AN: This idea came into my head earlier and I had to write it down. I'll try and get some more of "That's what I go to school for" written but at the moment Melody is being a bad little girl and won't co-operate with me. So here's this instead. Three guesses who the speaker's saviour is.
At the end of my first day, I sit with my new co-workers, getting to know them a bit better as well as I am now part of Captain Harkness's infamous Torchwood Three team. I had been transferred yesterday after UNIT got sick of my 'insubordination' and asked Captain Harkness if he needed a new team member. They're all pretty nice and just when I think I've avoided the major question, one of the women asks me the question I was dreading.
"How did you get that scar if you don't mind me asking?"
Actually I do mind. I tend not to think about what happened ten years ago which left me with the deep dark red six and a half inch scar that stretches diagonally across my face from the bottom of my right cheek to the left fringes of my hairline. Before I answer I think about what happened the day I got my scar.
It's chaos. Everywhere I look people are running and screaming. Some are trying to defend themselves. Others are calling for colleagues and friends. I sprint around calling out for someone, anyone, who was part of the group of UNIT technicians who were visiting the tower on a routine visit. I had come along because it was better than sitting at the base all day. Now I really wish I hadn't. Nobody seems to notice the terrified thirteen year old that's looking for a familiar face. The next thing I knew I'm standing in front of what everyone had believed to be a ghost. I had seen these things drag people to their deaths and I suddenly realise the same is going to happen to me. I am going to die and I'm only thirteen. As I am dragged along with other workers someone squeezes my hand reassuringly.
"It'll be alright." A pretty dark-skinned woman says but we both know it's just empty words. As we're taken through the tower the screams of the terrified people is intermixed with the sounds of what seem to be lasers and robotic voices screaming battle cries. I know that if by some miracle of Jesus or Buddha or Allah or whoever is Up There, that if I survive this, these words will haunt my nightmares until I die.
"EXTERMINATE!"
"DELETE!"
We're taken into an area I passed a few hours ago when we arrived at Canary Wharf. Was it only a few hours ago? I had just thought it was renovations. Well I had thought a lot of things today. None of them seemed to be right aside from my very imminent death. The woman who squeezed my hand is taken inside and just as I was forced through the curtains and strapped to the machine, the metal men rise into the air and are dragged out of the room. But the machine is still going. Just as it slices across my face as I try and twist myself free as I can hear running footsteps and a man's voice calling a woman's name.
"Lisa! Lisa where are you?"
"Help me please. I don't want to die, I'm just a kid!" I scream hysterically as the blade cuts across my face which is turned at an angle. Blood clouds my vision but I can see a man standing at the edge of the table. He stops the machine, frees me and tells me to run. I do so, stumbling out of the room and moving down the stairs. My rush of adrenaline is all that fuels my movements down three floors where dizziness, hysteria and the head wound makes me collapse.
Three days later I woke up in the UNIT hospital just outside London. My mum, who's never left her work as a UNIT translator for any reason in her life, is by my bed and hugs me tight. As I pull the bandages from across my face I gasp at the scar stretching the whole way across my face. I'm hideous and I look like Mad-Eye Moody! Just as I think these thoughts Mum tells me that over 800 people died at Torchwood One alone and God only knew how many others had died. I suddenly realise I'm lucky. I may have a scar but I also have my life. I was a survivor. My thoughts turned to the woman who went into the room before me. I wonder if she or the man looking for his Lisa survived. I never knew my saviour's name or even seen his face. All I knew was that I had seen hell.
When I was thirteen, I saw hell on this earth.
"When I was thirteen, I got into a fight with a go-kart and a shed window. I won but as you can see, it cost me my looks" I reply jokingly to my co-workers and we laugh.
