"SEE YOU IN HELL"
Chapter 1: Cardiff
A/N – huge thanks to timano for being my first and only review so far!! Glad you liked it, and yes there's going to be more!
It had taken 3 hours, 2 trains, a bus and directions from a friendly old couple, but Rose finally stood outside the Welsh parliamentary offices. Travelling by TARDIS had been so much easier, even with the Doctor's tendency to end up in the wrong time and place.
She strode into the building, going through her story in her head. Obviously the existence of an organisation based in London which dealt with anything related to aliens from space was somewhat hush-hush so she couldn't just wander in with a 'hi, I'm Rose Tyler from the Torchwood Institute in London, we think you may have a power source that somehow managed to make its way to Earth from a different planet, mind if I take it off your hands so we can study it and see exactly what it does?'
Yeah, because that would work. She did miss the days when she would have just burst in and grabbed what she wanted, her and the Doctor, with matching grins on their faces and a hasty apology yelled over her shoulder as an afterthought for the state they left the door in. Torchwood, however required a little more tact from their employees.
She smiled at the slightly harassed looking man behind the reception desk, 'hi, my name is Rose Tyler, I've got an interview with Daniel Bowen.'
'Ah yes,' was the reply, 'just go through and he'll be there in a moment.'
With a 'thanks', Rose made her way past the desk and followed the names on the doors until she found the right one.
Letting herself in, she smiled slightly at the room before her, this man had more clutter in his office than she did. She should take a picture to send to Pete, he was always complaining about how no-one would be able to work surrounded by so much junk.
It took a moment for her eyes to pick out what she was looking for and from one glance at the flat metal board with its raised circles – which had always reminded her of lego blocks – she knew that it was exactly what she'd thought.
This one was far more rusted than the one in her own world though, tarnished and battered, it was easy to see why people had thought it was antique.
Smoothing the pants suit she still wasn't used to wearing even after a whole 18 months of working for Torchwood and wearing one 5 days a week, she closed the door quietly behind her and moved forward to run her hands over the dented metal.
Mr Bowen had placed it on a shelf, leaning against the wall. It was a far cry from the pristine one she had seen, and somehow the wear and tear gave it an eerie sort of quality that she couldn't really define. You knew from first sight that this item had a history, and the fact that it was so difficult for anyone on Earth to be able to figure out what the hell it was made that history all the more intriguing and made the extrapolator all the more interesting.
She was just about to lift it from its shelf when the door clicked behind her and she spun guiltily, unwilling to be caught fondling this mans ornaments.
'Miss Tyler?' The slim dark haired man extended his hand, walking towards her with a smile.
She matched his smile with one of her own, shaking his hand politely, 'yes, hi, it's nice to meet you.'
'You too, please take a seat,' he gestured towards the slightly dilapidated looking chair in front of his desk as he eased himself into an only slightly less worse for wear seat behind it, 'I must say, you're not quite what I was expecting.'
'Yeah', she replied with a grin, 'I get that a lot, people don't really expect a politics student to be a ditzy looking blonde.'
'It is a…break from the norm, shall we say. Anyway, to business. What exactly was it you wanted to speak to me about?'
Here was the bit Rose hated. Obviously she couldn't just tell him that she wanted to buy his new antique for a top secret government project, so she had to pretend to discuss politics then oh-so-casually notice his interesting looking decoration, which of course a friend of hers would 'absolutely adore', and then offer to buy it from him for a very reasonable price.
What followed was twenty minutes of seemingly endless conversation about this bill and that motion, until Rose couldn't stand it anymore. She'd gone through everything she knew about politics, discussed the ramifications of a nuclear power station in the middle of Cardiff and just when she was contemplating chucking herself out of the window, there was a lull in the conversation which she immediately took advantage of to get to the whole point of her being there.
'I was just looking at that ornament thing you've got on that shelf,' she gestured, 'I've never seen anything like it, what is it?'
'Ah,' came the, rather subdued reply, 'well, to tell you the truth, I have no idea. Bought it from an antique store about a week ago because that space was looking a bit bare, but I think I'm going to get rid of it.'
This was better than she'd hoped, 'why?'
'Well…' he hesitated, seeming to fight with something inside himself, before leaning forward conspiratorially, 'I know it's not really something a politician ought to say, or even think, but I really do think it's cursed.'
Rose bit back a smile as she leaned even further across the desk, 'really? Cursed how?'
'Everything around it just goes haywire, the computers, the lights, everything, they just get random power surges, which shorts out the fuses. Even when my computer was off, when I took the plug out, it was still running, it was still switched on, but the screen was this bright white.'
He sat back with the distinct relaxation of someone who'd just unburdened a great secret, looking especially glad that she hadn't immediately laughed at him.
'Wow, that's really cool, so you're just gonna throw it out?' Seeing the end in sight Rose slightly dropped the professional air she'd maintained throughout the meeting, 'cos I've got a mate who would be really interested in it, he loves tinkering about with weird stuff like that and it would make a great birthday present for him.'
'But you don't even know what it is,' a slightly suspicious frown appeared on his forehead.
'I know, but that doesn't matter, this mate of mine, he's not really…all there…if you know what I mean,' she said softly with a wry smile, her thoughts on the real man she was describing, 'but it really is just the kind of thing he'd love, he'll spend hours cleaning it and playing about with it until he could figure out what it was.'
'I don't know…' She almost had him swayed.
'Well you're just gonna throw it out aren't you? I'll give you 20 quid for it.'
Fifteen minutes later Rose exited the building with a smile on her face and an extrapolator under her arm. Ah, he was a nice man but he was a politician, in the end the money had swayed him.
She had a while until her next train, and, although her job had her travelling all over London, and she'd travelled cross country to Norway, this was the first time she'd been to Wales since she got here. Other than the zeppelins that constantly hovered overhead, and a couple of political figures, she had no idea how else this Cardiff differed from hers.
Slowly, her feet dragging, she wandered down the riverside. There was the restaurant where the Doctor had dined with Margaret, the bench on which she'd sat and argued with Mickey…these thoughts were going to drive her insane. She had gone a year and a half trying to push the Doctor and her old life behind her, knowing that if she didn't her whole life would be spent huddled under her duvet crying herself to sleep every night.
Not that it never happened, but for the most part she managed not to dwell on her past. Well, until last night.
She'd managed to go the whole day without thinking about the nightmare that had her screaming into the darkness of her bedroom last night but now as she wandered through the square, beside the Millennium Centre and paused beside the fountain, she couldn't help the images from flooding her mind.
Gunfire. Waves of gunfire, interspersed only by screams. Death hung in the air, the smell of it, the taste of it, even the feel of it.
Through the golden haze that covered everything she was aware that somewhere far away someone was talking, but the words weren't clear. The gunfire and the screaming were smothered by the light and the pain that had worked its way to the front of her head.
Pain so intense that it was hard to even stand. Funny, she hadn't been aware of her body until then. As she became aware of her body, more things became clear, like the reason for the pain, and the fact that the light hid a billion things, pasts, futures, possibilities, the entire reaches of the universe and those thousands of other universes so close but just out of reach.
But there was something else, something she couldn't put her finger on. Something far more important than herself, more important than anything she had faced with the Doctor.
The Doctor! Through the pain she remembered him, remembered the danger that he was in and the threat that faced him and faced everything that she could see in her mind.
"I want you safe. My Doctor."
The pain and the fear that she had felt in the dream had lingered with her all day, despite her best efforts to forget it.
She dropped suddenly and heavily onto the nearest bench, overwhelmed by the sudden sense that something was wrong. The extrapolator dropped to the floor with a loud clang, only to be ignored. The images and feelings that had been so clear when she'd first had the nightmare were some how more vivid with the remembrance of them now, as though they carried a weight that dreams were not meant to hold.
With the memory of her nightmare came more. Pulled from the deepest recesses of her mind, wave after wave of images, sounds, smells, emotions, all bathed in a golden hue assaulted her, pain crashing though her.
Rose clenched her eyes closed against the tears of agony spilling from her, unaware that her screams were echoed by those of scores of others as she struggled to breathe past the memories of the Bad Wolf.
A/N – Please review! I'm just gonna tell you this now; I'm really going to try hard to update this fic every week/fortnight, but please take into account that both I and my beta are in our 3rd years at uni so there are gonna be times when the next chapter might be slightly delayed. Stick with me tho'!!