The man shifted his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, his mind racing over a rather long list of possible ways to tell the Doctor exactly what had happened to his Rose. He glance again over his shoulder, where Gwen met his eye as she ran a cool washcloth over the girl’s arm, cleaning the jagged and rather nasty wound there. Taking a large breath and swallowing the rising lump in his throat, he turned his attention back to the phone held tightly in his hand.
“She’s here. She fell through the rift last night. And she’s….Something’s happened to her.” He wasn’t sure exactly how to phrase the next bit, how to tell the Doctor that Rose was unconscious, badly wounded… As he tried to make words form in his suddenly rather dry mouth, Gwen called out from across the room.
“Jack…. You’d best come over here.”
Rose’s eyelids fluttered open. She could hear a rather loud ringing in her ears, and the rough, heavy sound of her own breath. The room spun for a moment, and she blinked against the bright white lights above her. A machine was beeping somewhere in the background. A lab. She was in a lab, on a cold, surgical table.
A flash, not even a memory, zapped through her brain. A man over her, pain, a table like this one. With a strangled cry, she sat up, looking around her in a panic.
Jack, dropping the phone, rushed over to her, trying to push her shoulders gently down to lay her back on the table. “Rose, Rose, It’s alright. We’ve got you.” Hazel eyes looked around in a panic, unfamiliar faces, everyone trying to calm her, hands trying to push her backward. There were three of them now, the larger man with the dark hair and the bright blue eyes, a woman with equally dark tresses, cut in a blunt line across her forehead, and now another, with sandy hair and a rather large mouth, who was coming toward her with a needle.
A hoarse scream ripped its way from her throat as she kicked wildly, ripping the IVs from her arms, wincing as the right one twinged painfully. Her whole body hurt, cried out against her struggle, and she could feel hot tears streaming down her face.
The first man had managed to get her back down onto the table, and they were restraining her, echoing the name from earlier. “Rose, don’t you remember? It’s me! It’s Jack! Don’t you remember me, Rose?” She shook her head numbly, the strength leaving her. Lifting her head, she saw the other man swabbing the inside of her elbow to inject whatever was in the shot. “Please… Please don’t…” She gripped instinctively at the military coat beneath her hands, gathering a wad of fabric into her hand, a small, hoarse cry escaping as the needle slid into her skin. A moment later she was relaxing backward again, her body relaxing back down onto the table.
Jack, satisfied that she was safe again, smoothed her hair back, wiping a tear from her face with the ball of his thumb before nodding at Gwen and Owen and going back to the phone, which was still dangling by its cord, rotating slowly. A determined look on his face, he addressed the doctor again. “You need to get here. Now.”
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