Archive of Our Own

- 1 -

Far above the ground, spacetime shivers as a slender portal opens and then blinks closed again, leaving a tiny black mote against the sky.

Jack Harkness falls.

- 2 -

An assassin is, above all, an observer. It takes more than being able to poison a drink or pull a trigger. To plan a successful hit, Natasha very often has to know her targets better than they know themselves. She's used to seeing everything and filing it away for future use.

So she notices the man who sits upright with a gasp, clutching at his chest where machine-gun fire had stitched a bloody seam across him.

She notices because he'd been dead.

- 3 -

It's in the arch of his eyebrow, the down-the-nose look, the way he sets his jaw: Nick Fury is not impressed with this shit.

Tony doesn't bother hiding his amusement. Or his approval. Somebody other than him putting that look on Fury's face has been on his bucket list for a while.

"Mr. Harkness, as useful as it might be to have a man who can't die on this team, you're no good to us if you're too busy hitting on your teammates, your enemies, or the innocent bystanders you are trying to protect to do your damn job."

Jack grins hugely. "Funny, I don't usually get that lecture until after I've started working."

- 4 -

Natasha has been having the best sex of her life.

Not that she's been greedy. Jack has made it perfectly obvious that he's not interested in anything more than a friendly tumble, and as a result, he's tumbled most of them. She thinks Steve is probably untouched, but only because Jack's leaving Tony and Pepper to relieve him of his very earnest virginity. When he's ready.

She's finished her workout and she and Bruce are making lunch--which Tony finds ridiculous, but they like to cook--when chaos breaks out on the Avengers' common floor. The TV falls silent, Tony talks to JARVIS and the voice that answers is feminine and alien, and the words in her cookbook go fuzzy. She blinks her eyes to refocus, and the recipe is gone, replaced by paragraph after paragraph of Bad Wolf Bad Wolf Bad Wolf Bad Wolf Bad Wolf.

"Rose!" Jack shouts, running for the balcony. A crack of thunder splits the clear blue sky.

Then things get weird.

- 5 -

As fast as Tony is getting into his armor, Thor is still faster, sent by the All-Father directly to the jagged edge of the Bifrost where none were able to travel and someone did. He catches her as she falls from the sky, and they land on the top of Tony's tower.

The woman is blonde, haggard, and unconscious. And known to Jack, who calls himself the Giant Killer, who calls her simply Rose, as if she needs no other name or patronymic. He stays by her side, forsaking all others, as she sleeps a healing sleep.

Thor speaks of the Bifrost Bridge to the other Avengers. Tony promptly begins speaking in an arcane magical tongue, laying plans to repair it. Dr. Banner seems to understand this speech. It is Thor who does not, quite, understand, but he is who was sent. So he does his best to explain what those in Asgard endeavor to effect that same end.

Between them, perhaps they might restore what Mjolnir has shattered.

- 6 -

Jack sits by Rose's bedside for nine days.

The first three, she's in a coma, and he has more than enough time to regret every unkind thought he's ever had about the Doctor keeping her when he abandoned Jack on the Game Station or the way she left the TARDIS that last time without so much as a private goodbye.

She could be the worst person in the world, and never have loved him in the first place, and it wouldn't stop him from loving her. Even if she never knew.

After that comes the raving. She sleeps fitfully, and while the IV in her arm feeds her enough nutrients that she's no longer wasting away, it can't put the color back in her cheeks.

On the ninth day, she opens her eyes and knows who he is. "I love you, Jack," she says. "Are you real?"

- 7 -

Rose could have done without Asgard, but it's a necessary waystation. And really, the overdone egos and backstabbing politics aren't much different than the ones she'd learned to deal with as the Vitex heiress.

Though if you offend the wrong person, the backstabbing might be literal.

As risky as it was, in the end, she's made the right choice. That universal bridge half-killed her--as if anything could--but it got her to Jack. Jack, who still carries a sliver of the Time Vortex inside him. The Vortex from their original universe.

With that guiding resonance, a small circle of human scientists and godlike aliens (who don't impress her, she's met too many godlike aliens already) think that bridge can take them back, not to the Earth Dr. Foster and Dr. Selvig come from, but to their own Earth. Hers and Jack's.

And the Doctor's.

- 8 -

It's 2249. There's no sign of the Doctor, but Jack's wristcomp still has the TARDIS phone number. He uses it to signal directly.

Just as well. In 2249, they can't find anything as old-fashioned as a phone.

- 9 -

It isn't easy.

"Never said it would be," Rose says. "Worth doing, though."

This Doctor is so much older, however young his face beneath that floppy hair. He's gone and regenerated under a companion's influence again, she can tell by his silences. And whoever it was, he's lost them. Jack tells her what her spiky-haired Doctor had been like without her. This new regeneration misses someone, she can tell. She can see them behind his eyes every time he goes all mopey and lost-looking.

"It happens," Jack tells him. "It's a hazard of living as long as we do. We run as fast as we can, hoping death will never catch up. But sometimes it does."

"Teach your granny!" the Doctor complains.

The bow tie is ridiculous.

They may never be the way they were before. Jack is long out of the habit of fidelity. The Doctor is married, on and off, and they still haven't met the lucky--very patient--woman. Rose is still mourning three great-grandchildren she'd half-raised, and there are days she can barely make herself get out of bed.

But they love each other. So they'll try.