Notes: So how did they do it? And will Rose finally get over her psychological trauma? This is it, the final chapter. I hope you've enjoyed it. Thank you to everyone who stopped by to have a read, and thank you for the reviews.

Chapter 18

Torchwood Special Operations Briefing Room.

Earlier in the day.

"Why don't you three go and get something to eat before we go? Being telepathic, Rose and myself have to make some preparations if we're not going to become puppets of Sutekh," John said.

"What are you up to John?" Rose asked as the other three left the room.

"Yeah, I'm wondering that as well," Andy said.

"Okay, here's the real plan. Andy, Chrissie, I'm sorry to lay this at your door, but you are the only people who will know what's really going on," John said.

"Andy. Rose told me about some 'blood bullets' you use for training exercises. Have you got any for their Glock pistols?"

"Yeah. They're in the armoury."

"Great. Can you get them and load all the team's guns with them?"

"Sure, but why? What have you got in mind?"

"Last time I met Sutekh, I very nearly didn't make it. I had to make him think I had been strangled by one of his robots. I used my respiratory bypass," John told them.

"Y'know, I miss that respiratory bypass. It was brilliant for…."

"John!" Rose said. "Stay on topic."

"Oh, right. Well, I'm certain he will take great delight in killing us all with our own weapons. The blood capsules will convince him that he's succeeded and he'll stop focussing on us."

"But won't he just read our minds and know it's a trick?" Rose asked.

"Oh my brilliant Rose. Always asking the right questions." He turned to Andy and Chrissie. "Have you noticed that about Rose? Always asking the right questions?" They looked at him, just grinning. Rose rolled her eyes.

"What...? Oh, topic. Stay on it. Right. Jack, Gwen and Jake have gone to lunch, so as far as they are concerned, everything is 'real', and Sutekh will believe it too."

He looked at Chrissie, suddenly serious. "Andy, I want Chrissie on Despatch for this mission. You can use the video feed on our helmet cameras to see who has been shot. When you hear the gunfire Chrissie, you have to tell everyone to keep still and play possum. They have to make Sutekh believe they are dead."

"Yeah, okay. I can do that."

John kissed her on the cheek.

"You're going to use Alistair's gun trick that he used to escape from the crime syndicate, aren't you?" Rose asked.

"Yep!" John said with a smile.

"But John, won't Sutekh be able to read our minds and find out that it's a trick?" she said.

John was looking at Andy and Chrissie, and he had a proud smile on his face. He pointed at Rose as he spoke.

"Did you hear that? She did it again." He turned to Rose and held her shoulders gently, looking into those gorgeous hazel eyes. "He would be able to, if we knew about it. But we're not going to know about it, so he won't," he said in a riddle.

"Wha'?"

"We're going to hide the knowledge in our memories, in a post hypnotic suggestion. Every time we try to remember any of this, all we will see is... Oh I don't know, what about EJ chuckling as he bounces in front of the telly? I don't think even Sutekh would be able to get past our love for our son."

"Oh John, that's brilliant," Rose said.

"I'll have to program a release into our memories so that we can recover them. Yours will be easy. As soon as you get shot with the blood capsules, you'll know you have to play dead and the whole plan will be back in your head."

"And what about you?" Rose asked.

"Ah, mine will be a bit more difficult. If Sutekh is the half decent psychopath I think he is, he'll keep me alive as long as he can." John hesitated; he looked uncomfortable with what he was going to say next.

"Rose, I think he will make me shoot you," he said.

"Well that's okay. They're dummy bullets. You won't really be killing me."

"But I won't know that, will I? As far as I will be concerned, I will have watched me shoot you dead."

Rose's eyes and mouth went wide. "Oh John. You can't do that. There must be another way to do this."

He continued to hold her shoulders and look intently into her eyes. "If he gets the slightest whiff of a trap, he'll incinerate us all where we stand. It has to be this way."

Rose pulled him into a hug. "I can't bear to think of you having to watch that John."

"Hey, I'll be alright as soon as my memories return, which is why I need a code word that you can remember to bring me back."

Rose thought about it and then came out of the hug to look at him.

"I know. Banana ice cream sundae, your favourite."

"Hah! That's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Okay let's do it. Are you ready?"

Rose nodded, and John turned to Andy. "Once we've finished this, we won't remember this conversation. Just point us in the direction of the others."

Getting a nod from Andy, John turned back to Rose and they put their first and second fingers on their temples. They closed their eyes, and John rested his forehead against hers. And there they stood, motionless for a minute or more.

They lowered their hands, opened their eyes and smiled at each other.

"Hello," Rose said.

"Hello," he replied.

They looked around the Briefing Room, and were puzzled that Jack, Gwen and Jake were missing.

"Where'd everyone go?" Rose asked.

"Down to the restaurant to get some lunch before setting off on the mission," Andy told them.

"Ooh, chips," John said. "I fancy some chips. C'mon Wife, I'm starving."

Rose rolled her eyes and laughed as he took her hand and headed for the restaurant.

Despatch desk. Torchwood Special Operations Briefing Room.

A short while ago.

Chrissie Anderson was stationed at the Despatch desk in Special Operations. Calling it a 'desk', was a bit of a misnomer. It was a bank of keyboards, knobs, dials, multimedia sliders, buttons and switches, under a wall of media screens, satellite uplinks and downlinks.

It was the nerve centre of Special Operations, the nerve centre of Torchwood. The dispatcher was the link between the field agents and the high tech services that could save their lives. At present, the large central screen was partitioned into six.

"Right Chrissie," Andy said. "Who have we got where?"

"Top left is John. Top middle, Rose. Top right, Jack. Bottom left, Gwen and bottom middle is Jake."

The bottom right partition was a satellite feed of the team in infrared. The five helmet cameras showed a road with scenery flying past at 100 miles an hour.

"Sharp turn coming up on the right onto a single track road," they heard Jake announce. He was riding point and the bikes onboard computers were linked to the Despatch desk feeds, giving them all the navigation and traffic information they needed.

Chrissie followed their progress on the screens.

"Sharp turn on the left. This is the street we want to be on." Jake said.

Chrissie centred the satellite on the luxury villa and started a surveillance sweep. She saw the three bikes moving up the driveway and approach the villa.

The bottom middle screen showed Jake moving behind cover to take out the first security guard.

"Beta Three reporting one target down. Over," Jake reported.

"Roger that," Jack replied.

On the bottom right screen, Chrissie could see a human shaped heat source at the other side of the villa.

"Despatch to Beta One," Chrissie called. "Satellite thermal imaging shows another heat source on the far side of the villa. Over,"

She watched Gwen's and Jake's heat sources move through the undergrowth around the villa, and watched the feed from their helmet cameras.

"Beta Three reporting second target down. Over."

After that, the heat sources disappeared inside the villa and Chrissie concentrated on the helmet feeds. That was strange, Jake and Gwen were just standing there, looking at Lee Kuan Yang.

When the rest of the team came into the room and started to move strangely, she knew something was wrong.

"Andy? We've got a problem," she called out.

Andy had gone to check the status displays of the rest of Blue Watch, but came running back at Chrissie's call.

"Is it kicking off?" he asked.

"I think it's about to, look."

Andy studied the video feeds and listened to the dialogue.

"Get ready Brains," he said.

"Oh look, a triangle. How apt," they heard Yang say before he clicked his fingers.

BLAM! Three shots rang out simultaneously, blood splattered across the trio's chests. Chrissie opened Jack, Gwen and Jake's channels.

"DON'T MOVE! Play possum. Do not react to anything. It's all part of John's plan," she told them.

Andy and Chrissie watched the rest of the plan unfold, pretty much as John had predicted.

"How the hell does he do that?" Andy asked in a mixture of amazement and admiration. "What we could have done with him in my old unit."

They saw John and Yang leave the villa and head for the garage.

"Ah. I don't think this was part of the plan," Andy said. "Where are they going?" he asked as a vehicle drove down the driveway and turned right onto the road.

They saw Jack and Rose run to one of the bikes and chase after the car.

"Beta one to…. Oh sod that. Chrissie, this is Jack. Deactivate Doc's headset, activate his transponder and get a fix on it."

Chrissie's hands flew over the controls as she carried out Jack's request. She activated John's tattoo beacon and overlaid it on the satellite image.

"Okay Jack, I've got a lock on it," Chrissie told him.

Jack's next transmission took her by surprise. "Good girl. Now I'm on a trail bike and I'm going to need cross country directions to beat the Doc to the TARDIS. Can you do it?"

"Well, that answers the question of where they're heading," Andy said.

"Mmmm. I've not been asked that one before. Hang on; I'll have to do this on the fly." Chrissie pulled up a detailed topographic map of the area and overlaid that as well.

She monitored their progress and used a software algorithm to show her the quickest route from A to B. She directed them down side roads, across open ground, along alleyways and back onto the main roads that would get them to their destination before John and Yang.

"We know where we are now Chrissie, thanks for that," Jack said.

Andy and Chrissie then watched in helpless horror, as Yang refused to die and threatened Rose with her own gun. They then thought that there was a fault or interference on the cameras, when a golden light blanked out the feed.

When the video returned, everything seemed to have been resolved. Yang must have been shot with the blood capsules, because he was sitting on the tarmac and seemed to be perfectly well.

"Alpha One to Despatch. Mission accomplished. We're just tying up loose ends and then we'll be coming home. Over," John said.

"Roger that, Alpha One. Congratulations. We look forward to seeing you back safe and sound. Over and out," Chrissie replied.

Andy opened the microphone. "Well done team. I can't wait to read the report on this one. The drinks are on me."

Lungbarrow Tree House. TardisBay. The Isle of Gallifrey. Beta Pegasi II. (Also known as Paradise) 196 light years from Earth.

Rose was sitting on the sofa in the Living Room of their Tree House, holding EJ on her lap and singing a nursery rhyme. She was wearing a white, chamois leather mini dress that she had made in the style that Leela sometimes used to wear when she was with the Doctor. She had seen it in John's memories.

John was sitting next to her in his animal skin loin cloth and a sleeveless animal skin jacket. He was thinking that when Leela had worn that dress, it hadn't had the effect that it was having now, with Rose wearing it.

Rose turned to look at him and returned his smile.

"John," she started to ask, not sure if she should bring up the subject in their beautiful hide away. "Y'know when you hid our memories from Sutekh so that he wouldn't know we were tryin' to trick him?"

"Yes?" he said, raising an eyebrow.

"Welll. I was wonderin' if that would work with my memories of that jungle shack in Cambodia. Y'know, make 'em go away so that I wouldn't keep dwellin' on it and what could have happened."

"Are your sessions with Alice not helping then?"

"Oh yeah, they're helpin' and Alice is very good, but it's not the same as before. I just thought that as it had worked for Donna…."

"That was different Love. Donna had every scrap of knowledge of me, the TARDIS and our travels erased. I don't think you want that, do you?"

"No, of course not."

"Taking part of a memory away, leaves you with the rest, and you know how annoying it is when you are trying to remember something that is on the tip of your tongue. Eventually it would send you psychotic and you'd end up suicidal."

"Oh, okay. It was just a thought." She went back to playing with EJ.

He hesitated before continuing. "Rose, there is a technique I can use to help you, it's called memory dampening."

"What's that?"

"It's a way of taking the edge off the memories and giving them a positive spin, rather than the negative feelings you have at the moment."

"How does it work?"

"It's a bit intimate, which is why I haven't mentioned it before. You let me share your memories of the incident, and you share mine. In a few minutes we can achieve weeks of cognitive therapy."

"You don't take away the memories then?"

"No, but we have to relive them together, and I don't know if I can watch that."

"I'll be there with you won't I? We can face anythin' together you and me. We're a team, remember? Shiver and Shake? I trust you John."

She put EJ on the sofa between them and took his hands, raising them to her head. He touched his first and second fingers to her temples, and she did the same to him. They were standing hand in hand inside the jungle shack, looking at her tied to the grubby bed.

John watched with suppressed rage as the young man started cutting off her clothes with his knife. She could feel the Storm rising in him. She turned towards him and stroked his cheek.

"At this point, hearing you in my mind made me feel safe and gave me hope."

He found it hard to watch the scene in front of him so he led her to the window and nodded outside. Rose saw him hiding behind a tree with his sonic screwdriver in his mouth.

He was wrapping duct tape around his stun gun and induction coil to form one unit. His sonic was then soldering bits of wire between the two items.

"What were you doing?" she asked.

"Creating a wide field energy discharge from the stun gun, through the inductance coil. Anyone inside the shack gets zapped…. Sorry."

"Hey, those guys had AK47's. That was a stroke of genius."

That thought from Rose helped him to reconcile the fact that he wasn't in the room stopping that bastard from doing what he was doing.

They turned back to the scene on the bed. Her assailant had grabbed her chin and threatened her, and they could see the tears rolling down the sides of her cheeks. Her wrists and ankles were raw from the rope burns of her struggle.

She had made the difficult choice to surrender to her attacker, to allow herself to be raped. She was preparing to vacate her mind and reside with John for the duration. John reinforced the feelings of courage and reduced those of shame and guilt.

Then the stunner came through the window and they saw Rose snap her head around to look at the man straddling her. She pushed her head back against the grubby mattress and crashed her forehead into the man's cheek.

At that moment, John associated that memory of the whole event with a defiant hope. She had fought back, in the end she had not surrendered, she had fought back.

She watched her body convulse from the energy discharge and her attacker collapsed on top of her. John came through the door and ran over to her, grabbing the young man by the hair and roughly dragging him onto the floor where he kicked him in the ribs.

Rose could see the Storm in his eyes, and when she looked at John who was watching himself, she saw sadness and self loathing. He was ashamed of kicking an unconscious man who couldn't defend himself.

"I should be better than that, but I thought…."

She squeezed his hand in support. "Under the circumstances, I think he got away quite lightly," she told him. "That's not where I would have kicked him," she observed.

They watched as John cut the ropes holding her to the bed, and carefully cut the rope around her neck that was holding the knot in her mouth. He gently picked her up off the bed and carried her out of the door.

They took their fingers off their temples and they were back in the Tree House. Rose grabbed him around the neck and pulled him into a hug. It had worked; there was no shame, no blame, just triumph. She had fought back, and with John's help she had survived.

And John's guilt at not stopping them from taking her had diminished, replaced instead with knowledge that he had saved her. He had neutralised the threat, no one had died and Rose was so proud that he had weathered the Storm.

They walked along the jungle path towards the pool hand in hand. Rose held EJ in her right arm, his one leg in front of her hip and the other behind.

"Ca' 'key," he said pointing up at a tree. Rose looked up where he was pointing.

"What's he saying?" John asked.

"I thought you spoke all languages," Rose teased. "Cat monkey, up there in the tree."

John looked up and saw one of the tabby monkeys running along a branch.

They came to the clearing in the forest, where the pool had a gentle waterfall pouring into it.

"How's that arm now Julia?" Rose asked as they approached.

"It's unbelievable. There's not even a scar where the bullet wound was and the bones have all knitted back together. Those nano genies really are magical." Julia lifted her arm out of the water to show them. Her husband Viktor looked again, just to make sure it wasn't a dream.

"Ooh, nano genies. I like that," John said with a grin.

Rose knelt down by the poolside to talk to her friend.

"I feel a bit of a fraud now, taking this sick leave when I'm all healed."

"Hey, Alice wouldn't allow it. You have to recover from the psychological trauma. That's why I'm here," Rose told her with a laugh.

"It is very kind of you to let us stay here," Viktor said. He spoke perfect English with a hint of a Dutch accent.

"That's no problem," John said. "It's nice to be able to share this paradise with people.

Julia had been tickling EJ while he was sitting on Rose's lap.

"Are you coming in?" she asked. "The water's lovely and invigorating."

"I haven't got my bikini on. To be honest Julia, when we are here on our own, we normally walk about in the buff."

"Really," Julia said in surprise. Rose had always seemed so prim and proper when she was at Torchwood. And, come to think of it, she had never seen her and John look like they did at this moment.

"I've got to say Rose, that Tarzan and Jane look you've got going on at the moment really suits you," she said.

"Oh, thanks," Rose said with a smile.

Julia looked at Viktor and raised an eyebrow as she nodded down at their swimming costumes. He nodded back and reached under the water, bringing up his swimming shorts and throwing them on the bank.

Julia peeled her metallic blue cossie off her shoulders and pulled it over her legs under the water. With a lopsided smile, she tossed it over her shoulder to join Viktors shorts.

"When in Rome," she said.

Rose blushed at seeing them naked and proud in the pool.

"I'll have some of that then," John said as he took off his jacket and loin cloth. He jumped into the water with a splash and whooped as he came up for air.

"Come on miss frumpy pants," he called to her, reaching over for EJ. This would be the acid test to see if the memory dampening had really worked. Would she be comfortable being naked again? He hoped so, because he loved to look at her fit body.

She handed EJ to him, who tried to walk on water at first and then started splashing as he was lowered in. Julia and Viktor laughed at his antics.

Rose stood up and turned around, loosening the laces on the side of the tight dress. She slipped the dress off her shoulders and peeled it down her body. She looked over her shoulder and saw that Julia and Viktor were playing with EJ, and John was eyeing her with a look of appreciation as he gave her a wink.

She smiled at him and let the dress fall to the grass, leaving her in her soft chamois knickers. She lowered them down and stepped out of them before turning around and jumping into the pool.

She surfaced behind him and dunked him under the water. He came up laughing and spluttering.

"Frumpy pants? Did you actually call me frumpy pants?" They started splashing each other with water, collapsing into a hug in fits of laughter. They stopped laughing and just floated there, looking into each others eyes.

John tentatively and hesitantly leaned his head forwards and brushed her lips with his, pulling back to study her face. Was she okay with where this was going?

He didn't have to worry. One hand came up behind his head and pulled him into a snog, her fingers running through his wet, messy hair. Julia and Viktor looked up from playing with EJ to smile at the couple who were obviously in love.

Rose rested her chin on his shoulder and whispered in his ear. "Do you think Julia will baby-sit tonight?"

"Are you kidding me?" John said. "Look at her playing with him. She'd take him home with her given half the chance. He's such a lovable little guy."

"Just like his Dad," she said, giving him another kiss.

"Why do we need a baby-sitter? What have you got in mind?"

"Well, I was thinking of letting you take me down to the beach." She nibbled his ear.

"Lying in the surf…." She kissed his neck.

"And letting you shag the arse off me."

John's face was a picture of disbelief. "Mrs. Smith! I've never heard such language."

She was smiling with her tongue poking through her teeth. Her teasing smile, John called it.

"Now who's a frumpy pants?" she said.

John grinned at her. 'Yep. It had definitely worked', he thought. His Rose was back and raring to go.

The End