Thank you for telling me about the formating issues, I fixed them :)

So, here is the revamped first chapter of my story, I have switched a couple of future plots, so things may go a little bit differently later on, though no huge differances. Hope you like and happy reading! (disclaimers apply) -

Rose was woken abruptly by the sounds of machine gun-fire and mortars flying over head. Through the shattered front window of the apartment her family must have taken refuge in the night before she could see the shadows of people running and screaming in the streets, occasionally ignited by a clap of battlefield lightning. She glanced around the dark, seemingly long abandoned room. She was alone. A sickening sense of wrong struck through her, no no no, she could not be alone, something was missing. A spark of fear ignited in the pit of Rose's stomach, and she started frantically feeling around in the thin blanket that had covered her. It took only a moment for the spark to ignite as she accepted that she was alone, truly alone. This could not happen.

A feeling of dread and horror trickled steadily around her heart, slowly beginning to constrict, and suffocate all but her most primal instincts. To run, run as fats and as far as she could. The prime objective of her survival was gone, and her life depended on finding it. Knowing in a heartbeat that she HAD to protect that one thing, find it, and protect it, or die trying.

A mortar struck a building adjacent to the room and she bolted out the hinge hung door. She stopped outside the threshold, trying to catch a familiar face in the momentary glow, but the chaos was to intense to have recognized anyone even if there had been someone she knew.

Rose noticed that a majority of the flow was heading north, probably trying to get out of the city and away from the front lines. Without realizing what she was doing, she let herself be swept away by the current, continuing to frantically search for any sign of the one thing she could not imagine living without. Once upon a time, in a land far far away, she had believed that she knew that feeling in all it's meanings, it had hurt her to even imagine living with out him. So much so that when he was torn from her, it was all Jackie could do to keep her daughter clinging to life.

Of course, Rose lived on, got a job, payed her bills, ate, watched tely and went to bed. But the whole month after their separation, she felt hollow, empty, as if the world had no colors to give. Slowly letting the heartbreak eat her from the inside out.

That was until she found one last thing tying them together. Ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes, two hearts and a button nose. They filled the gap left by the life that had been torn from her, and festooned herself so that she could no longer imagine having ever being able to live without her.

Bullets began to whiz through the crowd, and bodies began to drop. Through the screams and hellfire Rose's straining ears caught the distant, terrified wails of an infant. Everything else went silent save her breath, ragged and desperate in her throat as she sped up, frantically scanning the crowd for the source of that one heartbreaking cry with the power to make her do the impossible, no matter how unlikely. She became increasingly more frantic, as the wails rose in a crescendo, before she spotted her propped up in a cardboard box, though only barely staying upright, hopelessly screaming against the nook provided by the overhang of a blue door.

Tears began to fall down her cheeks, five more steps and her baby would be safe in her arms again. Four, if she veered left after, they could probably bypass the hoard of citizens swarming down the major streets, and make it out of the city before the troops started through. Three, there was a clipped zing, and Rose felt as if her stomach had just been torn out. She found herself helpless to watch as she slid to her knees, and then to the pavement with a grunt, one hand clutching at her belly.

Desperately, she craned her neck around to find her baby, still wailing before the blue door. Rose began to clawed her way closer to the child, ignoring her own pain, she was not a part of this equation. Rose crawled towards the box until she was close enough to reach inside and retrieve the missing piece to her jigsaw heart. She tucked her daughter tight against her body with bloody hands.

If Rose was doomed already, she would give her daughter this one last gift: a shield against the storm. Hopefully someone would find her child afterwards, and give her a second chance, with another mother. Her baby was still ferociously crying, as she smoothed down her feathery, deep red almost brown wisps of hair, of which Rose knew her father would be jealous.

She tried to concentrate every once of her love into this moment, knowing that it would have to last her child the rest of her life, be it twelve hundred years or just another few moments, they were all she could give.

Just then, Rose realised that she KNEW the door against which she sandwiched her baby, and with one last stunning burst of strength, she pounded against the wooden door with a dying fist.

To her relief, it opened with a creak, to reveal that oh so familiar face with it's old as sin eyes, flyaway hair, and high cheek bones. Exactly as she remembered it. As soon as he realised who had been knocking on the door, and the situation into which he had arrived, his grin faded, and was replaced with a deep shellshocked sadness mingled with last rolls of doomed hope.

He muttered "Rose" in an urgent whisper, before crouching and attempting, desperately, to help her up.

She refused with a shake of her head. It had been almost ten minutes since she was shot, and she could no longer feel past her torso: she was already lost, there was nothing he could do.

Rose looked him pleadingly in the eye and tried to loosen her arms from around her baby, though failing almost entirely. His own eyes were wrought with questions that he knew she wouldn't be able to answer, but he seemed to understand her motive and took their grief-stricken daughter into his helpless hands.

Rose watched with fading vision, as he took the child in his arms, and fell to his knees beside her as soon as he became aware of the two tiny hearts beating against his. Tears overflowed his eyes, and Rose,with her last ounce of strength, gave him a wilting smile, before her vision completely faded out.