?"
"Somewhere out there with you and Martha, with these things coming at you, and no way out because that," she nodded to his Vortex Manipulator, "is broken. And no one around you has any means of time travel."
"Shit."
"And I can't go home to Mum or Mickey, either, because their future is my past. I can't contact any of my old friends for the same reason. My phone's broken. The Master has the TARDIS. You are literally the only thing I've got, Jack, and I may be stuck here for the rest of my life." She slumped in the chair, all the energy seeming to drain out of her, and Jack had no idea what to say.
Suzie rang down to inform them that pizza had arrived and Rose stood up without another word and walked out of his office. Toshiko and Owen looked up from their stations, which unfortunately happened to be located right outside Jack's office, and stared at her. She walked past them without saying anything and dropped onto the couch against the wall, underneath a bold black TORCHWOOD. They continue to watch her until their gazes become too much and she snapped at them.
"Stop lookin' at me!"
Jack she knew, Jack she could tolerate. He still had a lot of explaining to do about his involvement in Torchwood, but from the way he spoke he wasn't against the Doctor. Those two, however, Owen and Toshiko and that other woman, Suzie, she didn't know about them. Did they view the Doctor as en enemy to the crown? Would they treat them like Torchwood One had? Jack trusted them but she wasn't sure she did.
Owen's eyebrows shot towards his hairline. "You know, I think I liked you better unconscious."
She glowered and looked down at her chest where her TARDIS key hung out in the open for the world to see. She held it in her hands, curling her body into a ball, and pressed the key to her lips. Toshiko knew everything from her old address to her school records and Owen had probably seen more of her body than most people. She just wanted to curl up and cry somewhere these invasive people couldn't see any more.
Rose avoided the others for the rest of the day the best she could. She alternated between sitting on the couch and staring into space, dozing, and talking with Jack in his office about trivial things—how'd they been, what they'd been doing, who Martha was, where the chain around her neck came from—and then not so trivial things like the rift and this Torchwood. They'd severed almost all ties to Torchwood One when he took over, but they were still required to submit occasional reports, they communicated about any potential issues concerning each other, and were supposed to report any sightings of the Doctor or his blue police box. Rose bristled until Jack assured her that only he knew about that last bit.
He offered her a place with Torchwood, though she wasn't sure if she should accept it. She was the Doctor's companion and practically his wife. It was just all sorts of wrong to work for a company that at its core was designed to eliminate him. But she was stuck here in this time, on this planet, with a homicidal Time Lord after her. What else could she do? Where could she go? Not to UNIT, for sure. They were the Doctor's allies, but they were military and she wasn't that kind of person. At least Torchwood had Jack.
"I'll think about it," she decided.
"Alright, but in the mean time you should stay here." He said seriously. "Don't leave without me with you. I make a great human shield—ow! It was just a joke. Mostly."
There were certain things she couldn't tell the team, though. His age, for starters, was strictly secret, which was fine because she didn't even know how old he'd been when they first met. His immortality was also a big no-no, as were his origins, and anything to do with what the device on his wrist actually was. So they came up with a vague backstory for how they met—London a few years back and they stopped an alien plague. He gave her permission to tell them she'd traveled in time and space, and how much she wanted them to know about the Doctor was up to her.
At five o'clock, Toshiko ran the sweep again for anything alien in a ten-mile radius. One minute later the computer bleeped a warning. "Jack!" she shouted. "Jack we've got something new!"
Rose, who had been sitting on the couch behind Toshiko, leaped to her feet at once. "Where?"
Jack emerged from his office, covering the distance between the door and her desk in three long strides. "What is it, Tosh?"
"Not sure, but it's alien, and it's close."
"How close?"
"It's right up on Bute," she reported, fingers flying across the keys. "I'm gonna try and find a good CCTV feed, but that area isn't heavily monitored."
Jack looked up at the ceiling. "Practically standing on top of us," he murmured.
Rose walked forward on surprisingly sturdy legs so she could get a good look of the screen over the computer genius's shoulder. There it was, a tiny red dot blinking on a map of Cardiff, right across from the Plass. Tosh brought up two different camera feeds and zoomed in on a large divider in the middle of a street with a traffic light on one side and a blue signpost in the center. People crossed through, stopping only to wait for a break in the cars, then continued on, except for one man.
He had brown hair and he was wearing t-shirt, jeans, and a pair of boots and he was just standing there, gazing around with arrogant confidence. Like he knew he was close to what he desired and had no doubt he would get it. She knew that face. It had leered and sneered at her. The hands hanging at his sides had grabbed her, hit her, shoved her, with the sole purpose of making her scream.
The room around her began to shake and it was only after Jack put his arms around her did she realize she was shaking, not the Hub.
"It's him!" she gasped. "Oh, God, that's him!"
Jack growled deep in his chest, low and dangerous. "Wait here, Rose. Owen, with me."
"No!" Rose cried, clinging to his shirt even as he tried to push her away. "No, you can't go out there! He'll see you!"
"That's the point."
"No, you can't!" She shifted her grip to his arms. "You don't understand!"
"Give me one good reason, Rose Tyler."
"Because even if you shoot him he won't stay down," she told him, digging her nails into his arms. "He'll just come right back and that is not something you want happening in the middle of Cardiff."
Jack's eyes widened. "Are you saying he's a—"
"Yes," she said urgently. "The only other one. That's how he was able to beat me. I wasn't just winning, Jack, I'd won."
Jack looked at the man on the screen again and for a moment he stopped breathing.
Owen leaned back in his chair, waiting to see how this would unfold. He was used to Jack being infuriatingly cryptic about, well, everything. Figures this 'old friend' of his would be, too. And if there wasn't any proof of any past relationship between the two, there was now in the way they understood each other, completing unfinished sentences in their minds, each following the other's train of thought.
Just what we bloody need around here, people talking in code, he thought.
"Does the Doctor know?" Jack asked. "What he is?"
"Yes. They've got history, remember?"
"What would he want me to do?"
"He'd want you to keep me safe."
It was true, the Doctor would want Jack to keep her out of harms way, even if she would prefer to be in the thick of things. At the moment, however, she wanted to go down as deep into the Hub as she could, put as many feet of stone and earth as she could between herself and the Master, and hide. Rose Tyler, hiding like a coward. But the truth was she was scared of the Master. Terrified. It wasn't just that he'd hurt her physically; after all, she was no stranger to pain. But he was a Time Lord.
She'd seen the Doctor topple governments with mere words, scare off enemies by just lifting his sonic screwdriver, and grab those on the precipice of death and pull them back. He'd gone against Daleks to save her. And for the Master to be an old rival of the Doctor, that meant he was equally powerful, but she would bet everything that he didn't share the Doctor's aversion to murder.
She didn't want to go near him. She didn't want Jack near him. She didn't particularly like any of his team, but she didn't want them near the psychotic Time Lord either. Not without the Doctor.
Jack gritted his teeth and she could see he wasn't entirely convinced.
"He knows about you, Jack, and he knows we're close. If you go out and confront him then he'll know where I am. We can't fight him, not on our own."
"He doesn't look like much," Owen remarked.
"Owen, you saw how I looked when I came in?" She nodded to the man on the screen. "Him. And he was weak at the time."
Jack looked at the screen again. The Master was still standing there, almost as if he knew they were watching him.
"Jack, please," Rose said softly, leaning in to whisper in his ear. "He could kill you for good and then where would we be?"
His Adam's apple bobbled and he exhaled through his teeth. "Fine. But if he comes here, we engage. Tosh, watch him." He headed into his office, pulling out his mobile to warn Suzie.
Rose stood and stared at the screen for a solid minute then she retreated to the couch but she still kept her eye on him. The Master did not venture any closer to the Plass but the CCTV, zoomed in as close to his face as possible, caught his smirk before he turned and walked away. He knew, she realized. He knew where she was but he hadn't come any closer. Why?
That night she found it impossible to sleep. The couch was comfortable enough and the sheets, blanket, and pillow Jack produced from somewhere made it better…but it wasn't anything like her bed. The back of the couch was something she could curl up against but it didn't return the cuddle or wrap its arms around her or make her feel any sort of safe. Her body ached, her emotions were all over the place, and the TARDIS was buzzing with all manner of negative emotions in the back of her mind. So she spent most of the night drifting in and out of a doze and staring around at the Hub. She knew Jack had a room beneath his office and if she really needed to she could go to him. But she didn't want to wake him. He'd been dealing with her and her mess all day and he deserved a break.
The next day passed as quietly as the last. Even more so, actually, since the Master did not make a reappearance. After Owen removed the stitches she no longer needed and she took a shower, Rose Tyler watched Torchwood work. She watched and listened to everything, speaking little, and tried to absorb it all. Rose wondered if this was how Martha felt sometimes. The four members of Torchwood III were an established group with their own, stories, jokes, dynamics, rules, and strategies that she wasn't a part of.
Owen and Suzie were sleeping together. She was fairly certain about this. She knew how two people acted around each other if they were secretly (or not so secretly) shagging each other's brains out. Whenever the two of them were anywhere together, talking or working, Tosh would make a point of looking at anything but them. Sometimes, if they got too loud, she would leave the room entirely, disappearing into the bowels of the Hub that Jack told Rose to not venture into without an escort. Jack didn't seem to have any romantic attachments to any of them and she'd never seen him go so long without flirting. It was a bit disconcerting.
Three days passed in this manner. At night she only slept out of sheer exhaustion but never for a full eight hours. During the day she felt like an outsider looking in, unable to help without stepping on someone's toes. They all thought she was a kid, barely twenty, and certainly not capable of helping them, well, except for Jack. He knew she could handle herself, knew she knew more about aliens than any of the others, and he knew she could defend herself because he'd taught her how to long ago. But to Suzie, Owen, and Toshiko she was Little Red Riding Hood and the big bad wolf was hunting her.
They didn't know she was the Bad Wolf. She had swallowed time and merged with the TARDIS, eliminated countless Daleks, and killed the Devil himself, but if she told them that they'd think she was mad.
If she was going to remain with this Torchwood for any length of time she knew she had to prove herself. Jack could put her up on the biggest pedestal in the world if he wanted, but they wouldn't believe any of it, not really, until they saw it. So she decided to make herself useful. She wouldn't risk leaving the Hub on her own, even if Jack would let her, so she busied herself in their underground base. The first thing she did was clamp down on her sour mood and smile at each of them.
Jack nearly threw a party when she brought him a cuppa in the conference room just the way he'd liked it back on the TARDIS—it'd been well over a hundred years for him, after all—and he kissed her full on the mouth. Then, of course, she swatted his arm and he started tickling her. Rose's shrieks and giggles echoed throughout the Hub. She tried to escape but he had her, and when she managed to wriggle away he caught her again. Thankfully her cries had brought the other members of Torchwood up to investigate.
"What on Earth are you two doing?" Suzie demanded, standing outside the conference room with her hands on her hips.
"Help!" Rose squealed, smacking at his hands.
"Jack, let the poor girl go."
After another wiggle of his fingers he released her and she skittered away, holding her sides as the last of her giggles died and she shot him a reproachful look. Jack grinned, unabashed.
"What the hell was that all about?" Suzie asked.
"Are you children?" Owen added disapprovingly.
"Rose made tea!" Jack said by way of explanation.
"So you decided to attack her?"
"Yes, and I got her laughing, finally. I was starting to get worried about you, Rosie. Now, let's see if you still got it."
He picked the mug off the table and brought it to his lips and took a hearty sip. He made a show of smacking his lips, looking down at the cup, before nodding. "Yep. Still got it. I swear no one can make tea like this woman here." He told his team.
"The Doctor's gotten a lot better," Rose informed him. "You'd be surprised."
"That man couldn't make a banana milkshake."
"He's not that hopeless. Well, not anymore."
"Can I give it a go?" Suzie asked.
"What?"
"The tea, can I try?"
"Well, yeah, s'pose so. How do you like it?"
She ended up making tea for all three of them and, thankfully, their reactions were a lot less physical than Jack's. Rose beamed at their compliments, even more when Owen mentioned he usually hated tea. However, she was hopeless when it came to making coffee, and she didn't much like the stuff, anyway.
She straightened up the mess around the main room. She listened to Tosh's theories about a few devices they'd recovered from the office of their former mayor, one Margaret Blaine (who was actually an alien wearing the skin of the real Margaret as a disguise!), and offering a few suggestions. Though she didn't do that for long because it was too much like listening to the Doctor, but also entirely different.
Jack put her to work monitoring the emergency reports and told her to look for things that warranted their attention: unusual incidents or murders, weird things running around—basically anything that belonged in a Men in Black movie. It wasn't exactly the most riveting of tasks but it kept her busy.
Owen offered to get Chinese food around dinnertime and she smiled when she heard Jack order for her. Of all the things he could remember over a hundred and fifty years, he remembered what kind of Chinese food she liked. When he came back, Tosh brought their portions over to the terminal where Rose was sitting. Rose smiled and took the box of fried rice and two egg rolls. They sat together in silence, eating their food and keeping an eye and ear on the scanner. It seemed that Tosh wasn't sure how to start a conversation so Rose decided as she bit into an eggroll that it was up to her.
"You know," she said, swallowing. "I've had real egg rolls in China. They taste nothing like this."
"You've been to China?" Toshiko asked in surprise.
Rose nodded. "I've been to a lot of places. I'm a traveller."
"Who do you travel with? That doctor man you two talk about?"
She nodded. "Yeah."
"And you an' him are…?"
Rose smiled and took another bite of the egg roll.
"So, how do you know Jack?" Tosh asked, gesturing at her with her fork. "He's never mentioned you 'til now."
"No, I expect he wouldn't," she murmured. With a sly grin she added, "But then, Jack's a mystery man."
"Where did you meet?"
Rose popped the rest of the egg roll into her mouth and chewed slowly. "London, few years back. Not long after me an' the Doctor met. He was havin' a bit of trouble with an alien…virus of sorts. We helped him set it right. Piece a cake."
"You do seem pretty comfortable with all this," Tosh noted.
Rose arched her eyebrows. "Jack says you looked me up. Was he right?"
Tosh looked embarrassed. "I, um, well I… Sorry."
Rose waited.
"I was curious," she admitted. "We don't exactly have girls showing up like you did every day. You didn't see his face, Rose, when Owen told him you were up there. I figured you had to be someone pretty important."
"No such luck, though?"
"Well, at least you exist."
"What do you mean?"
Tosh glanced over her shoulder to make sure he wasn't anywhere nearby, then murmured, "Jack doesn't exist. I've looked him up, we all have. There's only one American Jack Harkness on record, but he was a soldier from World War II, and he went MIA back in '41."
Rose had to force herself not to laugh. "Oh, well. Definitely couldn't be him, then."
"No, but that just makes it weirder. No record of him, whatsoever." Tosh peered at her. "Do you know much about him, then?"
She arched her eyebrows. "Is that why you came to talk to me, Tosh? Hopin' I'll tell you more about him?" She glanced over Tosh's shoulder across the room at Suzie who looked away quickly, confirming what she'd suspected. "They put you up to it?"
Tosh pursed her lips and started to go. "I'm sorry."
"No," Rose held up her hand. "Don't, please. Stay."
Tosh frowned indecisively then lowered herself back into the chair.
"I'm not always like this, I swear. I just…it's been a rough few days. I can't ever go home again, I've got a psychotic alien after me, and I'm stuck here—" Rose stopped talking abruptly and looked down at the rice. She scooped her spoon around the sides of the container to get at some of the stuck kernels.
"It's okay, Rose." Toshiko smiled sympathetically and touched the other woman's arm briefly. "You can talk to me."
"Yeah," she muttered. "You seem nice, Tosh, and I'd like to trust you, I really would but…you work for Torchwood."
"So? What's that got to do anything?"
Rose 'hmped' once. "Jack's offered me a job here."
Tosh blinked in surprise. "He's what?"
"But I don't know if I can take it," Rose went on bitterly. "I'd rather be unemployed than work for Torchwood. I hate this place. The things you've done, the things you will do...its completely—"
Rose inhaled sharply as a prickly shiver ran down her spine. A split second later, one of the computers across the room emitted a beeping sound and Tosh leaped from her chair, flying across the grating towards her terminal.
"Rift activity!" she announced.
Okay. Prickly spine tingle equals rift activity, Rose thought, rubbing the back of her neck as the feeling dissipated. She couldn't see this one being very useful when they had machines that could do the exact same thing.
Jack emerged from his office with his coat. "What do we got?"
"Something's come through in…" Tosh's fingers flew across the keyboard and she inhaled sharply. "Saint David's Centre."
"Can you tell what it is?"
"No, species not on record."
"Great," Jack said sarcastically, then pulled out his phone to ring Owen who was on desk duty.
The computer Rose was supposed to be monitoring blipped as a new report was brought to the front. Whoever had received the report had flagged it as something worthy of their attention. She leaned forward to better see the words on screen and set her nearly finished meal off to the side. Someone was causing a fuss at Saint David's Centre. Jack was telling Suzie to start the SUV and to prepare for an encounter with an unknown target when she found a description of what'd caused the disturbance.
"It's a humanoid male," Rose called. "Described as around six foot even, with blue and green feathers in his hair, and wings. It's makin' a scene down at the mall. Looks like it's already hurt a few people."
Jack stopped mid-sentence and his head snapped around. He stared at her for a moment as if he'd forgotten she was there then he gave his head a quick shake and was all business again. "Rose, get your shoes on, you're coming with us."
That brought her up short. "I'm what?"
"You heard me. You're not staying down here on your own. Any guests must be accompanied by a member of Torchwood at all times, that's policy."
This earned him a scowl.
"Besides," he went on. "You might be able to help."
"How could I help?"
"In the past few years, has anyone ever spoken to you that you couldn't understand?" He asked seriously.
"No, but—oh. Oh, yeah, right. Okay," Rose exhaled. "This doesn't mean I'm accepting your offer."
"This doesn't mean you have to."
Rose jumped out of the chair and raced over to the couch, her bare feet clattering against the railing, and tried to decide what to do with herself. She hadn't bothered with anything but a shower since she'd arrived. Her face was completely bare of makeup and her hair hung loose around her face. But her wounds were pretty much healed and a stunned Owen had removed the cast on her arm earlier that day. There wasn't time to put on makeup, though it would've probably made her seem a bit vain even if there was, and her hair was just going to have to stay as it was. The loose pair of sweatpants, however, had to go. She removed the sweats and shimmied into a pair of jeans, tucking her wallet into her pocket, then pulled on socks and her trainers. She smoothed down the Doctor's oxford since she refused to remove it and pulled on her gray hoodie. All in all, not a very terrifying getup, but she didn't care. If she understood Jack correctly she wasn't tagging along to terrify the poor alien who'd been displaced.
"Okay, I'm ready," she announced, looking up in time to see Jack toss something at her. Rose reached up reflexively and caught the object, turning it over in her hands and nearly dropping it when she realized it was a gun in a holster. She looked up in surprise. "Jack—"
Jack stood in the doorway to his office, pulling his coat on. "You do know how to use one, right?"
"Well, yeah, but—"
"Good," he said, straightening the collar. "I don't want to have to be worried about you not being able to defend yourself. He's not here to protect you, Rose."
Rose wanted to shout that she didn't need him to defend her, thank you very much, but that would be a lie. Sometimes she got herself in too deep and he had to rush in to save her like the stupid ape she was. Or sometimes there wasn't anything she could do but sit back and watch and she hated that more than anything. She strapped the gun to her waist without further protest but she had absolutely no plans on using it.