Fic: They Came to Norway to Eat Our Brains
Title: They Came to Norway to Eat Our Brains
Author: Doyle
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Jack, Mickey, Jake
Rating: PG
Notes: Very late backup for the available_very ficathon for honorh who wanted a reunion between Rose and Jack in Pete’s world, Mickey, yorkie!Rose, no Doctor and no angst.
Summary: The Torchwood base at Darlig ulv Stranden has a problem with zombies. Well, one zombie (suspected). And when the pictures come through in London, Rose is shocked to realise who it is.
Length: 5000 words
“You know zombies?”
“What about them?” Rose had got the phone off her bedside table and answered it without opening her eyes. This was starting to seem like a good move - it felt like very early morning and Mickey sounded worried. She huddled a bit further under the duvet. “Are there zombies outside my house?”
“Dunno, but probably not.”
“Are there zombies outside your house?”
“I’m at the office.” She heard a blind being cautiously drawn back as he checked, just in case. “It’s this report we just got in from the Norway office, it’s like...”
Rose waited.
“There was a body fell through the rift above the beach,” Mickey said. “They thought it was a dead body, only he came back to life.”
It wasn’t really his gran’s fault, Rose thought. She’d been old and she could hardly see by the time Mickey was seven; she’d thought the dodgy videos Rob Delaney’s big brother had been selling round the estate were Disney, not bootleg copies of banned horror films likely to scar for life any little kids unlucky enough to get one for a present. “Well, if the zombie’s in Norway, it’s not going to come and get you in London, is it?” she said comfortingly.
“But they sent through this picture…” She heard him sigh. “Look, it’s hard to explain over the phone. Get dressed, I’m coming over.”
“I love how you just assume I’m still in bed,” she said, fitting the words around a yawn.
“Rose, it’s eight in the morning and your house isn’t on fire, I know for a fact you’re still in - Rose? Rose!”
“I’m okay, I’m fine,” she said, once she’d disentangled herself and found the phone. “Rose jumped on my head.” The dog yipped excitedly at her name and bounced on the mattress. Rose - who’d petitioned for a change to the dog’s name but had been overruled by her mum, who ‘didn’t want to confuse the poor thing’ and who suggested Rose could always call herself something different - scratched her behind the ears. “Who’s a lovely girl? Were you pretending to be a zombie, trying to eat my brains?”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot you were looking after the dog. Suppose we could leave her with Jake, though…”
“What?”
“If we had to go somewhere today,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. Look, I’ll be there in half an hour.”
**
She’d offered to take care of Leona while their parents were on holiday, because they’d technically never had a honeymoon what with the invasion that week, and a two-year-old couldn’t be that hard to look after, could she? Her mum had just snorted. So she had the house herself for a fortnight, if you didn’t count the dog, who was sitting at the foot of her stool watching her eat cornflakes with an adoring look on its face. And Mickey, who came in the back door without knocking and put his laptop on the kitchen counter.
“Oi,” Rose protested idly, “half an hour, you said. I’m still in my pyjamas.”
“Seen you in less, babe.”
He hadn’t shaved, she noticed. “Late night?”
“Me and Jake were just coming off the night shift when the Norway office picked up some weird rift activity.”
“Oh. Okay.” She reached for the cereal box and tried not to look too uneasy. The rift above Darlig ulv Stranden flared every couple of months, and when that happened the beach got littered with Cybermen parts and bits of Dalek - or worse. Not her favourite place, and she hadn’t been out there in close to three years, since they’d all gone looking for the Doctor. “You said a body fell through? You mean a Cyberman.”
“That’s what we thought. Then they sent through the photos.”
She put down her spoon and pushed the bowl away. “Come on, then. Show me.”
“I wasn’t sure it was him,” Mickey said. “I only met him that once, and that was years ago, and I wasn’t sure...” And he turned the computer so she could see the screen.
It was a couple of minutes before she could make herself look away, and by then she’d memorised it. The body on the mortuary table, the grey cast to the skin. The coat. “No, you were right,” she said steadily. “It’s him. It’s Jack.” Mickey’s arm went around her shoulders and she leaned into the hug, wondering how it could hurt so much when she’d known, deep down, that Jack was dead the first time she’d tried to talk about him and the Doctor had been so keen to change the subject.
Then the part of her brain that had been jumping up and down and waving finally got her attention: “Wait, Jack’s your zombie?”
Mickey said, “You’d better see the rest.”
**
She looked through all the pictures and watched the videos from the CCTV, and listened to the recording of the conversation Mickey had had with Dr Fellman in their Norway office, and then she looked at it all again, and by the time they’d dropped the dog off at Mickey and Jake’s flat and got to the Tower she’d seen the lot half a dozen times. Now, as they waited for flight clearance, she was watching it again, still expecting ‘April Fool’s, Rose!’ to fly across the screen any minute.
“Look, he was definitely dead when we brought him in. You’ve got the picture there, haven’t you?” She didn’t look at the first picture, the one of Jack dead on the table.
On the recording, Mickey said, ”Me and my colleague are gonna, um, discuss this. I’ll only be a minute.” She’d made him go through every detail - what they’d been doing, the times everything happened - and she could nearly see him press the mute switch and look round at Jake. ”What d’you think?”
”Well, the guy in the photo’s got his eyes closed. So I can see where they might’ve made the mistake.”
“They must’ve checked, though. They’re going mental over there.”
“What, you think that lot’d think to check his pulse, see if he was breathing? That’s just crazy space medicine, Mick. You’ve been watching too much TV. You’ll be expecting them to whip out tricorders next.”
“Doctor Fellman, we’re just wondering, when you say he was dead...”
She’d known Fellman before he’d been transferred to Norway to head up the new branch there, and she’d felt like throwing a party the day he cleared out for good. He talked a lot about sacrifice and people being expendable for the greater good; he always called her Miss Tyler in a sneery sort of way. So even with everything else, she still enjoyed hearing him grind his teeth at the idea that he just hadn’t noticed Jack was alive.
“He came out of the rift two hundred feet above the sea. By the time we reached him he’d been underwater for more than an hour. He wasn’t breathing, there was no pulse, and he was blue. I assure you, until the moment he sat up on the autopsy table - and we’re going to need a new mortuary nurse, by the way - there was absolutely no prospect that life remained.”
“That’s Jack,” Rose said softly. “Full of surprises.”
”Right. Um. Can we ring you back?”
The two security videos were silent: Jack turning the charm onto a nurse, who eventually came back into frame with his coat - that made Rose smile; and a very blurry Jack running out of the front doors at top speed.
“I can’t believe they just let him walk out,” she complained.
“Yeah,” Mickey said, tapping at the flight computer keyboard, “‘cause Captain Jack’s in this universe and he’s able to come back from the dead, but him thumping a guard and getting away, that’s the weird bit.”
“It might not even be him.”
He looked up. “You said...”
“I mean, it’s definitely Jack.” She hadn’t seen him in - what was it, four years? - but that didn’t matter, it could have been forty and she wouldn’t have forgotten a thing. “But what if he’s not my Jack? He might, I dunno, be the Jack from this universe. Spaceships get pulled to the rift sometimes. He might be some Jack who never met me or the Doctor.”
“Still got to find him,” Mickey pointed out. “He’s still some Jack. Ricky wasn’t me but... he sort of was, you know? Jake says, anyway.”
”This is Torchwood Tower air traffic control, are you reading? Over.
Rose swivelled in her chair and hit the comms button. “Control, this is,” she made a face, “Thunderbird One, over.”
”Cleared for departure, Thunderbird One.”
“Thanks, Addie. Out.” To Mickey, she added, “When we get back, we’re so renaming this.”
They were halfway over the North Sea when she thought to ask, “What are you doing, anyway?”
Mickey pointed at the laptop, where the video was frozen on the shot of Jack legging it out of the Norway building. “That thing on his wrist,” he said. “He was wearing it that time I met you lot in Cardiff. Said it was some sort of communicator-teleporter thing and some other stuff I’m not telling you ‘cause he was probably making it up... but they scanned it when they brought him in. Didn’t know what it was, probably. And I’ve just isolated the frequency and now we’re tracking him on the GPS.” He grinned at her. “Go on, who’s brilliant?”
Rose said, “You know I love you, yeah?”
He shrugged modestly. “You’re only human. And Fellman’s lot are bound to think of this eventually, and they’re a lot closer than us.”
“Where is he now?”
They both stared at the screen as the map merged into the satellite image, the cross that marked Jack’s position blinking on top of a familiar building.
“Uh-oh.”
“He doubled back,” Rose said, not sure if that was very clever or very stupid. “He never left the building. He’s right under Fellman’s nose.”
“He must be...” Mickey squinted at the figure. “What the hell’s he doing on the roof?”
****
The only upside to the day beginning with an invasion fleet above Cardiff Bay was that things really couldn’t get any worse from there. In theory. Jack wasn’t prepared to go as far as to say that a fun trip through the void, a hundred-foot icy plunge, coming back to life with his lungs full of seawater, and then discovering that he was stuck in a parallel universe was worse than what he’d woken up to that morning back in the real world. Call it evens.
Another universe. Waking up on a slab in a Torchwood branch in Norway had been his first clue that the world wasn’t as it should be; still, Yvonne Hartman had liked her secrets and he’d told himself there was just an outside chance that there’d been a small international outpost, kept under wraps by Torchwood One and going on alone after Canary Wharf killed off the big bosses. When he made it out of the building - not such a small outpost after all - the air had smelled different, a sharp aftertaste in the drizzling rain, halons and greenhouse gases. Time Agent Basic Training 101 sometimes kicked in even centuries later; in an alien environment, head for high ground, establish your position. He’d made for the roof, climbed onto the ledge, looking over at the beach for any sign of where he’d fallen from.
And that was when he’d almost gotten winged by a zeppelin and realised that he was most definitely not in Cardiff any more.
He could have run then. He should have run; half a dozen people had seen him come back to life, and if this Torchwood was anything like Hartman’s a man who couldn’t die would be subjected to fifty kinds of painful scientific test before you could say ‘probe’. That security guard, the mean looking one who’d be waking up with a headache any time, he’d be first in line to explore Jack for science. So: getting the hell away from Torchwood - excellent plan. And, sure, he had no friends, no cash that was likely to be legal tender in an alternate universe, and nothing to his name but the waterlogged clothes on his back, but many a time he’d found himself on a world with less and walked away with a fortune, a hell of a reputation and, that one time, the hand in marriage of the God-Emperor of Kellenfal. Once a conman, always...
Wouldn’t work, he thought. He couldn’t even con himself.
His wrist strap fizzed and sparked and he shook it, wondering if transuniversal travel or the ocean had finally killed it. One last try, one last piece of hope - he tapped a button and said, “Ianto? Gwen? Anybody hear me?”
He listened to the silence for a long time before he shut the communicator off.
Faintly, in the building below him, something was ringing. Jack leaned over the ledge and looked down at the people streaming into the car park. He felt vaguely insulted. Not that he was looking forward to another rendezvous with Alternate Torchwood Norway, but it’d be nice to get the feeling they were taking him seriously as a threat. A lockdown or a red alert said ‘threatened’. A fire drill didn’t.
He heard the people on the stairs a few seconds before the door opened. Two of them, running, not trying to be quiet; he sprinted to the door, flattening himself against the wall.
“...says he’s still here. He could’ve ditched it, though,” the man was saying, but it wasn’t him Jack was looking at.
The picture of Rose Tyler he carried around in his head, he knew, wasn’t an exact likeness. It was a composite, pulled from the girl he’d kissed on the Gamestation before he died the first time; the 15-year-old kid in high heels and too much lipstick he’d seen once on her estate, a century later; the freeze-frame Tosh had pulled from the cameras at Canary Wharf on the day he’d believed she died.
The real thing - living, breathing, and barely six feet from him, pushing back her hair as she looked over the rooftop - was a little older and a lot more beautiful.
“Rose?”
She spun in place and stared at him, and he heard her breath catch.
“Rose,” he said again, surer, even as he was warning himself about an infinite multiverse and billion to one chances.
“How did we meet?” she said.
“What?”
“You know my name,” she pressed, hope wavering in her voice. “How did you meet me? When?”
Dancing in the sky in the middle of an air raid; the champagne; a beautiful girl in his arms. “It was 1941,” he said, and grinned when she pressed her hands to her mouth and stepped towards him. “The Germans wore grey, you wore - what was it? - oh, a Union Jack...”
“Union flag,” she said, inexplicably, and launched herself into his arms.
He’d had close to a hundred and forty years to think about meeting Rose again. Mostly he hadn’t pictured further ahead than imagining a couple of glib opening lines about how much she’d missed him, or debating with himself whether to kiss her or the Doctor first, half the time going one way, half the other.
And, okay, one of the contestants was out of the running by way of being in a different universe, but with Rose in front of him he was still pretty sure how it would have gone.
She was laughing when she drew back from him, her hands still buried in his hair. “Hello.”
“Hello,” he grinned.
Behind her, her friend was setting a toolbox on the ground and feigning interest in the fire drill going on below. “Mickey Smith,” Jack said, “as I live and breathe.”
He looked pleased. “Captain Jack. Didn’t think you’d remember me.”
“Once seen, always yearned for - Mickey, I’d kiss you too, but that’d mean letting go of Rose.”
“Mickey, get in the queue.”
“I’m at least seventeen times too manly for that sort of thing,” Mickey said. “Also my boyfriend would murder me. And I’m not totally convinced you’re not a zombie, by the way, so if you’ve got plans for eating mine or Rose’s brains, just remember I know where they keep the chainsaws downstairs.”
Jack looked down at Rose.
“I don’t think you’re a zombie,” she said loyally. “Only... we did see you come back from the dead.”
“Oh.”
“How...”
“Long story,” he said, holding her close for a moment. “One with a Miss Rose Tyler in a starring role. You don’t remember?”
“I... I sometimes dreamed about you, after the Gamestation. I dreamed the Daleks killed you and then...” She shook her head. “I always woke up. What should I remember?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jack said, and right now, it didn’t. “Short version is, I can’t die. I figured falling through the Void would do the job, but I guess not.”
“Not being able to die’s probably lucky,” Mickey said, “because Fellman’s lot are coming back in.”
Rose ran to join him at the edge and Jack followed, keeping close to her.
“You know these people?”
“They’re Torchwood,” Rose said.
“Yeah, weird coincidence...”
“I mean, we’re Torchwood as well. Me and Mickey.”
Jack struggled with this for a second. “In Norway?”
“In London. My dad - my dad in this universe - runs the place but he’s on holiday and Fellman’s in charge of this branch and he’s...”
“A headcase,” Mickey finished. “He’s some sort of genius but when he was in London these aliens kept mysteriously dying on his shift. And then they’d accidentally get sent to the lab for dissection.”
“Lucky for me I’ve got you two to protect me,” Jack said, and Rose beamed at him and Mickey rolled his eyes, and this new universe was shaping up to be okay, he thought.
“We didn’t think they’d be back so early,” Rose said.
“I knew that bin would burn out too quick.”
“Good thing we’ve got a backup plan, then,” she said, in a take-charge voice Jack couldn’t remember hearing from her before. “Mickey, toolbox. Jack, get your clothes off.”
“My kind of plan,” he said, resisting the urge to add ‘ma’am’ as he stripped off his coat.
Mickey shook a shapeless garment out of the box and threw it to him. “Maintenance overalls. Hope they’re your size, we didn’t have a lot of time to raid the storage cupboard.”
“This is plan B? A disguise?”
“Plan A was setting the building on fire,” Mickey pointed out. “Anyway, you can talk. Your plan A was standing around on the roof. Leave your wrist thing, too, they’ll track it like we did.”
Jack threw his soaked clothes in a corner, already mourning the loss of his coat. “Think we could steal a zeppelin?” he joked.
Rose and Mickey exchanged looks. “Actually...”
****
She couldn’t stop smiling. It was a problem. She might need to need to talk to Fellman in a minute, and he’d know something was up if she didn’t look like being in the same building as him was making her skin crawl.
But Jack was alive, and she couldn’t stop.
She kept near to him as the three of them made their way to the ground floor, keeping to the emergency stairs. Jack kept brushing against her - taking her arm, or pressing his hand against her lower back - and she was glad, because the only thing stopping her from being completely, madly happy was the feeling that any second the other universe was going to notice what had happened and snatch him back. She looked at him and bit her lip. Even in those godawful overalls - and they weren’t the right size, nowhere near - he was gorgeous.
“So,” he said, leaning close, “parallel universe.”
“Yep.”
“There another Rose around somewhere?” His grin didn’t just imply something filthy, it added colour illustrations.
“Yes.” She smacked his arm. “She’s got four legs and a wet nose.”
“Interesting...”
Mickey shushed them both and clamped his phone to his ear. “Sorry, what? Right. We’ve got to wait here till Jake gets the cameras,” he reported. “And he says can I ask if your head would grow back if somebody cut it off.”
“Yes. Don’t ask how I know.”
The security cameras, in unison, rotated away from them, leaving a clear route to the stairs. They ran.
Setting off the fire alarms had seemed like a good idea at the time, Rose thought, but now everyone was back in the building and trying to put off getting back to work, so they were all hanging around Reception.
She edged into the foyer. Fellman was at the reception desk, ranting at the receptionist about vandals and lax security.
Rose put her hand behind her back and signalled. At the edge of her vision she could see Jack stride to the fire door, baseball cap pulled over his eyes and toolbox swinging in his hand. She risked a look to her other side. Mickey was at the other emergency exit, pretending to read the clipboard they’d grabbed from an empty office upstairs.
They opened the doors at the same moment.
“Sorry,” Mickey shouted as the alarms started to wail. “Leaned on the door. Sorry.” Across the room, the receptionist gave him a bored look and hit a button beneath his desk. The claxons stopped. Some of the people who’d thought they were in for another chance to skive off outside looked disappointed. Jack was gone.
Mickey ambled to her side, the clipboard discarded behind the nearest potted plant. “He’ll be across the carpark by now,” he murmured. “Five minutes to the tower. He’s well clear.” She breathed.
“Everybody back to work,” Fellman roared, and then his eyes landed on Rose and narrowed.
“Dr. Fellman,” she said, going to him before he could come to her; get them off-balance, Pete always said, make sure they know you’re in charge. Even if you’re not, if you fake it well enough people will believe it. She thought the Doctor might have said that once, too. “We heard you’d had a security problem. More than one, it looks like. Bad day?”
“Miss Tyler, Mr Smith,” he said in a low, tight voice. “A Hostile escaped this morning - I spoke to Mr Smith about that - and we’ve apparently had a small fire in one of the Ladies toilets. Nothing that can’t be sorted out.”
“My... I mean, Mr Tyler’s very worried about these security breaches,” Rose said, enjoying his little twitch at the reminder that, as far as anyone in this world knew, she was the boss’s long-lost daughter. “He interrupted his holiday with his wife and daughter specially to get me and Mickey to come out here and take a look around.”
“That’s right, so if you could point us to your records, accounts, logs of everything you’ve brought in from the rift...”
It interested her how someone could go to fury to panic with hardly any change of expression. His face seemed to freeze. “Ah,” he said.
“Boring job, but someone’s got to do it,” she said breezily, hoping to God he didn’t call her bluff and look up Pete’s hotel number. “We could start with this Hostile you lost this morning.”
“In point of fact,” Fellman said, “having reviewed the evidence since our conversation this morning, ah, Michael, it seems that our man wasn’t an extraterrestrial life form at all. Just a trawlerman who’d come to some misfortune and has now, no doubt, returned to his home.”
“That’s like a fisherman?” Mickey asked.
“Yes, yes.”
“They can come back from the dead, can they? That must come in handy.”
“Evidently,” he said, his teeth so gritted Rose wasn’t sure his lips had moved, “he was only suffering from exposure and the morgue attendant was premature in pronouncing him dead.”
“You mean you made a mistake?” she asked, frowning as if she couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying, and it was so easy, when people had written you off as thick on first glance, to find the right buttons and push. Fun, too. Fellman’s ears were turning red.
“Mistakes were made,” he managed. “But I’m sure the pair of you have much more things to be getting on with in London than some silly mix-up.”
“Well...”
“No, the man’s right, Rose. We should be getting back.”
“If you’re really sure,” she said, and let Mickey steer her out of the building as Fellman steamed impotently behind them. When they were well out of sight, she grabbed Mickey’s hand and broke into a run, the laugh that had been bubbling up inside her for the last ten minutes finally getting out.
**
Jack was waiting for them in the dirigible. He hadn’t got picked up by security, or vanished into thin air, and she hugged him so hard her arms hurt.
“Your friend Jake called,” he said. “He was watching everything on CCTV. Mr Fellman? Not in a happy mood. The phone’s a nice addition, by the way. I haven’t been in a zeppelin since the Thirties. It’s weird seeing them with computers. Love the drinks cabinet, too. Champagne?”
“I can’t, I’m flying,” she said automatically.
“I’ll fly us back,” Mickey said. “Go on, have a drink.”
Jack looked between them as if he thought they were having him on and a pilot was going to drop out of an overhead compartment. “You can fly a zeppelin,” he said. “You can both fly a zeppelin.”
“Got my license two months ago. Mickey’s had his ages. Only for the smaller ships like this one, though, you need a special license for the passenger airships.”
“Something about this girl and balloons,” Jack told Mickey. “Flying them, dangling from them...”
“I want to hear the rest of that story,” Mickey said, “but let me get us airborne and onto autopilot first.” He climbed out of the small cabin and Rose settled into the seat beside Jack. He clinked his glass against hers.
“There’s no way back,” she said. “I don’t know how you even got through - it’s meant to be impossible without both universes blowing up.”
“Daleks,” he said. “A whole fleet, ripping open the Cardiff rift back home, trying to force open the Void. And, yeah, both universes would have been screwed.
“It was supposed to be my great, glorious moment. Sacrificing myself in the rift, all that life energy sealing the scar.” He leaned forward, reaching for the champagne bottle. “It worked, according to Jake. He says the rift above Dalek...”
“Darlig ulv Stranden,” she said. “It means Bad Wolf Bay. Sort of.”
“Well, it doesn’t have a rift now. It’s sealed.” He downed the champagne and gave her a half smile. She rested her arm on the back of the seat, touched her fingers to the nape of his neck. “I was wondering how the hell I was going to tell you there was no chance of getting back that way.”
The ship lurched into takeoff. “I know. It’s hard, leaving...” She didn’t even know, she realised. Jack could have friends, a lover - or more than one - might be married, even. And he’d never see them again. “I know,” she said again, and, because she couldn’t not ask: “Was the Doctor with you?”
Jack smiled at that. “Daleks in the sky, the world ending, where else would he be? He was the last thing I saw, back in the real world,” he said, “and don’t worry, he was winning.”
She wondered when she’d stopped thinking of the other universe as ‘the real world’, and how much longer it would take for Jack, if he was really going to live forever.
“Is he all right?”
Jack looked at her for a long time.
“You don’t have to try and guess what I want you to say,” she said. “I just... think about him sometimes. And when I do I hope he’s still travelling, still finding amazing places, still saving planets ten times a week, and that he’s not on his own, and that he... thinks about me sometimes as well. Just to remember.”
“Then he’s all right,” Jack said softly. “He’s fantastic.”
She smiled and leaned in and kissed him, wondering why she’d never done that before today. Not enough champagne on the TARDIS, maybe.
“I’m gonna need somewhere to live,” Jack realised. The offer was out before she’d thought about it, and after that she wouldn’t have taken it back for the world.
This, she thought, was going to be really fun to explain to Mum.
****
It was a long time before anyone checked the roof. They’d locked in on the signal hours before, but by then word had got around that the rift had vanished, and people were more concerned with pinching as many pens and mousepads as they could carry before Torchwood London cut off their funding. Office urban legend already had it that Fellman’s tantrum had been heard by trawlermen out at sea.
It was two very junior agents who finally decided to go and capture the Hostile, both of them thinking that it wouldn’t do any harm to pad the old CV a bit if people were going to be relocated to other branches. Anyway - they didn’t say it, but both were thinking it - it hadn’t moved in hours. Maybe it was dead again. Bringing in a dead alien still looked good, but was much less frightening.
They eased open the rooftop door, nets and tazers at the ready, and peered out into the gloom.
Neither of them ever forgot the sound. It was a high, snarling, vicious noise floating over the bare concrete; it was, in fact, exactly the sort of sound you might get if you let a Yorkshire Terrier chew on a microphone, then fed the recording on a permanent loop through a 51st century wrist communicator (standard Time Agent issue).
Seven hundred miles away, Jake watched the race through the building as the two agents set a new world record for the roof to lobby route. He smirked, fished a dog treat from the bag on his desk and tossed it behind him. A pair of contented jaws snapped closed.
“Good dog,” he said.
Author: Doyle
Characters/Pairing: Rose/Jack, Mickey, Jake
Rating: PG
Notes: Very late backup for the available_very ficathon for honorh who wanted a reunion between Rose and Jack in Pete’s world, Mickey, yorkie!Rose, no Doctor and no angst.
Summary: The Torchwood base at Darlig ulv Stranden has a problem with zombies. Well, one zombie (suspected). And when the pictures come through in London, Rose is shocked to realise who it is.
Length: 5000 words
“You know zombies?”
“What about them?” Rose had got the phone off her bedside table and answered it without opening her eyes. This was starting to seem like a good move - it felt like very early morning and Mickey sounded worried. She huddled a bit further under the duvet. “Are there zombies outside my house?”
“Dunno, but probably not.”
“Are there zombies outside your house?”
“I’m at the office.” She heard a blind being cautiously drawn back as he checked, just in case. “It’s this report we just got in from the Norway office, it’s like...”
Rose waited.
“There was a body fell through the rift above the beach,” Mickey said. “They thought it was a dead body, only he came back to life.”
It wasn’t really his gran’s fault, Rose thought. She’d been old and she could hardly see by the time Mickey was seven; she’d thought the dodgy videos Rob Delaney’s big brother had been selling round the estate were Disney, not bootleg copies of banned horror films likely to scar for life any little kids unlucky enough to get one for a present. “Well, if the zombie’s in Norway, it’s not going to come and get you in London, is it?” she said comfortingly.
“But they sent through this picture…” She heard him sigh. “Look, it’s hard to explain over the phone. Get dressed, I’m coming over.”
“I love how you just assume I’m still in bed,” she said, fitting the words around a yawn.
“Rose, it’s eight in the morning and your house isn’t on fire, I know for a fact you’re still in - Rose? Rose!”
“I’m okay, I’m fine,” she said, once she’d disentangled herself and found the phone. “Rose jumped on my head.” The dog yipped excitedly at her name and bounced on the mattress. Rose - who’d petitioned for a change to the dog’s name but had been overruled by her mum, who ‘didn’t want to confuse the poor thing’ and who suggested Rose could always call herself something different - scratched her behind the ears. “Who’s a lovely girl? Were you pretending to be a zombie, trying to eat my brains?”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot you were looking after the dog. Suppose we could leave her with Jake, though…”
“What?”
“If we had to go somewhere today,” he said. “Just thinking out loud. Look, I’ll be there in half an hour.”
**
She’d offered to take care of Leona while their parents were on holiday, because they’d technically never had a honeymoon what with the invasion that week, and a two-year-old couldn’t be that hard to look after, could she? Her mum had just snorted. So she had the house herself for a fortnight, if you didn’t count the dog, who was sitting at the foot of her stool watching her eat cornflakes with an adoring look on its face. And Mickey, who came in the back door without knocking and put his laptop on the kitchen counter.
“Oi,” Rose protested idly, “half an hour, you said. I’m still in my pyjamas.”
“Seen you in less, babe.”
He hadn’t shaved, she noticed. “Late night?”
“Me and Jake were just coming off the night shift when the Norway office picked up some weird rift activity.”
“Oh. Okay.” She reached for the cereal box and tried not to look too uneasy. The rift above Darlig ulv Stranden flared every couple of months, and when that happened the beach got littered with Cybermen parts and bits of Dalek - or worse. Not her favourite place, and she hadn’t been out there in close to three years, since they’d all gone looking for the Doctor. “You said a body fell through? You mean a Cyberman.”
“That’s what we thought. Then they sent through the photos.”
She put down her spoon and pushed the bowl away. “Come on, then. Show me.”
“I wasn’t sure it was him,” Mickey said. “I only met him that once, and that was years ago, and I wasn’t sure...” And he turned the computer so she could see the screen.
It was a couple of minutes before she could make herself look away, and by then she’d memorised it. The body on the mortuary table, the grey cast to the skin. The coat. “No, you were right,” she said steadily. “It’s him. It’s Jack.” Mickey’s arm went around her shoulders and she leaned into the hug, wondering how it could hurt so much when she’d known, deep down, that Jack was dead the first time she’d tried to talk about him and the Doctor had been so keen to change the subject.
Then the part of her brain that had been jumping up and down and waving finally got her attention: “Wait, Jack’s your zombie?”
Mickey said, “You’d better see the rest.”
**
She looked through all the pictures and watched the videos from the CCTV, and listened to the recording of the conversation Mickey had had with Dr Fellman in their Norway office, and then she looked at it all again, and by the time they’d dropped the dog off at Mickey and Jake’s flat and got to the Tower she’d seen the lot half a dozen times. Now, as they waited for flight clearance, she was watching it again, still expecting ‘April Fool’s, Rose!’ to fly across the screen any minute.
“Look, he was definitely dead when we brought him in. You’ve got the picture there, haven’t you?” She didn’t look at the first picture, the one of Jack dead on the table.
On the recording, Mickey said, ”Me and my colleague are gonna, um, discuss this. I’ll only be a minute.” She’d made him go through every detail - what they’d been doing, the times everything happened - and she could nearly see him press the mute switch and look round at Jake. ”What d’you think?”
”Well, the guy in the photo’s got his eyes closed. So I can see where they might’ve made the mistake.”
“They must’ve checked, though. They’re going mental over there.”
“What, you think that lot’d think to check his pulse, see if he was breathing? That’s just crazy space medicine, Mick. You’ve been watching too much TV. You’ll be expecting them to whip out tricorders next.”
“Doctor Fellman, we’re just wondering, when you say he was dead...”
She’d known Fellman before he’d been transferred to Norway to head up the new branch there, and she’d felt like throwing a party the day he cleared out for good. He talked a lot about sacrifice and people being expendable for the greater good; he always called her Miss Tyler in a sneery sort of way. So even with everything else, she still enjoyed hearing him grind his teeth at the idea that he just hadn’t noticed Jack was alive.
“He came out of the rift two hundred feet above the sea. By the time we reached him he’d been underwater for more than an hour. He wasn’t breathing, there was no pulse, and he was blue. I assure you, until the moment he sat up on the autopsy table - and we’re going to need a new mortuary nurse, by the way - there was absolutely no prospect that life remained.”
“That’s Jack,” Rose said softly. “Full of surprises.”
”Right. Um. Can we ring you back?”
The two security videos were silent: Jack turning the charm onto a nurse, who eventually came back into frame with his coat - that made Rose smile; and a very blurry Jack running out of the front doors at top speed.
“I can’t believe they just let him walk out,” she complained.
“Yeah,” Mickey said, tapping at the flight computer keyboard, “‘cause Captain Jack’s in this universe and he’s able to come back from the dead, but him thumping a guard and getting away, that’s the weird bit.”
“It might not even be him.”
He looked up. “You said...”
“I mean, it’s definitely Jack.” She hadn’t seen him in - what was it, four years? - but that didn’t matter, it could have been forty and she wouldn’t have forgotten a thing. “But what if he’s not my Jack? He might, I dunno, be the Jack from this universe. Spaceships get pulled to the rift sometimes. He might be some Jack who never met me or the Doctor.”
“Still got to find him,” Mickey pointed out. “He’s still some Jack. Ricky wasn’t me but... he sort of was, you know? Jake says, anyway.”
”This is Torchwood Tower air traffic control, are you reading? Over.
Rose swivelled in her chair and hit the comms button. “Control, this is,” she made a face, “Thunderbird One, over.”
”Cleared for departure, Thunderbird One.”
“Thanks, Addie. Out.” To Mickey, she added, “When we get back, we’re so renaming this.”
They were halfway over the North Sea when she thought to ask, “What are you doing, anyway?”
Mickey pointed at the laptop, where the video was frozen on the shot of Jack legging it out of the Norway building. “That thing on his wrist,” he said. “He was wearing it that time I met you lot in Cardiff. Said it was some sort of communicator-teleporter thing and some other stuff I’m not telling you ‘cause he was probably making it up... but they scanned it when they brought him in. Didn’t know what it was, probably. And I’ve just isolated the frequency and now we’re tracking him on the GPS.” He grinned at her. “Go on, who’s brilliant?”
Rose said, “You know I love you, yeah?”
He shrugged modestly. “You’re only human. And Fellman’s lot are bound to think of this eventually, and they’re a lot closer than us.”
“Where is he now?”
They both stared at the screen as the map merged into the satellite image, the cross that marked Jack’s position blinking on top of a familiar building.
“Uh-oh.”
“He doubled back,” Rose said, not sure if that was very clever or very stupid. “He never left the building. He’s right under Fellman’s nose.”
“He must be...” Mickey squinted at the figure. “What the hell’s he doing on the roof?”
****
The only upside to the day beginning with an invasion fleet above Cardiff Bay was that things really couldn’t get any worse from there. In theory. Jack wasn’t prepared to go as far as to say that a fun trip through the void, a hundred-foot icy plunge, coming back to life with his lungs full of seawater, and then discovering that he was stuck in a parallel universe was worse than what he’d woken up to that morning back in the real world. Call it evens.
Another universe. Waking up on a slab in a Torchwood branch in Norway had been his first clue that the world wasn’t as it should be; still, Yvonne Hartman had liked her secrets and he’d told himself there was just an outside chance that there’d been a small international outpost, kept under wraps by Torchwood One and going on alone after Canary Wharf killed off the big bosses. When he made it out of the building - not such a small outpost after all - the air had smelled different, a sharp aftertaste in the drizzling rain, halons and greenhouse gases. Time Agent Basic Training 101 sometimes kicked in even centuries later; in an alien environment, head for high ground, establish your position. He’d made for the roof, climbed onto the ledge, looking over at the beach for any sign of where he’d fallen from.
And that was when he’d almost gotten winged by a zeppelin and realised that he was most definitely not in Cardiff any more.
He could have run then. He should have run; half a dozen people had seen him come back to life, and if this Torchwood was anything like Hartman’s a man who couldn’t die would be subjected to fifty kinds of painful scientific test before you could say ‘probe’. That security guard, the mean looking one who’d be waking up with a headache any time, he’d be first in line to explore Jack for science. So: getting the hell away from Torchwood - excellent plan. And, sure, he had no friends, no cash that was likely to be legal tender in an alternate universe, and nothing to his name but the waterlogged clothes on his back, but many a time he’d found himself on a world with less and walked away with a fortune, a hell of a reputation and, that one time, the hand in marriage of the God-Emperor of Kellenfal. Once a conman, always...
Wouldn’t work, he thought. He couldn’t even con himself.
His wrist strap fizzed and sparked and he shook it, wondering if transuniversal travel or the ocean had finally killed it. One last try, one last piece of hope - he tapped a button and said, “Ianto? Gwen? Anybody hear me?”
He listened to the silence for a long time before he shut the communicator off.
Faintly, in the building below him, something was ringing. Jack leaned over the ledge and looked down at the people streaming into the car park. He felt vaguely insulted. Not that he was looking forward to another rendezvous with Alternate Torchwood Norway, but it’d be nice to get the feeling they were taking him seriously as a threat. A lockdown or a red alert said ‘threatened’. A fire drill didn’t.
He heard the people on the stairs a few seconds before the door opened. Two of them, running, not trying to be quiet; he sprinted to the door, flattening himself against the wall.
“...says he’s still here. He could’ve ditched it, though,” the man was saying, but it wasn’t him Jack was looking at.
The picture of Rose Tyler he carried around in his head, he knew, wasn’t an exact likeness. It was a composite, pulled from the girl he’d kissed on the Gamestation before he died the first time; the 15-year-old kid in high heels and too much lipstick he’d seen once on her estate, a century later; the freeze-frame Tosh had pulled from the cameras at Canary Wharf on the day he’d believed she died.
The real thing - living, breathing, and barely six feet from him, pushing back her hair as she looked over the rooftop - was a little older and a lot more beautiful.
“Rose?”
She spun in place and stared at him, and he heard her breath catch.
“Rose,” he said again, surer, even as he was warning himself about an infinite multiverse and billion to one chances.
“How did we meet?” she said.
“What?”
“You know my name,” she pressed, hope wavering in her voice. “How did you meet me? When?”
Dancing in the sky in the middle of an air raid; the champagne; a beautiful girl in his arms. “It was 1941,” he said, and grinned when she pressed her hands to her mouth and stepped towards him. “The Germans wore grey, you wore - what was it? - oh, a Union Jack...”
“Union flag,” she said, inexplicably, and launched herself into his arms.
He’d had close to a hundred and forty years to think about meeting Rose again. Mostly he hadn’t pictured further ahead than imagining a couple of glib opening lines about how much she’d missed him, or debating with himself whether to kiss her or the Doctor first, half the time going one way, half the other.
And, okay, one of the contestants was out of the running by way of being in a different universe, but with Rose in front of him he was still pretty sure how it would have gone.
She was laughing when she drew back from him, her hands still buried in his hair. “Hello.”
“Hello,” he grinned.
Behind her, her friend was setting a toolbox on the ground and feigning interest in the fire drill going on below. “Mickey Smith,” Jack said, “as I live and breathe.”
He looked pleased. “Captain Jack. Didn’t think you’d remember me.”
“Once seen, always yearned for - Mickey, I’d kiss you too, but that’d mean letting go of Rose.”
“Mickey, get in the queue.”
“I’m at least seventeen times too manly for that sort of thing,” Mickey said. “Also my boyfriend would murder me. And I’m not totally convinced you’re not a zombie, by the way, so if you’ve got plans for eating mine or Rose’s brains, just remember I know where they keep the chainsaws downstairs.”
Jack looked down at Rose.
“I don’t think you’re a zombie,” she said loyally. “Only... we did see you come back from the dead.”
“Oh.”
“How...”
“Long story,” he said, holding her close for a moment. “One with a Miss Rose Tyler in a starring role. You don’t remember?”
“I... I sometimes dreamed about you, after the Gamestation. I dreamed the Daleks killed you and then...” She shook her head. “I always woke up. What should I remember?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Jack said, and right now, it didn’t. “Short version is, I can’t die. I figured falling through the Void would do the job, but I guess not.”
“Not being able to die’s probably lucky,” Mickey said, “because Fellman’s lot are coming back in.”
Rose ran to join him at the edge and Jack followed, keeping close to her.
“You know these people?”
“They’re Torchwood,” Rose said.
“Yeah, weird coincidence...”
“I mean, we’re Torchwood as well. Me and Mickey.”
Jack struggled with this for a second. “In Norway?”
“In London. My dad - my dad in this universe - runs the place but he’s on holiday and Fellman’s in charge of this branch and he’s...”
“A headcase,” Mickey finished. “He’s some sort of genius but when he was in London these aliens kept mysteriously dying on his shift. And then they’d accidentally get sent to the lab for dissection.”
“Lucky for me I’ve got you two to protect me,” Jack said, and Rose beamed at him and Mickey rolled his eyes, and this new universe was shaping up to be okay, he thought.
“We didn’t think they’d be back so early,” Rose said.
“I knew that bin would burn out too quick.”
“Good thing we’ve got a backup plan, then,” she said, in a take-charge voice Jack couldn’t remember hearing from her before. “Mickey, toolbox. Jack, get your clothes off.”
“My kind of plan,” he said, resisting the urge to add ‘ma’am’ as he stripped off his coat.
Mickey shook a shapeless garment out of the box and threw it to him. “Maintenance overalls. Hope they’re your size, we didn’t have a lot of time to raid the storage cupboard.”
“This is plan B? A disguise?”
“Plan A was setting the building on fire,” Mickey pointed out. “Anyway, you can talk. Your plan A was standing around on the roof. Leave your wrist thing, too, they’ll track it like we did.”
Jack threw his soaked clothes in a corner, already mourning the loss of his coat. “Think we could steal a zeppelin?” he joked.
Rose and Mickey exchanged looks. “Actually...”
****
She couldn’t stop smiling. It was a problem. She might need to need to talk to Fellman in a minute, and he’d know something was up if she didn’t look like being in the same building as him was making her skin crawl.
But Jack was alive, and she couldn’t stop.
She kept near to him as the three of them made their way to the ground floor, keeping to the emergency stairs. Jack kept brushing against her - taking her arm, or pressing his hand against her lower back - and she was glad, because the only thing stopping her from being completely, madly happy was the feeling that any second the other universe was going to notice what had happened and snatch him back. She looked at him and bit her lip. Even in those godawful overalls - and they weren’t the right size, nowhere near - he was gorgeous.
“So,” he said, leaning close, “parallel universe.”
“Yep.”
“There another Rose around somewhere?” His grin didn’t just imply something filthy, it added colour illustrations.
“Yes.” She smacked his arm. “She’s got four legs and a wet nose.”
“Interesting...”
Mickey shushed them both and clamped his phone to his ear. “Sorry, what? Right. We’ve got to wait here till Jake gets the cameras,” he reported. “And he says can I ask if your head would grow back if somebody cut it off.”
“Yes. Don’t ask how I know.”
The security cameras, in unison, rotated away from them, leaving a clear route to the stairs. They ran.
Setting off the fire alarms had seemed like a good idea at the time, Rose thought, but now everyone was back in the building and trying to put off getting back to work, so they were all hanging around Reception.
She edged into the foyer. Fellman was at the reception desk, ranting at the receptionist about vandals and lax security.
Rose put her hand behind her back and signalled. At the edge of her vision she could see Jack stride to the fire door, baseball cap pulled over his eyes and toolbox swinging in his hand. She risked a look to her other side. Mickey was at the other emergency exit, pretending to read the clipboard they’d grabbed from an empty office upstairs.
They opened the doors at the same moment.
“Sorry,” Mickey shouted as the alarms started to wail. “Leaned on the door. Sorry.” Across the room, the receptionist gave him a bored look and hit a button beneath his desk. The claxons stopped. Some of the people who’d thought they were in for another chance to skive off outside looked disappointed. Jack was gone.
Mickey ambled to her side, the clipboard discarded behind the nearest potted plant. “He’ll be across the carpark by now,” he murmured. “Five minutes to the tower. He’s well clear.” She breathed.
“Everybody back to work,” Fellman roared, and then his eyes landed on Rose and narrowed.
“Dr. Fellman,” she said, going to him before he could come to her; get them off-balance, Pete always said, make sure they know you’re in charge. Even if you’re not, if you fake it well enough people will believe it. She thought the Doctor might have said that once, too. “We heard you’d had a security problem. More than one, it looks like. Bad day?”
“Miss Tyler, Mr Smith,” he said in a low, tight voice. “A Hostile escaped this morning - I spoke to Mr Smith about that - and we’ve apparently had a small fire in one of the Ladies toilets. Nothing that can’t be sorted out.”
“My... I mean, Mr Tyler’s very worried about these security breaches,” Rose said, enjoying his little twitch at the reminder that, as far as anyone in this world knew, she was the boss’s long-lost daughter. “He interrupted his holiday with his wife and daughter specially to get me and Mickey to come out here and take a look around.”
“That’s right, so if you could point us to your records, accounts, logs of everything you’ve brought in from the rift...”
It interested her how someone could go to fury to panic with hardly any change of expression. His face seemed to freeze. “Ah,” he said.
“Boring job, but someone’s got to do it,” she said breezily, hoping to God he didn’t call her bluff and look up Pete’s hotel number. “We could start with this Hostile you lost this morning.”
“In point of fact,” Fellman said, “having reviewed the evidence since our conversation this morning, ah, Michael, it seems that our man wasn’t an extraterrestrial life form at all. Just a trawlerman who’d come to some misfortune and has now, no doubt, returned to his home.”
“That’s like a fisherman?” Mickey asked.
“Yes, yes.”
“They can come back from the dead, can they? That must come in handy.”
“Evidently,” he said, his teeth so gritted Rose wasn’t sure his lips had moved, “he was only suffering from exposure and the morgue attendant was premature in pronouncing him dead.”
“You mean you made a mistake?” she asked, frowning as if she couldn’t quite grasp what he was saying, and it was so easy, when people had written you off as thick on first glance, to find the right buttons and push. Fun, too. Fellman’s ears were turning red.
“Mistakes were made,” he managed. “But I’m sure the pair of you have much more things to be getting on with in London than some silly mix-up.”
“Well...”
“No, the man’s right, Rose. We should be getting back.”
“If you’re really sure,” she said, and let Mickey steer her out of the building as Fellman steamed impotently behind them. When they were well out of sight, she grabbed Mickey’s hand and broke into a run, the laugh that had been bubbling up inside her for the last ten minutes finally getting out.
**
Jack was waiting for them in the dirigible. He hadn’t got picked up by security, or vanished into thin air, and she hugged him so hard her arms hurt.
“Your friend Jake called,” he said. “He was watching everything on CCTV. Mr Fellman? Not in a happy mood. The phone’s a nice addition, by the way. I haven’t been in a zeppelin since the Thirties. It’s weird seeing them with computers. Love the drinks cabinet, too. Champagne?”
“I can’t, I’m flying,” she said automatically.
“I’ll fly us back,” Mickey said. “Go on, have a drink.”
Jack looked between them as if he thought they were having him on and a pilot was going to drop out of an overhead compartment. “You can fly a zeppelin,” he said. “You can both fly a zeppelin.”
“Got my license two months ago. Mickey’s had his ages. Only for the smaller ships like this one, though, you need a special license for the passenger airships.”
“Something about this girl and balloons,” Jack told Mickey. “Flying them, dangling from them...”
“I want to hear the rest of that story,” Mickey said, “but let me get us airborne and onto autopilot first.” He climbed out of the small cabin and Rose settled into the seat beside Jack. He clinked his glass against hers.
“There’s no way back,” she said. “I don’t know how you even got through - it’s meant to be impossible without both universes blowing up.”
“Daleks,” he said. “A whole fleet, ripping open the Cardiff rift back home, trying to force open the Void. And, yeah, both universes would have been screwed.
“It was supposed to be my great, glorious moment. Sacrificing myself in the rift, all that life energy sealing the scar.” He leaned forward, reaching for the champagne bottle. “It worked, according to Jake. He says the rift above Dalek...”
“Darlig ulv Stranden,” she said. “It means Bad Wolf Bay. Sort of.”
“Well, it doesn’t have a rift now. It’s sealed.” He downed the champagne and gave her a half smile. She rested her arm on the back of the seat, touched her fingers to the nape of his neck. “I was wondering how the hell I was going to tell you there was no chance of getting back that way.”
The ship lurched into takeoff. “I know. It’s hard, leaving...” She didn’t even know, she realised. Jack could have friends, a lover - or more than one - might be married, even. And he’d never see them again. “I know,” she said again, and, because she couldn’t not ask: “Was the Doctor with you?”
Jack smiled at that. “Daleks in the sky, the world ending, where else would he be? He was the last thing I saw, back in the real world,” he said, “and don’t worry, he was winning.”
She wondered when she’d stopped thinking of the other universe as ‘the real world’, and how much longer it would take for Jack, if he was really going to live forever.
“Is he all right?”
Jack looked at her for a long time.
“You don’t have to try and guess what I want you to say,” she said. “I just... think about him sometimes. And when I do I hope he’s still travelling, still finding amazing places, still saving planets ten times a week, and that he’s not on his own, and that he... thinks about me sometimes as well. Just to remember.”
“Then he’s all right,” Jack said softly. “He’s fantastic.”
She smiled and leaned in and kissed him, wondering why she’d never done that before today. Not enough champagne on the TARDIS, maybe.
“I’m gonna need somewhere to live,” Jack realised. The offer was out before she’d thought about it, and after that she wouldn’t have taken it back for the world.
This, she thought, was going to be really fun to explain to Mum.
****
It was a long time before anyone checked the roof. They’d locked in on the signal hours before, but by then word had got around that the rift had vanished, and people were more concerned with pinching as many pens and mousepads as they could carry before Torchwood London cut off their funding. Office urban legend already had it that Fellman’s tantrum had been heard by trawlermen out at sea.
It was two very junior agents who finally decided to go and capture the Hostile, both of them thinking that it wouldn’t do any harm to pad the old CV a bit if people were going to be relocated to other branches. Anyway - they didn’t say it, but both were thinking it - it hadn’t moved in hours. Maybe it was dead again. Bringing in a dead alien still looked good, but was much less frightening.
They eased open the rooftop door, nets and tazers at the ready, and peered out into the gloom.
Neither of them ever forgot the sound. It was a high, snarling, vicious noise floating over the bare concrete; it was, in fact, exactly the sort of sound you might get if you let a Yorkshire Terrier chew on a microphone, then fed the recording on a permanent loop through a 51st century wrist communicator (standard Time Agent issue).
Seven hundred miles away, Jake watched the race through the building as the two agents set a new world record for the roof to lobby route. He smirked, fished a dog treat from the bag on his desk and tossed it behind him. A pair of contented jaws snapped closed.
“Good dog,” he said.