New fic: Guardians 1/4
Fic: Guardians
Author: wmr wendymr
Characters: Rose Tyler... and others ;)
Rated: PG
Disclaimer: They're not mine, no; did you really think they were?
Summary: No, her past’s got nothing to do with why she’s on her way to Cardiff, in the cabin of a Torchwood private plane, the mysterious file and an overnight bag with her.
This is a sequel to Protector, long-promised to honorh - sorry it's taken so long to come to fruition! I hope to be able to post regularly - every three days if writing goes smoothly. With huge thanks to dark_aegis for BRing and reassuring me that the skience isn't totally naff ;)
Guardians
Chapter 1: Disturbances
“Ms Tyler? Sorry to interrupt, but I have something here I think you should see.”
Saving her work and engaging the screen protector, Rose glances up. If Jeri’s telling her this is important - and the mere fact that she’s come into her office instead of just emailing says it is - then it’s worth being interrupted. Jeri’s that good. And utterly loyal, too, thanks to the fact that her citizenship status - and the fact that she and her daughter are alive - is down to Rose.
She found Jeri one day eight years ago, in the back of a van she intercepted on one of her rare field missions. The driver was suspected of trading in alien artefacts. As it turned out, he was trading in slaves - women and children kidnapped from East Africa and passed into domestic servitude in the homes of the wealthy. People who could well afford to pay a housekeeper’s wages, but preferred to have someone so dependent on them that they’d do anything, including sell their bodies, for room and board.
Jeri and her then newborn daughter were destined for that fate, until Rose and her team rescued her. The government initially wanted to deport the thirty-odd Somalians back to a so-called ‘safe’ country, but after Torchwood’s intervention, and Rose’s personal guarantee that the public purse would not be affected, all were allowed to remain in the country.
As Jeri’s daughter was so young, finding a job wasn’t an easy option, and Rose employed her as a housekeeper. A year or so later, as Jeri’s English improved, it became clear she was much more suited to a job as a personal assistant. She’s intelligent, near-impossible to fool, incorruptible and has the kind of sharp, analytical mind that Rose likes to have around - it’s a useful foil for her own intuitiveness. Jeri’s worked here ever since, and still insists on the Ms Tyler. But then most people around here call her that, and with an awe bordering on fear at times.
“Let’s see it, then.” Extending her hand for the thick - bulging, in fact, and rather dusty - folder Jeri’s holding, her eye’s caught by the scrape on her knuckle. Or, rather, the scrape that was on her knuckle this morning. Gone now.
“Edited highlights?” she asks as Jeri passes her the folder.
Jeri raises one shoulder in the most casual of shrugs. “Just your usual things that go bump in the night.”
“Yeah, right.” She flips over the cover. The front page is an index of dates, stretching back almost two hundred years.
“Yeah.” Jeri smiles. “Except that this version includes earth tremors with no traceable cause, missing persons and weird things turning up out of nowhere.”
“Oh?” There’s more; she can tell by her assistant’s stance. “Sounds like a version of Roswell.”
“Nope, all British, this one. And the weirdest of the lot? Tattered old biography of an American president way back in the 2000s.”
She snorts. “They’re all weird. Nothing unusual there.”
“Maybe not. ‘Cept this bloke was never a president.”
“Yeah? Who was he, then?”
“No-one knows. There’s no record of him ever existing. Well, lots of Arthur Winters, but none born on that day in that place to those parents, or growing up and going into politics.”
“Fiction?” Rose suggests.
“Nope. Not the way it’s written. And, anyway, the ISBN doesn’t exist either.”
Crazy theories are already spinning through her head. Steadying her breathing, she asks - even though the answer’s in the folder and she could see it for herself - “So where has all this stuff been happenin’?”
With a half-laugh, Jeri says, “Wales, of all places! Would you believe, Cardiff.”
***
There’s a Rift between time and space...
If there’s a Rift in Cardiff in her original universe, then why would there not be one here? And if it’s between time and space, then who says it can’t reach between universes?
That’s her theory, at any rate. Missing persons? Strange objects turning up out of nowhere, including a complete biography, including references, photographs and copies of newspaper articles, of a president who never existed? Another universe.
Though which universe? The Doctor, all those years ago, gave her and Mickey the impression that there were lots. Or that there used to be.
But she’s not getting any hopes up. It’s been far, far too long for that. And anyway, the mere fact that objects might have made it through the Void in either direction means nothing. After all, they turned up on this side a bit the worse for wear, according to the folder. And who’s to say that any humans who went missing in Cardiff actually reappeared in another universe? Or that, if they did, they did so alive?
No, her past’s got nothing to do with why she’s on her way to Cardiff, in the cabin of a Torchwood private plane, the mysterious file and an overnight bag with her. Of course, back when she first arrived in this universe, or for a couple of years after, the overnight bag would have contained different things - her most valued possessions, for example. She’d have had a completely different reason for going, hope and expectation in her heart.
That was then. This is now. Now... well, she’s changed. Time changes everyone. Her home’s here now. A responsible job, friends, a life, far more than the Rose Tyler who grew up in the Powell Estates, left school at sixteen and worked in a shop ever imagined she’d achieve.
So much of it would never have happened if not for the Doctor; but it’s her own accomplishment too. The Doctor’s not the one who got her A-levels, two university degrees, the senior position she now holds, even if he was the one who inspired her.
She’s going to Cardiff quite simply because this has been going on too long. And because this shouldn’t have been a secret from her, and because it’s clear that nobody else has been able to get to the bottom of what’s going on. Unexplained earth tremors with no geological explanation, missing persons, strange objects, and reports going back over two hundred years, and nobody has been able to come up with an answer?
Admittedly, she’s got the advantage of knowledge nobody else has: that there’s such a thing as time- and space-rifts, and that in a parallel universe there’s one in Cardiff. The chances of there being a Rift in this Cardiff have to be high.
Jeri raised a single eyebrow when she announced she was going. “I’ll tell the Swansea field team to expect you, then?” was her only comment.
“Nah. Think I’ll surprise them,” she said. Swansea - one of many differences between this universe and her original one is that Cardiff’s not the capital of Wales. It’s just a smallish town that very much plays second fiddle to its bigger neighbour down the road. Swansea, the home of the Welsh national rugby team, the cricket team and the Welsh national parliament - which, in this universe, was never merely an assembly. Neil Kinnock, fiery advocate of Welsh independence, would never have settled for less.
So, what makes the Rift active? she wonders again as the ramparts of Windsor Castle come into view - in this universe it’s an international conference centre. Alien involvement, that’s one; the first time it was the Gelth, via Gwyneth. And then later it was Blon Fel Fotch - but, wait; she did it by harnessing the TARDIS with the extrapolator. So the TARDIS can affect the Rift. Though she knew that - the TARDIS draws fuel from the Rift.
Not that that helps at all; there’s no TARDIS in this universe. Aliens, yes; plenty of those. But no alien sightings in Cardiff that she’s aware of, and certainly none that correspond with any of the recorded tremors. Not even any alien sightings in Swansea, which is why the Torchwood presence is minimal.
Maybe the dates could tell her whether there might have been anything that could have set the Rift off - any recordings of alien presence somewhere close to Wales, any unexplained incident that could have been a temporal disturbance. She’s got her computer and a working internet connection, after all.
She flips open the file again, running her finger down the list of recorded ‘things that go bump in the night’, as Jeri put it. Thus far, she only skimmed the summary; now she’s reading the detail. Lots of minor incidents: people reporting furniture shaking, ornaments or crockery falling off shelves and smashing, that sort of thing. Only a small number of larger occurrences, big enough to make the newspapers.
The first was in 1869. And she stills, staring at the date. 1869. That’s when she and the Doctor ended up in Cardiff, when he was trying to take her to Naples in 1860. 1869, when Gwyneth opened the Rift at the Gelth’s bidding. A massive tremor and an explosion in her old universe. And, according to the record here, enough movement to damage several buildings.
Rift activity in 1869 in her old universe. Rift activity in 1869 here. Yet there’s no Doctor here. There was no Rose here - only a dog.
Not long after she ended up in this universe, she and Mickey speculated about the reason why time seemed to move faster here than in their original universe, and they wondered, in the end, whether it really did move faster or if the Preachers and Pete just, somehow, didn’t go through the Void in a straight line. After all, on their first visit they arrived in the same year she’d left - 2007 - and everyone - her mum, Ricky, her dad - was the same age they should have been. Okay, the TARDIS can travel in time, but it was falling through space and the Void when they ended up there.
So there’s every possibility that the two universes share parallel times; that when it was December 24th 1869 in her original universe it was also December 24th here.
One coincidence of dates means nothing, though. She reads on.
Nothing of note in the 1900s. Nothing, really, until... Her eyes widen. November 2006. A massive earthquake - massive in British standards, anyway - localised in Cardiff, measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale. A couple of buildings near the bay completely destroyed, and through the town lots of recorded minor damage. Yet no cause. It was a complete mystery to geologists, seismologists and other scientists. Popular myth believes that the government, or other ‘officialdom’, was testing some kind of secret weapon and refused to admit it.
But November 2006 is when Blon Fel Fotch tried to open the Rift and destroy the Earth in order to escape.
Could it be that, when the Rift’s active in her old universe, its effects are felt in this one? And that would mean that it is her old universe that’s somehow linked to this one via - what? A shared Rift through the Void?
She skims the rest of the file. Another major disturbance in late 2007, a few months after she came through the Void and ended up here. Another small one a few months after that, in early 2008. And then, almost every year after that, reports of minor tremors, the sort that just set things shaking, with another three large eruptions between then and now. Course, she’s got no way of comparing those with events in the other universe.
So she’s got two coinciding dates, and not a lot else. All she can do is speculate that there had to be something in the other universe that set the Rift off. Which, in terms of finding out how to stop these things happening, leaves her precisely nowhere.
It’s at times like these that she misses Mickey so much. Days gone by, he’d have been here with her, him and Jake, laughing and joking and working their way to a solution, the three of them. Not any more; not since that mission to Italy, in this universe riven for decades by guerrillas and a bitter civil war, and the car-bomb that killed the two of them instantly.
In one instant, she lost not just two of the best friends she’s ever had, but also two of the very small number of people who know the truth about Rose Tyler, Torchwood Director of Strategy.
But she’s got used to losing people. She coped. Copes.
Flipping the file shut, she prepares for landing.
***
The centre of the disturbances seems to be in an area near the bay, which isn’t anywhere close to where Sneed’s house was in 1869, or so she thinks. But then - assuming this Rift’s in exactly the same place as in the other universe - she doesn’t exactly know how big it is. The Doctor never really explained it, did he? And, of course, that time they went to Cardiff to refuel from the Rift they were in the Plas, near the Millennium Centre.
So much she never asked him. Oh, she was always full of questions, but it’s only been in the years since that she’s realised she rarely asked the important ones. Yes, she’d ask why it’s hot on a satellite two hundred thousand years in the future, but did she ever ask exactly what a Time Lord was? What he did, other than travelling? What his planet and his people were like? What happened to Jack? Or... so many other questions, about him, about the universe, about time.
And right now, yeah, it would be handy if she’d ever asked him to tell her more about what the Rift does. A rift between time and space, yes. A source of energy, yes. Obviously a way for other life-forms to make their way from one world to another - one planet to another. But one universe to another? Is that possible? He told her, yes, that black holes can be gateways to other universes - and that truth left her hoping in vain for too long. The Rift? Either he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to tell her.
You can’t. For a long time - also too long - she agonised, wondering if that meant that he could, but he wouldn’t.
Not any more. And she hasn’t thought about this for ages, really she hasn’t. It’s only this, thinking about the Rift, that’s brought it all back. And, maybe, that if he were here now he’d know what’s going on and he could fix it. Though she’s been fixing stuff like this - alien invasions, minor time distortions, other oddities - without him for a lot longer than she did it with him.
Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth - yes, she’s that and more. He’d probably be proud of her, but what’s much more important is that she’s proud of herself.
Most of the time, she is.
***
She picks her way across the uneven paving-stones towards an abandoned clothing factory just behind the street facing the sea-wall. Somewhere around here, the file notes, there’ve been several reports over a number of years of people hearing voices. Mostly, it seems, a male voice, with accents described as American, Scouse, Geordie or even Australian. No-one seems to have heard actual words, just something that sounded like someone talking in the distance.
The compiler of that section of the file seems to believe these reports are just the product of over-active imaginations, or attention-seekers. They probably are, but on the other hand everyone who claims to have heard a voice, or voices, pinpoints a very similar location. This warehouse, or close to it. And the other oddities - items appearing as if from nowhere, people disappearing - all relate to this general area too. So she’s not subscribing to the attention-seeker theory. As for over-active imaginations, she’s seen too many times when such things turn out not to be imagination at all.
There’s nothing at all notable about this area to the naked eye, but that means nothing. A run-down, abandoned warehouse - and that’s not surprising, because who’d want to own a business in a part of town where the earth shifts on a regular basis? Or about which, no doubt, ghost stories are told.
It’s the work of seconds to pick the lock on the warehouse door. It creaks as she pushes it open. Inside, it’s gloomy and dark; what few windows there are must be covered in grime and dust, allowing little natural light to seep through. Good thing she brought a torch.
Her reader’s showing a strong energy signal in here, even stronger than outside. Though there’s lots of things that could cause an energy spike, after all; not for the first time, she curses the fact that Torchwood never managed to come up with anything to detect temporal displacements or other disturbances. But then, in this universe not many people believe that time-travel’s more than just science-fiction.
Mickey did, of course, and so did her mum, but who’d ever believe a former small-time criminal and a survivor of a nervous breakdown? That’s the trouble, of course, with stepping into a life lived first by someone else; parallel-universe counterparts aren’t always identical in every way. She found that out too when she accidentally on purpose managed to bump into this universe’s Shareen and discovered a driven, ruthless futures trader who worked hard, played hard, whose sole ambition seemed to be to make more money than any of her colleagues, who she considered the opposition. And who wasn’t interested in friendships, with either men or women. To this Shareen, other people were for shagging or climbing over on her way to the top.
She pushes thoughts of Shareen away and concentrates on the energy reader. The signal seems to be strongest towards the rear of the warehouse, so she climbs carefully over broken crates and bits of abandoned machinery. And then, suddenly, she hears it.
A voice, definitely. Words aren’t distinguishable, but it’s unmistakably a voice.
She moves closer, listening.
“...the hell... waiting for...”
Frowning, Rose moves closer again, searching around at the same time for any sign of another person in the area. Her device isn’t showing another life-form anywhere within a hundred-feet radius, so wherever the voice is coming from it’s not here. But can it really be coming through the Void?
“Who’s there?” Of course, she’s got no idea whether the speaker can even hear her. No way to know if this traffic’s two-way.
When the voice comes again, it’s louder, clearer, and she almost jumps.
“I said go! Move! That doesn’t mean relax and finish your coffee first!”
A chill runs through her. For a couple of seconds, she’s paralysed, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to breathe.
“Jack?” Finally, speech returns, but it’s barely more than a whisper, and her voice cracks on the name. A shuddering breath, and then she tries again. “Jack? Jack Harkness, is that you?”
***
tbc
Author: wmr wendymr
Characters: Rose Tyler... and others ;)
Rated: PG
Disclaimer: They're not mine, no; did you really think they were?
Summary: No, her past’s got nothing to do with why she’s on her way to Cardiff, in the cabin of a Torchwood private plane, the mysterious file and an overnight bag with her.
This is a sequel to Protector, long-promised to honorh - sorry it's taken so long to come to fruition! I hope to be able to post regularly - every three days if writing goes smoothly. With huge thanks to dark_aegis for BRing and reassuring me that the skience isn't totally naff ;)
Guardians
Chapter 1: Disturbances
“Ms Tyler? Sorry to interrupt, but I have something here I think you should see.”
Saving her work and engaging the screen protector, Rose glances up. If Jeri’s telling her this is important - and the mere fact that she’s come into her office instead of just emailing says it is - then it’s worth being interrupted. Jeri’s that good. And utterly loyal, too, thanks to the fact that her citizenship status - and the fact that she and her daughter are alive - is down to Rose.
She found Jeri one day eight years ago, in the back of a van she intercepted on one of her rare field missions. The driver was suspected of trading in alien artefacts. As it turned out, he was trading in slaves - women and children kidnapped from East Africa and passed into domestic servitude in the homes of the wealthy. People who could well afford to pay a housekeeper’s wages, but preferred to have someone so dependent on them that they’d do anything, including sell their bodies, for room and board.
Jeri and her then newborn daughter were destined for that fate, until Rose and her team rescued her. The government initially wanted to deport the thirty-odd Somalians back to a so-called ‘safe’ country, but after Torchwood’s intervention, and Rose’s personal guarantee that the public purse would not be affected, all were allowed to remain in the country.
As Jeri’s daughter was so young, finding a job wasn’t an easy option, and Rose employed her as a housekeeper. A year or so later, as Jeri’s English improved, it became clear she was much more suited to a job as a personal assistant. She’s intelligent, near-impossible to fool, incorruptible and has the kind of sharp, analytical mind that Rose likes to have around - it’s a useful foil for her own intuitiveness. Jeri’s worked here ever since, and still insists on the Ms Tyler. But then most people around here call her that, and with an awe bordering on fear at times.
“Let’s see it, then.” Extending her hand for the thick - bulging, in fact, and rather dusty - folder Jeri’s holding, her eye’s caught by the scrape on her knuckle. Or, rather, the scrape that was on her knuckle this morning. Gone now.
“Edited highlights?” she asks as Jeri passes her the folder.
Jeri raises one shoulder in the most casual of shrugs. “Just your usual things that go bump in the night.”
“Yeah, right.” She flips over the cover. The front page is an index of dates, stretching back almost two hundred years.
“Yeah.” Jeri smiles. “Except that this version includes earth tremors with no traceable cause, missing persons and weird things turning up out of nowhere.”
“Oh?” There’s more; she can tell by her assistant’s stance. “Sounds like a version of Roswell.”
“Nope, all British, this one. And the weirdest of the lot? Tattered old biography of an American president way back in the 2000s.”
She snorts. “They’re all weird. Nothing unusual there.”
“Maybe not. ‘Cept this bloke was never a president.”
“Yeah? Who was he, then?”
“No-one knows. There’s no record of him ever existing. Well, lots of Arthur Winters, but none born on that day in that place to those parents, or growing up and going into politics.”
“Fiction?” Rose suggests.
“Nope. Not the way it’s written. And, anyway, the ISBN doesn’t exist either.”
Crazy theories are already spinning through her head. Steadying her breathing, she asks - even though the answer’s in the folder and she could see it for herself - “So where has all this stuff been happenin’?”
With a half-laugh, Jeri says, “Wales, of all places! Would you believe, Cardiff.”
***
There’s a Rift between time and space...
If there’s a Rift in Cardiff in her original universe, then why would there not be one here? And if it’s between time and space, then who says it can’t reach between universes?
That’s her theory, at any rate. Missing persons? Strange objects turning up out of nowhere, including a complete biography, including references, photographs and copies of newspaper articles, of a president who never existed? Another universe.
Though which universe? The Doctor, all those years ago, gave her and Mickey the impression that there were lots. Or that there used to be.
But she’s not getting any hopes up. It’s been far, far too long for that. And anyway, the mere fact that objects might have made it through the Void in either direction means nothing. After all, they turned up on this side a bit the worse for wear, according to the folder. And who’s to say that any humans who went missing in Cardiff actually reappeared in another universe? Or that, if they did, they did so alive?
No, her past’s got nothing to do with why she’s on her way to Cardiff, in the cabin of a Torchwood private plane, the mysterious file and an overnight bag with her. Of course, back when she first arrived in this universe, or for a couple of years after, the overnight bag would have contained different things - her most valued possessions, for example. She’d have had a completely different reason for going, hope and expectation in her heart.
That was then. This is now. Now... well, she’s changed. Time changes everyone. Her home’s here now. A responsible job, friends, a life, far more than the Rose Tyler who grew up in the Powell Estates, left school at sixteen and worked in a shop ever imagined she’d achieve.
So much of it would never have happened if not for the Doctor; but it’s her own accomplishment too. The Doctor’s not the one who got her A-levels, two university degrees, the senior position she now holds, even if he was the one who inspired her.
She’s going to Cardiff quite simply because this has been going on too long. And because this shouldn’t have been a secret from her, and because it’s clear that nobody else has been able to get to the bottom of what’s going on. Unexplained earth tremors with no geological explanation, missing persons, strange objects, and reports going back over two hundred years, and nobody has been able to come up with an answer?
Admittedly, she’s got the advantage of knowledge nobody else has: that there’s such a thing as time- and space-rifts, and that in a parallel universe there’s one in Cardiff. The chances of there being a Rift in this Cardiff have to be high.
Jeri raised a single eyebrow when she announced she was going. “I’ll tell the Swansea field team to expect you, then?” was her only comment.
“Nah. Think I’ll surprise them,” she said. Swansea - one of many differences between this universe and her original one is that Cardiff’s not the capital of Wales. It’s just a smallish town that very much plays second fiddle to its bigger neighbour down the road. Swansea, the home of the Welsh national rugby team, the cricket team and the Welsh national parliament - which, in this universe, was never merely an assembly. Neil Kinnock, fiery advocate of Welsh independence, would never have settled for less.
So, what makes the Rift active? she wonders again as the ramparts of Windsor Castle come into view - in this universe it’s an international conference centre. Alien involvement, that’s one; the first time it was the Gelth, via Gwyneth. And then later it was Blon Fel Fotch - but, wait; she did it by harnessing the TARDIS with the extrapolator. So the TARDIS can affect the Rift. Though she knew that - the TARDIS draws fuel from the Rift.
Not that that helps at all; there’s no TARDIS in this universe. Aliens, yes; plenty of those. But no alien sightings in Cardiff that she’s aware of, and certainly none that correspond with any of the recorded tremors. Not even any alien sightings in Swansea, which is why the Torchwood presence is minimal.
Maybe the dates could tell her whether there might have been anything that could have set the Rift off - any recordings of alien presence somewhere close to Wales, any unexplained incident that could have been a temporal disturbance. She’s got her computer and a working internet connection, after all.
She flips open the file again, running her finger down the list of recorded ‘things that go bump in the night’, as Jeri put it. Thus far, she only skimmed the summary; now she’s reading the detail. Lots of minor incidents: people reporting furniture shaking, ornaments or crockery falling off shelves and smashing, that sort of thing. Only a small number of larger occurrences, big enough to make the newspapers.
The first was in 1869. And she stills, staring at the date. 1869. That’s when she and the Doctor ended up in Cardiff, when he was trying to take her to Naples in 1860. 1869, when Gwyneth opened the Rift at the Gelth’s bidding. A massive tremor and an explosion in her old universe. And, according to the record here, enough movement to damage several buildings.
Rift activity in 1869 in her old universe. Rift activity in 1869 here. Yet there’s no Doctor here. There was no Rose here - only a dog.
Not long after she ended up in this universe, she and Mickey speculated about the reason why time seemed to move faster here than in their original universe, and they wondered, in the end, whether it really did move faster or if the Preachers and Pete just, somehow, didn’t go through the Void in a straight line. After all, on their first visit they arrived in the same year she’d left - 2007 - and everyone - her mum, Ricky, her dad - was the same age they should have been. Okay, the TARDIS can travel in time, but it was falling through space and the Void when they ended up there.
So there’s every possibility that the two universes share parallel times; that when it was December 24th 1869 in her original universe it was also December 24th here.
One coincidence of dates means nothing, though. She reads on.
Nothing of note in the 1900s. Nothing, really, until... Her eyes widen. November 2006. A massive earthquake - massive in British standards, anyway - localised in Cardiff, measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale. A couple of buildings near the bay completely destroyed, and through the town lots of recorded minor damage. Yet no cause. It was a complete mystery to geologists, seismologists and other scientists. Popular myth believes that the government, or other ‘officialdom’, was testing some kind of secret weapon and refused to admit it.
But November 2006 is when Blon Fel Fotch tried to open the Rift and destroy the Earth in order to escape.
Could it be that, when the Rift’s active in her old universe, its effects are felt in this one? And that would mean that it is her old universe that’s somehow linked to this one via - what? A shared Rift through the Void?
She skims the rest of the file. Another major disturbance in late 2007, a few months after she came through the Void and ended up here. Another small one a few months after that, in early 2008. And then, almost every year after that, reports of minor tremors, the sort that just set things shaking, with another three large eruptions between then and now. Course, she’s got no way of comparing those with events in the other universe.
So she’s got two coinciding dates, and not a lot else. All she can do is speculate that there had to be something in the other universe that set the Rift off. Which, in terms of finding out how to stop these things happening, leaves her precisely nowhere.
It’s at times like these that she misses Mickey so much. Days gone by, he’d have been here with her, him and Jake, laughing and joking and working their way to a solution, the three of them. Not any more; not since that mission to Italy, in this universe riven for decades by guerrillas and a bitter civil war, and the car-bomb that killed the two of them instantly.
In one instant, she lost not just two of the best friends she’s ever had, but also two of the very small number of people who know the truth about Rose Tyler, Torchwood Director of Strategy.
But she’s got used to losing people. She coped. Copes.
Flipping the file shut, she prepares for landing.
***
The centre of the disturbances seems to be in an area near the bay, which isn’t anywhere close to where Sneed’s house was in 1869, or so she thinks. But then - assuming this Rift’s in exactly the same place as in the other universe - she doesn’t exactly know how big it is. The Doctor never really explained it, did he? And, of course, that time they went to Cardiff to refuel from the Rift they were in the Plas, near the Millennium Centre.
So much she never asked him. Oh, she was always full of questions, but it’s only been in the years since that she’s realised she rarely asked the important ones. Yes, she’d ask why it’s hot on a satellite two hundred thousand years in the future, but did she ever ask exactly what a Time Lord was? What he did, other than travelling? What his planet and his people were like? What happened to Jack? Or... so many other questions, about him, about the universe, about time.
And right now, yeah, it would be handy if she’d ever asked him to tell her more about what the Rift does. A rift between time and space, yes. A source of energy, yes. Obviously a way for other life-forms to make their way from one world to another - one planet to another. But one universe to another? Is that possible? He told her, yes, that black holes can be gateways to other universes - and that truth left her hoping in vain for too long. The Rift? Either he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to tell her.
You can’t. For a long time - also too long - she agonised, wondering if that meant that he could, but he wouldn’t.
Not any more. And she hasn’t thought about this for ages, really she hasn’t. It’s only this, thinking about the Rift, that’s brought it all back. And, maybe, that if he were here now he’d know what’s going on and he could fix it. Though she’s been fixing stuff like this - alien invasions, minor time distortions, other oddities - without him for a lot longer than she did it with him.
Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth - yes, she’s that and more. He’d probably be proud of her, but what’s much more important is that she’s proud of herself.
Most of the time, she is.
***
She picks her way across the uneven paving-stones towards an abandoned clothing factory just behind the street facing the sea-wall. Somewhere around here, the file notes, there’ve been several reports over a number of years of people hearing voices. Mostly, it seems, a male voice, with accents described as American, Scouse, Geordie or even Australian. No-one seems to have heard actual words, just something that sounded like someone talking in the distance.
The compiler of that section of the file seems to believe these reports are just the product of over-active imaginations, or attention-seekers. They probably are, but on the other hand everyone who claims to have heard a voice, or voices, pinpoints a very similar location. This warehouse, or close to it. And the other oddities - items appearing as if from nowhere, people disappearing - all relate to this general area too. So she’s not subscribing to the attention-seeker theory. As for over-active imaginations, she’s seen too many times when such things turn out not to be imagination at all.
There’s nothing at all notable about this area to the naked eye, but that means nothing. A run-down, abandoned warehouse - and that’s not surprising, because who’d want to own a business in a part of town where the earth shifts on a regular basis? Or about which, no doubt, ghost stories are told.
It’s the work of seconds to pick the lock on the warehouse door. It creaks as she pushes it open. Inside, it’s gloomy and dark; what few windows there are must be covered in grime and dust, allowing little natural light to seep through. Good thing she brought a torch.
Her reader’s showing a strong energy signal in here, even stronger than outside. Though there’s lots of things that could cause an energy spike, after all; not for the first time, she curses the fact that Torchwood never managed to come up with anything to detect temporal displacements or other disturbances. But then, in this universe not many people believe that time-travel’s more than just science-fiction.
Mickey did, of course, and so did her mum, but who’d ever believe a former small-time criminal and a survivor of a nervous breakdown? That’s the trouble, of course, with stepping into a life lived first by someone else; parallel-universe counterparts aren’t always identical in every way. She found that out too when she accidentally on purpose managed to bump into this universe’s Shareen and discovered a driven, ruthless futures trader who worked hard, played hard, whose sole ambition seemed to be to make more money than any of her colleagues, who she considered the opposition. And who wasn’t interested in friendships, with either men or women. To this Shareen, other people were for shagging or climbing over on her way to the top.
She pushes thoughts of Shareen away and concentrates on the energy reader. The signal seems to be strongest towards the rear of the warehouse, so she climbs carefully over broken crates and bits of abandoned machinery. And then, suddenly, she hears it.
A voice, definitely. Words aren’t distinguishable, but it’s unmistakably a voice.
She moves closer, listening.
“...the hell... waiting for...”
Frowning, Rose moves closer again, searching around at the same time for any sign of another person in the area. Her device isn’t showing another life-form anywhere within a hundred-feet radius, so wherever the voice is coming from it’s not here. But can it really be coming through the Void?
“Who’s there?” Of course, she’s got no idea whether the speaker can even hear her. No way to know if this traffic’s two-way.
When the voice comes again, it’s louder, clearer, and she almost jumps.
“I said go! Move! That doesn’t mean relax and finish your coffee first!”
A chill runs through her. For a couple of seconds, she’s paralysed, unable to move, unable to speak, unable to breathe.
“Jack?” Finally, speech returns, but it’s barely more than a whisper, and her voice cracks on the name. A shuddering breath, and then she tries again. “Jack? Jack Harkness, is that you?”
***
tbc