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Her name was Rebecca McKae, he'd find out later. The first time he saw her, there was a spider running down her arm, which she only smiled at and transferred to a nearby wall, with a murmured, "There you go," and a distinct air of satisfaction as she watched it scurry away. She saw him looking and smiled; he smiled back, and it almost reached his eyes.
The second time he saw her, she was running from a creature with six arms and nasty-looking teeth, and he had to bite back a curse — this would happen to him, even in New York.
He called out to get her attention and, when she turned toward him, pulled her into a tight space between two buildings. "It can't follow you here. Not enough room."
"I don't suppose there's a way to reason with this thing," she said, a bit too quickly and a shade too high-pitched for her really be as calm as she was pretending to be. "No... wacky misunderstanding?"
"Sorry, no." Not a bad first reaction, all considered.
"So we either need to send it back where it came from, or kill it." She nodded to herself,.
"There is no 'we'," he told her. "Let me handle it."
"Fuck that," she told him. "It's already trying to kill me."
He considered it for a moment — this brave, stupid girl who showed compassion for spiders and refused to panic when confronted with aliens, who asked about communicating first and kept killing as her last option.
He could let her help him, but there were only two things that could come from that: either she'd get herself killed (likely), and become another corpse to weigh on his conscience, or...
Or she'd be good. She'd impress him enough for him to take her back to Cardiff, to go back himself, to maybe fall in love with her a little, and the cycle would begin again. He thought of Ianto, Tosh, Owen, all loved, all lost.
He shook his head. "Go home."
Torchwood had enough dead.