AN: Glad to have had this finished! I've been badly sick with the flu since Monday and completely lacking in energy, so I was worried that I wouldn't have it in me to get anything done.
Rose and Martha ate dinner together in the TARDIS galley, a tired quiet overtaking them. The afternoon had been a long one; studying for medical exams and inter-universal travel theories really took it out of you. Not to forget, the events of Lazarus' party were still catching up to her; she had killed him. Planned to kill him, at that.
She didn't know whether there would have been a way to subdue him - a way of ending the night without Lazarus' blood being spilled, but it still had her shaken to the core and again made her think of her mother's warning on that awful day; that one day, a woman who used to be Rose Tyler would walk the surface of some distant, unknown planet, unrecognisable to those who had once loved her.
The thought made her feel even sicker, and so pushing her empty plate away, she declared, "I need to let the TARDIS refuel before we go anywhere else. Quick trip to Cardiff should do it."
Martha appeared surprised but she never said anything, or if she did Rose didn't notice, because she was too busy convincing herself that nothing was wrong. They would land in Cardiff and everything would be okay when she confirmed that nothing in her had changed. She was still the same old Rose, if not more grown up, and she would prove it to herself.
"That's right," she said under her breath to herself as she moved around the console at a speed still classified as 'snail's pace' by the Doctor's standards, but as 'top speed' by her own. She was getting better, it was just taking a really, really long time.
Landing the TARDIS in Cardiff, at the Roald Dahl Plass to be specific, she called out to Martha who joined her a moment later, having already been on her way.
"Won't take long," she said with a smile, slipping on a cosy hoodie. "Just take the time to sit back and enjoy… Cardiff."
"Enjoy Cardiff?" Martha repeated.
Rose didn't dignify that with a response as they stepped out into the bracing Wales air and took in the ordinary sights, of ordinary people going about their ordinary days and lives. This was a world she had given up for good when she chose to remain in the TARDIS after the Doctor's - after he was sent to the parallel universe. That didn't mean she couldn't stay connected to it though.
"Rose!" The shout was achingly familiar - a ghost's voice reaching out to her from across the plaza.
Jaw dropped, she turned to see Jack. Captain Jack Harkness, running for her. "Oh my god."
"Who's that?" Martha asked, looking concerned between she and the strange man. Rose was too stunned to offer an answer.
He came to a stop in front of her, breathing more heavily than usual, and then stared at her like he was trying to take her in.
She smiled weakly. "Hi Jack."
At that, he let out a happy yelling shout and threw himself at her, wrapping her in a hug strong enough to lift her up from the floor. First thought, honestly? Jack was ripped. Not that he was ever a weakling, but his muscles were definitely bigger now. Rose, for her part, had to fight down a wave of panic as her confusion lashed out, meeting another confusing force that she couldn't quite pinpoint. How? How was he here?
"You two know each other?" Martha asked, raising an eyebrow and breaking them from their own little world.
Rose stepped back and offered her friend a sheepish smile. "Sorry, Martha, this is Jack. He's an old friend of mine."
"You can say that again," he said with a smile that suggested an inside joke only he was in on. "Now, who's your friend here?" His smile turned charming and all-too-familiar, and Rose grinned.
"Leave it."
"What, you're not jealous are you, Rosie?"
Martha's smile turned amused. "Rosie?"
"In your dreams, Harkness." Then, to Martha, "It's just a silly nickname."
"Why Rosie, you're always in my dreams, and who're you to talk about silly, Miss Barrage Balloon?"
"Miss what?"
"So where are you set up now?" she asked quickly.
The grin on Jack's face turned shit-eating. "Deflection is a coward's tactic, Rose. As for where I'm based, well…" He trailed off, glanced off to the side at the Roald Dahl Plass Hub, and looked back at her. "Let me introduce you."
"This whole place, I did in - well, in your memory, actually," he said, speaking candidly but looking distinctly uncomfortable. "At Canary Wharf, after everything that went down there with the Cybermen and the Daleks, they put up a remembrance list. Your name was on it."
A chill swept down her spine. "What, seriously?"
"Yeah, well, like I said, it's good to see you." His stare penetrated for a few long seconds before he continued on to say, "You're supposed to be dead, you know."
"Yeah, well, so are you."
"That so?" he asked, tone remaining deceptively light despite the look in his eyes that had just appeared. He glanced around them and then back to her. "Come on then, where is he? I know he's not sending you to do his dirty work for him."
There was no question who he was talking about - to Rose, at least. "Who's 'he'?" Martha asked, looking like she could guess.
"The Doctor." Jack paused and his brow furrowed. "Where's he got to?"
"He's… he's not here."
"What do you mean 'not here'?"
"What do you think?" she asked, her voice raising and tone sharpening to a point.
He held up his hands defensively for a second, then dropped them, expression cautious. "The Doc's gone?"
"Yeah." The air hung heavy between them for a while. Neither knew how to continue, and on the outskirts of it all, Martha certainly didn't.
"God dammit," he said eventually, huffing an unconvincing laugh. "Never really thought I'd hear someone say that. What uh - what happened?"
And for what felt like the one hundredth time since that awful day, Rose told the inside story of the Battle of Canary Wharf.
That other, unfamiliar feeling from earlier re-emerged and now she had the time to examine it. She didn't know what it was, but it was nagging almost painfully in the forefront of her mind. Something about Jack that now seemed… different. Not wrong, different. Almost calling out to her. Magnetising her to him.
"Have I mentioned how I wanted to kill him?" They sat around a table in Jack's hub drinking tea, on she and Martha's part, coffee on Jack's. At the intrusion to her searching thoughts though, she blinked several times, confused, then realised Jack was talking to her, and shook her head.
"No, you haven't - you wanted to what?"
"After the GameStation. He left me behind." Now, reliving the memory, Jack's tone had turned completely flat. Martha, sipping her tea on the opposite side of the table, choked at the statement. "I was running back to the TARDIS when I heard it dematerialise."
"He wouldn't." Her tone was resolute and unchanging; after everything that had happened, she would not believe this about the man she loved.
"He did."
"Sorry," Martha said, putting her mug down. "You said this Doctor bloke abandoned you somewhere?" She looked at Rose then, whose fists were beginning to clench. "All this time I've spent with you, and you've been going on and on about how brilliant the Doctor was and trying to bring him back - and he just abandoned one of his friends on some planet?"
"No, Martha," she snapped, glaring at Jack now. He met her gaze evenly, openly, and the honesty she saw in it made her sick. "He wouldn't."
"But he did. You weren't there Rose, so you don't know, but the last thing I remembered after waking up was the sound of the TARDIS leaving me behind in the year two hundred, one thousand." So many different things were fighting for prominence in her mind that Rose couldn't formulate a response, but Martha had the silence covered.
"What do you mean 'after waking up'?"
His brow furrowed. "That's - that's just the thing. I don't really know what happened to me on that station. I'd been cornered by a group of Daleks and obviously, there was no way out of that." Rose's ears pricked up, and she looked at Jack through new eyes. "What actually happened though - well, I'm not sure on. They killed me, and then I woke up."
Something in Rose called out then - that weird feeling she had around Jack specifically screaming in her mind. Like a part of her knew what he was talking about.
"They killed you and then you woke up?" Martha repeated.
"That's right," he said ruefully, sitting back. "I died, there was this light in my mind, and I woke up." The look on his face suggested there was more to the story than that, but Rose couldn't bring herself to care in the moment.
"There was a light?" she asked. "What does that mean? What sort of light?"
He frowned, concerned. "I don't really know. It was just sort of… there, in my head. All yellow -"
"Or gold?" she asked, pitch rising. Martha's eyebrows rose at that and she too faced Jack with heightened interest.
"Sure, I guess it could have been gold." He shrugged carelessly. "What does it matter?" When he spotted the look she and Martha exchanged, he sat up straighter. "What does the light mean?"
Rose was utterly breathless, but managed to answer. "It's - it was me, Jack. That light was me."
"What does that mean?"
The truth was main the subject of Rose's warring thoughts recently. That the Bad Wolf might be stirring in her again terrified her, and she had to admit that her was every day diverting more from it's original goal; to bring the Doctor home. The more time passed, the more she thought about it.
With a deep, steadying breath, she said, "That night, on the GameStation, the Doctor did send me away. Made it so the TARDIS couldn't bring me back - so she couldn't do anything, actually. You two were in two hundred, one thousand and I was in two thousand and five with no way of getting back to help you! He didn't tell me what he was doing, obviously." A familiar spring of bitterness sprouted up in her mind at that but she didn't let on.
"He always liked his secrets," Jack nodded with a sad smile.
"Yeah, well I wasn't happy so I tried to get back to him - you both. Mum and Mickey both helped me out, but it was mum who got it in the end. Borrowed this massive rubbish truck from a 'mate' of hers and we used it to force open that uh -" She wrinkled her nose. "Do you remember that day with the Slitheen in Cardiff, when the TARDIS opened up and turned her back into an egg?"
Martha's eyebrows shot up at that, but it was Jack she was focusing on. He gave an uncertain nod. "How could I forget?"
"We opened it up again, with the truck. I looked into the heart -"
"Rose, you what?"
"And then after that I don't remember anything. I know I became something called the Bad Wolf, but it's all just… golden light, until I wake up in the TARDIS and the Doctor's there, going on about all the stuff he wanted us to do together and how he never would with 'this face', and…" She looked off to the side, tears welling up in her eyes for the first time in weeks. "I killed him, Jack. No one's supposed to look into the heart of the TARDIS, for a reason. But I did, and to stop it killing me, he took it into himself, and he died."
A dull silence overtook the hub. Neither of her companions appeared to know what to say and were exchanging loaded looks, but Rose couldn't bring herself to care. After all this time, the full truth of that night had come spilling out. Her mother's fears had been founded but late; Rose had already become something inhuman, long before Jackie Tyler had the time to express her fears.
"Rosie," Jack began, before cutting himself off. He searched for words for a few seconds, jaw flapping uselessly before he settled on a course of action. "I thought the Doctor was trapped in this parallel world. How can both these stories be true?"
She was still tense, but made her shoulders relax somewhat. "When he was fatally hurt he had this thing - this, like, Time Lord trick, that let him cheat death. All the cells in his body were dying so he -"
"Regenerated?" Jack interrupted.
She was surprised, but still managed to nod. "Yeah. How did you -"
"There were always rumours back on the Boeshane Peninsula, about the Time Lords. About the things they could do - the things they manipulated their own DNA for. Never believed it all myself, but I guess it's true, huh?"
"Well, the regeneration stuff was, yeah. He turned into this - this completely new man, right in front of me, and it's him who got trapped."
Everything went quiet for another moment. "Damn Rosie."
"Yeah."
"He could turn himself into a new person when he was dying?" Martha asked, looking appalled. "But that isn't right! It goes against the laws of nature."
"The Time Lords were never renowned for their respect of nature's laws," Jack said dryly. "But the Doctor -" He broke off and sighed. "Well, despite everything, the Doctor was a good man. Made me who I am now, you might say." With a grin and a wink, he drained the last of his coffee.
Rose shook her head, a smile trying to fight its way onto her face. "What am I gonna do with you, eh?"
"Whatever you want, Rosie." He winked again and she groaned, turning away as he laughed.
"But if you were trapped in the year one hundred thousand -" Martha began.
"Two hundred, one thousand."
"Whatever. How can you be here, now?"
He leveled at Martha a dry look. "Time travel, baby. Ever heard of it?" Then, a though seemed to occur to him. "Hey, if the Doc's gone how did I see the TARDIS out there on the plaza?"
"I landed her there," Rose said.
For a few seconds he was too stunned to answer. "I mean - so you can pilot the TARDIS now?"
"Sure," she shrugged. "You know, read the manual and so forth. Plus, I'm pretty sure she's been helping out."
He blew out a breath. "That's quite the tale you have there. I'm sorry." She nodded but couldn't think of anything to say in response. "I have to ask though, knowing what I do now…" She looked back, eyebrows raised promptingly. "Could you do it again?"
"What?"
"Become Bad Wolf again? Reverse whatever it was that brought me back to life?"
Panic swelled in her chest and she said, "No! No, I couldn't."
He looked disappointed, and like he wanted to say something else, when a door behind them opened and a young man in a suit and tie stepped inside, stopping short when he saw them.
"Er…"
"Ianto," Jack said bracingly, getting to his feet with a wide smile on his face, like he hadn't just been asking her to unleash an all-powerful time goddess. "Allow me to introduce Rose Tyler and Martha Jones. Good friends of mine." He said this last bit with a wink back at Martha, who knew by now to just roll her eyes.
Ianto sighed. "Oh god, not more 'special friends'. Jack, honestly -"
"Not like that, Ianto! They are special ladies, who deserve the best our fine hub has to offer." With an almost unnoticeable glance at Martha, he said, "Perhaps a tour, for Dr Jones-to-be? Maybe we can convince her to come work with us once she's finished her degree."
Ianto looked exasperated but he agreed. As he toured Martha around the compound, Jack and Rose remained behind, talking in low tones.
"Jack, I couldn't. I shouldn't! No one's supposed to hold the time vortex in their head like that. It even killed the Doctor we knew. Killed him, Jack."
"No, no, I understand," he said, though it appeared to pain him to say so. "I just asked because - well your bringing me back to life as Bad Wolf, great as it was at first…" He trailed off and looked to be warring with himself over what to say. "It worked a little too well."
"What does that mean?"
"It means, Rosie - it means… I'm over one hundred years old." Everything he said from that point on may as well have not been said at all. It was like she had been plunged into ice water and was trying to listen to him shout for her from the surface. Nothing was coherent. None of it went in. What did he mean, he was over a hundred years old?
"I woke up and managed to piece things back together, so I used my old vortex manipulator to get back to Earth, only I misjudged the time zone a little, ended up living through two world wars waiting for the Twenty First century to hit."
"I - I don't -"
"I can't die, Rosie. Not ever, as far as I can tell. Even when I do, I just come back. That's why I asked you about Bad Wolf, about using it again. I'd just - I'd like to think I'll be able to pass on one day, you know?"
She did know, but she was too stunned to express this. Jack was - and she had -
She had done this to him. Her reckless rescue mission had cost one Doctor his life, and robbed Jack Harkness of his death. When they first locked eyes across the plaza she had been so happy, but now, watching her old friend speak so candidly of his apparent immortality, all she felt was a hollow sickness. This trip to Cardiff had been meant to cement her innate humanness. It wasn't working out as she had hoped.
For some reason though, Jacks' revelation had sparked something inside her, and that new feeling, that magnetised feeling, was prompting her to start talking.
"Something's happening to me, Jack. I don't know what it is yet - well no, I do. I think it's Bad Wolf. I don't think it's gone from me completely." And at his concerned, intrigued look, she regaled to him the tales of her recent adventures, of her strange draw to him, and of every suspicion that the Bad Wolf wasn't as dead as it should be. "I think it's still there, inside me, like it's waiting for something."
"If that's true, this feeling you have around me now might not be so out of nowhere," he said. "Bad Wolf brought me, specifically back to life; I didn't see anyone else who died on the GameStation getting back up to stretch their legs, at least. If it's still there, still inside you in some way, then it makes sense for it to recognise me, reach out to me." An intensely curious look overcame his face as he continued. "If Bad Wolf is still there, then I might even suggest that it's waking up."
