Leap of Faith: Chapter Eight

[amberfocus]

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Title:  Leap of Faith (8/?)
Author:  amberfocus
Characters/Pairings:  John Smith (alt!Nine)/Rose Tyler, Toshiko Sato, Jake Simmonds, Mickey Smith, Ianto Jones, Jackie Tyler/Pete Tyler, Tony Tyler, various original characters
Genre:  Romance, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe
Rating:  Adult
Betas:  amyo67, jeprdyfrndly
Summary:  Hiding from the Family of Blood, the alt!Ninth Doctor turns himself into John Smith via the chameleon arch and with his companion Toshiko Sato, takes a job at Torchwood.  He clashes with everyone he meets and Rose Tyler, the beautiful young director of Torchwood Field Operative Training and the daughter of his boss, is no exception.  AU after season 2 and based mostly, but not completely, on my short story Third Time's the Charm:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/319447.html, but it is not necessary to have read that.

Previous Chapters:  http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/327895.html

Chapter Eight: Sparring Match

Rose went into the women’s locker room and changed into a pair of loose white pants and a white sleeveless t-shirt. She tied her hair up into a ponytail. Barefoot, she padded back out to the gym. John was waiting there dressed in similar clothing, only black, and talking with Jake.  He looked beautiful and for a moment her footsteps faltered as she took in his lithe form. Jake noticed her and she came forward. He looked relieved to see Rose. “You going to run this one or shall I?” asked Jake.

“You run it,” said Rose. “I’ll partner with John for any sparring.” There was just the faintest note of glee in her tone.

Jake looked at her sharply before he nodded and looked down at the papers on his clipboard. “Do you have any real martial arts training?” he asked John.

“I can get by.”

“Show me what you know,” said Jake.

What he knew was a ridiculous mix of a dozen different martial art forms that he’d picked up in half a dozen places during his life, and what Rose felt sure had to be, despite the impossibility of it, Venusian Aikido. He’d be fine in a fight against the average Joe, but against someone skilled and well-trained he’d be a disaster. Rose said so and Jake didn’t disagree with her. “I think you should start off in the beginner’s class,” Rose said.

“I don’t need any classes,” he protested. “Besides, I’m never going to be a field operative. Why should I bother?”

“You need to learn discipline,” Rose said. “Your skills are all over the place. You run into someone who even halfway knows what they are doing and you’re going to end up unarmed and unable to defend yourself.”

“I won’t be armed regardless. I won’t use a gun.” His voice was flat.

“We’ll see,” Rose said.

“No, we won’t.” This time his tone was harsh and unyielding.

“Well, then you really need to be able to defend yourself well without one,” Rose said.

“Why? I work in a lab. Unless you expect an invasion from inside—.”

“It could happen,” snapped Rose. “It’s happened before!”

John frowned. “When?”

“It just…has. Not here. Somewhere else. But it happened…it happened to me.” She turned away abruptly, swallowing hard. “It doesn’t matter. Right now a twelve year old green belt could take you down.”

“Ha,” said John.

“I could.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Rose glanced over at Jake, who nodded his head in permission. “All right then. Show me what you’ve got. Rush me.”

John did. Using his forward momentum Rose ducked into him and lifted with her back, flipping him right over her head and down onto the mat. He scrambled to his feet, coming at her again. This time she neatly sidestepped, slipping her arm though one of his and kicking his foot out from under him. He fell onto his side with a heavy thud, but was almost instantly on his feet again. Rose moved backwards and into a fighting stance. When he came forward this time she met him with a solid roundhouse kick that knocked him onto his arse. Again he came at her, catching her from behind when she’d had her attention on Jake. She gave a quick elbow strike followed by an uppercut and when his arms came around her, flipped him over her head to land in front of her.

“Had enough?” she asked dropping to a crouch.

“Never,” he told her bouncing back onto his feet. Her leg shot out sweeping in a semi-circle, bringing him back down once more. Before he could move to rise again, Rose scrambled on top of him, straddling his hips and reaching forward to a pressure point in his neck. He stilled under her as the pain of her hold shot through his shoulder.

“That’s not a martial arts move,” he said with a wince.

“Not a human one, no,” she agreed. “Had enough yet?” He shook his head no. “I’m starting to think you like being on your back,” she said.

“There’s something to be said for a woman on top,” he shot back. His hips shifted slightly under her and she gulped. Rose leaned forward so they weren’t quite so intimately pressed together and put a little more pressure on the nerve she held and John gasped at the increase in pain.

“All right,” Jake said. “Point proven. Let him go, Rose.”

Rose was reluctant but finally let up the hold she had on his neck and sat back giving him a totally smug and superior smile. She should have known better than that, because it stung his pride awake and the next thing she knew he had rolled them over and was pinning her down in something that was part wrestling and part illegal Judo hold, with an arm wrapped just shy of her neck, his hand firmly gripping the opposite shoulder, joint-locking it, and his leg pinning both of hers tightly to the mat. “Pride goeth before a fall,” he quoted.

“You should know, you’ve fallen enough today,” she replied.

Rose didn’t care about pride just then, though. The only thing her mind was focused on was the closeness of their bodies and how there was absolutely no space left between them. His breath in her ear made her shiver. It was all she could do to lay completely still and not wiggle against him. She knew she could get out of his hold pretty quickly if she needed to. All of his attention was focused on holding her in place, which meant he couldn’t defend the soft tissues of his body, but her heart was beating so fast just then and her mind totally didn’t want to move.

She relaxed under his hold, breathing carefully in and out, calming her racing heart. His arms felt so familiar, so right around her and even though he wasn’t the man she wanted him to be, everything about him from the strong muscles in his arms, to the way he smelled, made it seem as if he was. She closed her eyes. Just for a moment she wanted to forget where she was and who she was with and just be held in arms that were so comforting to her body’s memory. Well, except for the possibility of strangulation should he move his grip an inch or two higher.

He eased the joint-lock when she didn’t struggle and Rose became much more aware of their positioning. The warmth of his body radiating through her back and side felt deceptively good to her. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t professional, but all she wanted was to curl into him, to be really held, to be made love to in a way that would make her scream and then again in a way that would leave her exhausted and weak as a kitten and she was pretty sure he was that sort of lover. He adjusted his grip and she couldn’t help the quiet little sigh as his elbow brushed lightly across her breast. No, no, no. Damn it, no! What the hell was she thinking? This was not the least bit sexy. He was not the least bit sexy. Liar, hissed a mutinous voice in the back of her head.

He made a soft sound in her ear and then she felt him loosening his hold even more and suddenly straining to keep his hips back from her bum. He couldn’t quite without moving his leg and she felt definite signs of his body’s interest in hers. The realization made her remember exactly where she was and who she was with and it was enough to make her erupt out of his hold, using the strength in her legs and the surprise in her sudden motion to free herself. Once loose she flipped up to her feet and stepped several paces away from him. Her jaw was jutted forward and her fists were clenched and she was breathing like she’d just run a marathon.

She heard him get to his feet and she looked anywhere but at John Smith. “Jake, why don’t you take over now and I’ll observe,” she said so quickly that she had to repeat herself before Jake understood what she was saying. She sat down abruptly on a pile of mats and after a few seconds to calm her breathing she dared to look up again, only to find John staring right at her with a soft and speculative expression. She blushed so hotly under his gaze she was sure her face had to be beet red.

Jake took advantage of John’s distraction to launch a flying scissors kick and Rose smiled as John was once again down on the mat flat on his back. This was definitely the safer way, for her anyway, of doing things. By the end of the session, he’d agreed that maybe a lesson or two to brush up on his skills wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but he didn’t want to participate in any class. Jake agreed to take him on with private training and despite her better judgment, Rose had volunteered to help. She wasn’t prepared to look too closely at why, other than to note that she’d had tremendous satisfaction at seeing him flat on his back so many times in one day.



The buzz of knocking John about and then watching John get knocked about by Jake was muted only slightly in the lift as Rose guided John back down to A&R. They were in the second lift and he was sulking a bit, still not ready to admit that the mandatory training was necessary and insisting that he had only agreed to more martial arts training because he enjoyed it and not because he hadn’t been able to pin Jake at all. He was still against any of the other things that he’d need to learn for a dry run out in the field.

“Look,” Rose finally snapped, “It’s not up for discussion. It’s not your choice, do you get that? You signed a contract and in that contract you agreed to any and all necessary training.”

“It’s the necessary part that I’m disagreeing with,” John growled back.

“You don’t get to decide what is and what is not necessary,” she told him.

“It’s stupid.”

“It's not stupid, it's practical.  There may come a time when you have to go out of that lab. Something in the field may be too dangerous to move and we’ll need your expertise to figure out what to do. We’ve had space craft—and people—blow up because agents didn’t have the knowledge to avoid triggering booby traps. Or standing in the wrong place when an engine started back up again and they got sucked inside. It’s rare, but it happens. You could save lives, John. Don’t you care about that?” Rose asked.

“If that’s the case fine, come and get me. But I don’t see why I need to play pretend beforehand.”

“Dry runs prepare us for the unexpected,” Rose said. “It helps us weigh all the options.”

“Yeah, and how often do all those options turn out to be what actually happens? How many times have you personally come up against something that there was no way in hell you could have prepared for?” he argued.

“Plenty, but at least I had the experience to know what not to do because of the dry runs. It only takes being unprepared once for your entire world to end!” Her hands were on her hips and her eyes were flashing at him. They were both turned sideways glaring at each other when the lift doors opened. They whirled in unison, their furious expressions cast on the intruder who’d dared to call for a lift.

It was poor Ian McFarland again and when he groaned something about it just not being his day and backed away, it was all Rose could do to suppress a grin. The moment the doors closed she started to giggle. She couldn’t help herself. When she caught sight of the expression in John’s eyes, saw them twinkling and the corner of his mouth curve up before he began to chuckle, she stopped trying to hold herself back. It was incredibly cathartic, lessening the weight of tension that had been in the lift during their argument.

When the doors finally opened onto the cellar labs she had herself back under control. “John,” she said and he startled. It was the first time she’d used his name and not Dr. Smith. “I don’t want to keep fighting with you every time I see you. Please just do the training.” He exited the lift without answering, but she followed him and stopped him with a hand on his arm. “I get that you don’t like jumping through hoops. Neither do I, really, but I’ve seen the importance of those hoops in my last three years here. I don’t want to be scraping you up off the pavement one day because you never learned the proper procedure.”

He looked down at her hand on his arm and she hastily pulled it away as if she’d been burned. “Okay,” he said softly. “But I don’t intend to like it.”

“I don’t need for you to like it,” she said. “I just need for you to live.” Abruptly she turned on her heel and got back into the lift, leaving him alone with his thoughts and her safely back on her way to the normal day to day activities of her job at Torchwood.

Those day to day activities were interrupted when she was called to Ianto’s office a half an hour later. She sat down in one of the chairs in front of her desk while Mickey went to pour her a coffee. She took it with much appreciation. Her sparring with John Smith, both physical and verbal, had left her exhausted.

“So what’s up?” she asked looking first at Ianto and then at Mickey. “Did Jake talk to you about my offer?”

“What offer?” asked Mickey while Ianto said, “No.”

“I told Jake that if Torchwood really needed the money, I could take it from my trust,” she said with a shrug.

“Rose, you can’t do that,” Mickey said. Ianto didn’t say anything, but he looked like he was weighing the possibilities of that option.

“I can if I want to,” Rose said in annoyance.

“Well, it’s not what we called you in for,” said Ianto.

“Then why?” Rose leaned forward in interest.

“Project Broken Thorn,” said Ianto.

“A couple of hours ago someone triggered a level 3 alarm,” added Mickey.

Rose frowned. “Someone’s trying to find out where I came from?”

“We’re not exactly sure,” said Mickey pacing the room. “He looked around at several media websites starting a year or two before your birth would have been and looked for your school history. But that’s not all. He broke into Torchwood’s files, Rose. He copied every case report you’ve written up, as well as your personnel file. Medical, psych, peer reviews, work reviews, even your employment application. If it’s on paper, whoever this is has it.”

“So maybe it’s just a really good reporter chasing an old story,” Rose said with a shrug.

“They hacked Torchwood files from inside of Torchwood, Rose, and Mickey couldn’t figure out where or who beyond that. This is an inside job. Someone in Torchwood is very interested in finding out all there is to know about Rose Tyler,” Ianto said. “Ian redid the firewall and we’ve set a trap if he comes back, but frankly there isn’t anything left he could take. I don’t think we’ll ever find him.”

Rose was silent for a long time. If it was someone inside of Torchwood she could only think of a few people who might have more skills than Mickey or Ian McFarland. Toshiko was one, but Rose felt instinctively that Tosh would simply ask if she wanted to know something, and that she wouldn’t really care that much about Rose’s background. The other person was John Smith. He was a man who had already proven that he didn’t care about personal boundaries when it came to her.

He’d gone into her office uninvited, taken over her desk, and hacked into the CCTV feeds without getting caught. That required a tremendous amount of skill. If he was curious about her, he’d have no compunction against looking into her past to see what made her tick. And since he’d caught her with his own file open on her computer, he’d probably assume turnabout was fair play, despite the fact that she was authorized and he wasn’t. He did have entitlement issues.

Rose sighed heavily and looked up. Mickey looked angry, like he wanted to burn at the stake whoever it was that threatened her cover story. Ianto looked worried and overprotective. She wasn’t about to let either man know that she was pretty sure who the hacker was. John was difficult enough to handle as it was without blowing this up into some huge production with two of her friends coming to her rescue. Like I need rescuing, she thought indignantly. She was perfectly capable of handling this on her own.

“Guess there’s nothing we can do then,” Rose said with a casual shrug. She stood up. “Thanks for letting me know and if you figure it out give me a call.” She started for the door.

“Rose, I don’t think you realize how important this is!” Mickey said annoyed at her lack of excitement over the issue.

“I understand it completely, Mickey. I’m not stupid. There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing more you can do about it. How’s it gonna make matters better if I get all upset?” she asked sensibly.

“I just think you’re not taking it seriously enough,” Mickey said sulkily.

“The problem is in good hands,” Rose said in exasperation. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to get back to. Something I actually can do.” She finished her coffee and said good-bye to Ianto and Mickey and left.

Instead of returning to her office she went down to the eleventh floor and walked into the security offices. “Miss Tyler, this is a surprise,” said Harry. “What can I do for you?”

“I need to look at the recordings of the CCTV feeds from A&R for the last four hours,” she told him. “I’ll need a private viewing area as well.”

“Of course. Go on into viewing booth 3A,” he said. “I’ll send it to the monitor there. You’ve been down here before and know how it works, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ve done it a few times now,” she replied.

“All right, let me track down what you need. The little blue light above the monitor will flash when it’s ready for retrieval.”

Rose nodded and went into the little viewing booth and waited for what she needed to arrive on her terminal. It didn’t take long, Harry was good at his job, and soon the little blue light flashed. She turned on the monitor and began to scan through the footage, starting at 11:30 and fast forwarding until she saw John sitting down at a computer with his lunch. She slowed the images down and zoomed in on John’s monitor, magnifying the images three hundred percent. It took no longer than a minute to confirm her suspicions.

She continued to watch even as he finished up loading everything onto a portable hard drive and turned his attention to something else. A few minutes later Toshiko returned from her lunch break and they had an intense conversation. She was tempted to turn on the audio feed and if it had been anyone but Tosh in the room with John, she would have not hesitated at all. She had no problem invading John’s privacy, but she wasn’t about to do it to Tosh.

Rose turned off the footage and sat back in her chair with a frown. She wasn’t angry with John so much as she was curious what he was up to. She could understand him taking the personnel file information and even searching through her history to find out more about her after their first fight disabused him of the notion that she was pampered and privileged, but why would he want her old case files? Unless he was trying to figure out how she thought.

That could be it. Nothing showed her thought process like the way she worked a case and the evidence of that would be written on every page. It was clever really, but why would he want to know how she thought? Yes, he was obviously physically attracted to her, but so far he hadn’t seemed to care for her opinions so why would he be interested in how her mind worked? Unless Tosh was right and he actually really did like her. She didn't consider even for a moment that it was for nefarious reasons. Her heart refused to believe that when there was so much evidence to the contrary.

She bit her lower lip. He had almost apologized to her. Twice. She got the feeling he wasn’t the sort of man who knew how to do that and that even coming as close as he had to saying he was sorry was something she shouldn’t get used to. Yet he’d done it, which meant he had to, maybe a bit, care what she thought about him. Didn’t it?

This was confusing. And it would be confusing even if he didn’t look like the Doctor. The fact that he did didn’t help matters at all. Well, now that she knew for a fact that he was the one looking into her past, she had to figure out what to do about it. Despite his attitude and behavior she felt absolutely no threat to her physical safety from the man. She didn’t trust him, exactly, because she didn’t know him, but she didn’t fear that he’d harm her either. It didn’t feel right to just let it go. Confronting him over it was probably the right thing to do, but she didn’t want to do it at work where Mickey or Ianto or even Jake might overhear. It needed to be one on one, alone. She just needed to figure out how, when, and where.




Later that evening, John fixed himself a bowl of instant noodles in the microwave and plugged his portable hard drive into his laptop. Torchwood security had been laughable. He knew that they knew that he’d been there and probably even what he’d taken, but he also knew they’d be chasing their tails for the next couple of weeks trying to discover how he’d done it and who he was. It was quite possible they’d figure out the how of it eventually. Even if he was a snot-nosed kid, Ian McFarland was brilliant with software and he’d solve it and figure out a way to block it from happening again.

John didn’t care. He had what he needed and he’d left himself a back door hidden in a dead end piece of code on the off chance he’d need to go back in for any reason in the future. True, they’d probably set all kinds of traps for him, but it wouldn’t matter. He knew what he was doing. If they happened to call Tosh in to help, she’d recognize straight away that it had been him, but that was the only way he’d be discovered. She’d taught him what to do, after all, back when they were at UNIT. But he didn’t think they’d call in someone so new to the organization for this and not all of Tosh’s skills had been put on her CV. She’d never turn him in anyway, though she might yell at him for snooping into Rose’s background.

He didn’t really care about that, even if her background was a little bit…off. He was more concerned with her performance at Torchwood and the kind of woman she was. Her psychological evaluations were the most interesting. Words and phrases like ‘self-isolating,’ ‘fixation on rules and regulations,’ ‘perfectionist,’ and ‘failure to form significant attachments’ were scattered throughout them. He frowned. Her newfound attachment to Tosh seemed pretty significant to him. And true he’d only seen her interacting with Jake, but they’d seemed to have a healthy work relationship.

Peer reviews said she was ‘tough but fair,’ ‘difficult to work with,’ ‘the absolute best person in Torchwood to have your back,’ ‘knows her job,’ and ‘I’d rather face an angry Sontaran alone than piss her off.’ He smiled. He’d been up against Sontarans a time or two with UNIT and could recognize, if not agree with, the sentiment. Facing an angry Rose Tyler was…fun. He grinned. She wouldn’t appreciate his opinion, but that didn’t stop it from being any less true.

When she got angry, her eyes would flash and she’d put her hands on her hips and turn as pink as she did when she was blushing. For some reason her anger stirred his blood, and he didn’t think it was because he was so furiously attracted to her, though that had a little to do with it. At least he understood now where her adherence to the rules and regulations came from.

“It only takes being unprepared once for your entire world to end,” she’d yelled at him. That one little sentence told him almost as much about her as perusing her files. He’d been able to infer that she’d lost someone in her life, someone who had been her world, and she’d been devastated. It had been unexpected and catastrophic and it had left her determined to never leave herself open to that sort of pain again. That gave them a lot in common if he cared to think about it. He didn’t, though, not just now.

Their little spat in the lift had been interrupted by Ian, and Rose’s emotions had turned on a dime, first to hilarity and then to what actually appeared to be concern for his well-being. “I don’t need for you to like it,” she had said. “I just need for you to live.” The way she had said it had felt awfully specific to him, as if she wouldn’t say it to just anyone. Yet why he felt that way he couldn’t say. She wasn’t like Tosh. She held no affection for him. She had certainly panicked when he’d pinned her in the gym and she’d felt the stirrings of his body’s interest in her. And yet, for nearly a minute she’d just lain trapped by his body when it was clear she could get out of the hold whenever she wanted. So why hadn’t she?

The only conclusion he could draw was that she was definitely as attracted as he was and she had forgotten in that long minute that she didn’t want to be. Now he had to decide if he was going to do anything about pursuing it. It would be stupid to try. She was the boss’s daughter. She didn’t like him. She was too young and too beautiful for the likes of him. And yet none of that made the want go away, did it? Not this strange creeping desire that was taking him over more and more every time he saw her. It would be a challenge and if there was one thing he loved in this life it was conquering a good challenge.

He sighed, finished his noodles and then opened her medical file. He frowned. He wasn’t a medical doctor, nor even a geneticist, but even he knew what a normal strand of double helix DNA was supposed to look like. And it wasn’t the image on the computer monitor in front of him with little extra bits of coding. He sat back in amazement. Rose Tyler was indeed the daughter of Pete and Jackie Tyler. Her DNA had matched samples taken from the Tylers over a decade ago and kept in the national DNA bank, but she was also something more complex than just an ordinary human being. If her work up was to be believed, Rose Tyler’s DNA, like her background story, was just a little bit off.

Ch. 9: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/332766.html