Standard disclaimers apply. Don't own. Blah, blah, blah. Big thanx to Reichenbach for the brainstorming help and betaing. Oh, and the title. Everyone should read her fic by the way.

Now, everyone enjoy and R&R.

XYZ

Rose's head hurt so bad she could barely see straight. She was sure it had to be stress related. Last week she had driven to Bad Wolf Bay with her family and said goodbye to the Doctor for the last time. Now with that and her mother's hormonal mood swings and starting her new job at Torchwood, well, she needed an Anadin.

Her life had changed so much since she came here. There was the obvious no more Doctor. Mickey wasn't the same Mickey that clung to her legs after the Nestene kidnapped him. He was older, wiser, and braver. He loved the excitement Torchwood offered him, and he even was dating a little. Mum and Pete were so happy together, well, as happy as Jackie could be, and Pete was getting used to having a daughter. For Rose, he wasn't the same Pete the Doctor had taking her back in time to meet, but he was trying, so she smiled at his efforts.

Torchwood seemed quite the same as before. The warehouse would have been like a playground for the Doctor. Ray guns and transports, boxes of parts and pieces. He could have sat down on the floor surrounded by them with his Sonic Screwdriver and entertained himself for hours, completely ignoring her, except for the occasional, "Rose, take a look at this, guess what it does?" Mickey's desk was even a third of a TARDIS console that he had found in a pile of twisted metal going out for scrap. "It reminded me of home," he had told her. He had even gotten the screen and some of the devices to work and interface with his own computer.

The thought made her smile sadly. Mickey was standing next to her when they walked in and saw it. He gave her a reassuring smile and put his arm around her shoulder in a brotherly fashion. "It's gonna be okay, Rose. You'll see. It might take a while, but you'll see." He was lying through his teeth, and they both knew it.

Rose went upstairs to her office. The office was nice, if small, on one of the upper floors with a window. She could see the Thames River from her desk. She had pictures of her family on a filing cabinet behind her chair. Jackie and Pete renewing their wedding vows shortly after arriving here, that time he got her name right, Mickey and herself sitting at the edge of the fountain where they used to eat lunch, before she left, and one of the Doctor and herself. She had found it in the archives from the other Jackie's birthday party. The Doctor was laughing, and she was glaring at him because she had just found out that a dog had her name. Rose did not find it the least bit amusing at the time.

And stashed in the top drawer of her desk was a large bottle of aspirin. She had only had it three days, but it was already 1/3 gone. Rose sat down at her desk and cracked her neck, trying to relieve some of the stress in her body. She was so tired today. Maybe this weekend she would go for a massage. She could take her mum. Jackie was always up for a day at the spa.

XYZ

Roses headaches weren't going away. They had persisted now for three months, gradually getting worse. Sometimes she would have to close the blinds in her office and sit in the dark to get relief. Mickey was starting to worry about her as well. It wasn't normal to have this kind of pain for this long. Jackie was starting to nag her about going to see a doctor, and even Pete, who really wasn't that observant when it came to her had noticed her withdrawing more and more.

Finally, the pain was more that she could stand, and she had Mickey drive her to the clinic. She refused to let Jackie come with her because she didn't want her exposing herself to all those viruses at six months pregnant. Mickey insisted on pushing her in a wheelchair, and she felt ridiculous in the huge sunglasses, but she couldn't step outside without them, and whenever the doctor left the room she made Mickey flip the lights out.

"Well, Miss Tyler, I don't see anything in your CT scan that would cause the headaches. Your blood work does reveal some slight anemia, which, with the stress of the recent events in your life, could be contributing. For now, I'm going to prescribe a stronger painkiller than what you've been taking and a vitamin supplement. If this doesn't work, then we may need to refer you to a neurologist, see if there is something else going on in there."

He smiled as he handed her a slip of paper with her prescriptions on it. Mickey snatched it and stuffed in his pocket of his ever-present leather jacket, glaring at the unhelpful physician. There was no way that it was just a vitamin deficiency. The doctor's smile disappeared as he stepped out of the way of the wheelchair being pushed out of the room. That guy made him nervous.

XYZ

After they had gotten home from the clinic and Jackie had received the report she insisted that Pete makes some calls and get her that referral to the neurologist. Having one of the most influential people in England as her husband came in handy.

Rose went to her room, all the while listening to her very pregnant mother worrying about her very loudly to Pete. She loved that about her Jackie Tyler, even if it did hurt her head.

The new painkillers helped a little bit. She could go back to work without too much trouble, and read the files on her desk without the words doing the samba across the page. She still couldn't get herself to go down the noisier labs because the sights and sounds tended to make her nauseous, but all and all, she was feeling a quite a bit better.

She went to the neurologist two weeks later, where they ran every kind of scan they could think of. PET scans, CAT scans, and CT scans, EEGs, EKGs, MRIs, more blood was drawn, if there was a test for it, they did it on her. Rose felt a bit like a pincushion. Mickey held her hand the entire time, and was required to call Jackie and Pete every hour on the hour with updates.

By the end of the day Rose was exhausted, and knew little more than she had before the battery of tests. It would be a couple of weeks before the results of all the tests came back, but she already knew what they would say. She was beginning to suspect what the problem was.

XYZ

Mickey sat at his desk in the lab going through photos of the newest acquisitions in the warehouse. They needed to be identified and cataloged before they were stored or backwards engineered for study and application. Most of the pieces were of little interest to him. A trans-mat, they were already working on one of those in Research and Development, and this one looked like its circuits were fried already, useless. There were two energy pistols; those might be worth have a second look. The last picture caught his attention. It was a large cylindrical ship of some kind. The description stated the wreckage was found at the center of London in 1941 after a German air raid.

He ran to the lift as quickly as he could with all the other lab jockeys milling around, many of which turned to watch him zip passed. A couple shook their heads, wondering how he could have gotten a management position, even if Pete Tyler was a good friend of his, and he got results. He had no A-levels, and his work experience was mostly auto repair.

The lift opened on Rose's floor, and Mickey was so excited that he almost slammed into the doors before they opened. He walked more calmly once he was on her floor so as not to draw too much attention to himself, her colleagues could be quite uppity from time to time, and entered her office. At first he couldn't find her, but he was sure that she said she would be in her office all day today. He walked around her desk to sit in her chair to wait for her to come back, but as he rounded the corner he found her lying on the floor unconscious.