Captain Jack Harkness, con-man, criminal, and former Time Agent, stared at the information on the screen in front of him. He’d known something was up at Royal Hope hospital but had been unable to get there in time to do anything about it. Instead, he was still sitting in his office far underground in Cardiff. His team had all gone home for the night but Jack rarely bothered to visit his flat. Instead, in the year since the Battle of Canary Wharf, he’d practically lived in the Torchwood office, pouring himself into his work in hopes of redeeming the institution in the name of a woman that Torchwood had killed. A woman he had been best friends with. A woman who had seen the best in him and called it forth – just as she had with the Time Lord who was securely wrapped around her unknowing fingers. A woman he’d hoped to see again if he could just find the Doctor. A woman whose name was a bleeding scar on his heart and soul: Rose Marion Tyler.
She’d vanished after Canary Wharf. He’d watched the footage from the Lever Room security cameras. She and Jackie, her mother, had been there. And Rose had been brilliant. She had figured out how to send the Daleks and the Cybermen away and to seal the damage that Torchwood had done. She’d tried to send her mother to safety but Jack – a parent himself – knew that Jackie wouldn’t want to leave Rose any more than he’d wanted to leave his own children. The last bit of footage the cameras had captured before some kind of power spike had shut the entire surveillance system down had been Jackie Tyler flying towards the breach into Hell. When Rose never returned to their apartment, when she never appeared anywhere again, the authorities declared her “missing, presumed dead.” The governments of the world had been briefed on Torchwood’s activities and had seen the same footage Jack had watched. They were planning to honor Rose at the opening ceremony once the memorial was finished being built. Apparently, she was to be named the Defender of the Earth. Jack was planning to go to the ceremony that would unveil the memorial at Canary Wharf. It would be his way of paying his respects and saying farewell to the woman whose memory drove him to rebuild and redeem the institute responsible for her death.
But now, there was this. Data from a patient named Vairë A. Carter. A woman who had appeared out of nowhere at the Royal Hope hospital. Who had known about the Judoon and the Shadow Proclamation. Who had helped capture the plasmavore Jack’s own team had been tracking in hopes of keeping something like Royal Hope from happening. A woman who had survived a fatal dose of radiation in disabling an MRI turned into some kind of explosive. A woman who, unless Jack was losing his mind, looked very much like Rose Marion Tyler.
True, she dressed differently, more conservatively. She looked beautiful and sophisticated. And, if the Doctor was out of the picture (and he seemed to have vanished from all of time) and Rose was on her own, Jack would definitely be tempted to try to win her for his own. But he couldn’t be certain that this Vairë was Rose. Or could he?
Typing frantically, Jack called up all of the camera data from Canary Wharf. Most of the system had been destroyed when the breach was sealed. But there were a few back-up systems in the storage facility. He pulled up the video from them, scanning through them. Nothing. But wait…just there…barely in the frame…was that the TARDIS? He let the video play through, keeping an eye on the timestamps. Several hours after the breach had been sealed, he watched as the TARDIS dematerialized.
“C’mon, c’mon,” Jack groaned at his computer. “Give me something more than this. Give me something more than just a fleeting hope.” He pulled up other cameras. “Tell me I wasn’t a fool to just take their word for it that Rose was killed in the battle.”
Putting his mind to the task, Jack continued to try to prove to himself that Vairë and Rose were the same person and that Rose Tyler had survived.