Chapter Three: Warfare
The Time War would forever burn in his memory.
As a death of enemy forever can.
The day the Doctor had died.
The day both their TARDIS's had died.
The day he found himself trapped on Earth. Alone.
Being insane and trying to destroy the world is only fun if someone is trying to stop you and you're not stuck on that same world.
The Master needed a way to travel once again, to get off this boring short lived planet.
He needed to get back to power.
It was always about power.
To find a way of accessing equipment that was as advanced as he could get. To travel among the stars again, or even perhaps later, among time. First make a ship, a device a way of travelling of conquering the stars.
A way off a singular planet stuck in a backwards era.
What place held the most alien equipment? The most knowledge? The most power?
Torchwood.
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After she glanced behind, in the mirror of the black jeep, Rose began to play with the radio.
"And today's top story." the dry female emotionless voice of the BBC news reader stated, "Elliot Madden, the head robotic engineer, of the late John Lumic's cybertronics empire, denounced all claims today of knowledge of the break out last week when two fully functional cybermen units killed fourteen people and marked a government building, using an electrical surge. The word on that wall was, of course, 'LISA'. There is no comment from Torchwood as what that could actually mean, but there are reports-"
Rose pressed a different button, cutting the news reel dead. She didn't want to learn what other less informed people thought of her work, at least not on her day off.
Elvis Presley's 'Hound Dog' followed. She quickly moved her eyes once again and pressed a different button. She really wished Pete wouldn't leave his CDs in her car.
An opera filled the heavy black car with the sounds of a female singer attempting to break glass.
That too was quickly turned off.
A rapper raved on, about 'birds', his 'posse' and the ways of drugs and war of the streets of New York. Rose shook her head as she remembered listening to it years ago and actually liking it. Did that make her old at just 25?
Pressing buttons at random, Rose tore her eyes away from the road in frustration, just as she was driving past a junction.
A car pulled out, just as Rose looked up from the radio, she didn't manage to hit the brakes in time.
The cars crashed in a head on collision.
The air bag inflated and the world faded, blurry around the edges.
Then black.
---
Pushing the suffocating air bag away from her, Rose struggled until she unclipped the seat belt and swung open the door. It thudded as it hit its own hinges. Squeezing past the bag, she coughed as she took her first breath of air, in what felt like such a long time, only to be nearly smothered by the smoke of the engine as it filled her lungs.
Whilst coughing, she all but fell out of the car. Stumbling on her pink high heals, Rose forced herself to breathe in the dirty air and stop coughing.
A siren was getting nearer.
"What the hell were you doing!!" screamed a man, near her car. His sharp black suit still looking strangely neat, even if there was blood trickling from a fierce injury on his head and dipping onto his white shirt.
"ME!" bellowed Rose, suddenly realising who she was talking to, the driver in the other car, "you should have stopped!!"
"You should have been looking!"
"I was looking!" Rose almost growled, ignoring the almost blinding head ache.
"No, you weren't or you would have seen me pull out!" the man sharked back.
"You should have waited for me to pass,"
"I saw you! Head down, probably doing your lippy! You could have gotten both of us killed!" he pointed an accusing finger at her and something within her was sure he was more worried about himself than anyone else.
Rose didn't like the man.
"Yeah or maybe you were trying to get me killed?" Rose pulled out her electric teaser from her back pocket and began advancing towards the stranger with the caramel brown hair. "Hands up, I'm arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder. You do not have to say anything, but I really would like to know who the hell you are and why the hell you just tried to kill me!" screeching the last part, Rose began to advance on him.
"WHAT THE F-" three Torchwood issued jeeps pulled up and several men and women pulled their weapons out and pointed them at the man.
In the back ground an up beat, cheerful song by the Bad flow echoed from Rose's car radio.
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The guns outlining the roof of the room the Doctor had been in, had suddenly retraced back into the holes where they came, and sealed back up. A section of the wall swung slowly like an out of time electric door suitable for wheelchairs and large prams. Despite his instincts telling him to run, the Doctor walked through.
The Master was pacing, back and forth, his brow creased. Each time he walked past Rose looking at something in the far corner, his left eyebrow lifted slightly. The Doctor turned to look at Rose as she poured a deep dark golden brown liquid into a short glass, before taking a seat on one of the red and black overstuffed armchairs near the fireplace. The fire blazed needlessly on, as the Time Lord was once again reminded what a show man the Master was, a true evil genius. As the Doctor moved to stand protectively near Rose, he realised the fire was fake. The planet Crackta had developed the cold flame, now it was used like air conditioning for the traditionalists.
Silent tears dropped down Rose's eyes, as she took a drink of the strong smelling alcohol.
"How do you know each other?" the words echoed through the warm looking room of the Master's private quarters.
When Rose showed no response, the Master began to laugh at the Doctor's question.
"How do we know each other?" he laughed hard and bitter, "you don't know her at all, do you? Not a bit." He turned to Rose "Is this your Doctor? The one you love so much more than me?"
Rose turned around to face him. That left her neck at a very odd angle and both Time Lords were sure her neck would snap, "You left me, Harry! All alone in some bloody forest, you left me!"
"Did she never tell you about me? About what we were? God, I bet you don't even know she's an alcoholic." 'Harry' scoffed the last bit of his sentence, and then added "or the war. The Cyberwar in the parallel world. Not the Time War."
The Doctor ignored him.
"What about you? How did you survive the Valiant?"
"The what?" The Master eyebrows rose, his face twisting into a look of arrogant confusion as though he was simply humouring the Doctor.
"He thinks you're the 'MASTER' from this universe," Rose turned his name into a sneer "That one died on the Valiant. Jack, he only called him 'the Master' and not 'Harold Saxon', so I never made the connection. But it's you, isn't it? You're the Master? The Master from the other Universe... the one I met, the one I loved."
"Rose, what are you? How are you?" the Doctor tried again running his hands widely through his hair. "Ok, so he's from the other Universe and there he survived the Time War."
"Yes, but you didn't, the all great and mighty Doctor, in the other universe at least died in the war." Explained the parallel Master with a snort. He now sat slumped on a chair with his legs up.
Rose was silent.
"Did he tell you he knew me Rose?" the Doctor looked at her harshly as she ignored him, or possibly couldn't even hear. She just stared back the heat on the fire reflecting on her face. "Two Masters, Two Doctors, did you know we knew each other?"
The moved to pull her shoulder towards him, suddenly paranoid that she had some great scheme of destroying him, her and her Master.
"No." Rose said finally looking at him. "He told me you never existed in the other world."
Both turned to look at the Master, he raised his eyebrows.
"What?" he shifted slightly in his chair. "He was already dead, and you'd have just run off and tried to find him."
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Rain pounded hard onto the black umbrella. Rose thought back to the last time she had seen her stepfather, after the meeting that morning she'd had to get out of.
'LISA'; the burnt writing on the wall. She'd been told by Pete it was a fringe group of Cybermen activists. The kind of people, usually scientific researchers, who had gone though horrific events, were people scarred with a mental numbness they could not shake. Their families murdered, tortured. A small group of twenty had joined John Lumic in the early days of cybermen creation as researchers. People who believed it was better to feel nothing in a cold hard heartless shell than feel everything and be weak with the added pain of being human.
These people created the cybermen.
After the cybermen were stopped, back when Rose and the Doctor had first come to this Universe, the deactivated were left in the locked down ruins of the Lumic Empire. Then half of them had escaped to travel to the other world. Reactivated somehow - a popular belief claimed LISA was also behind this - they were left alone for five years. Until they woke. Two of them came free and staged the attack and killing of fourteen people in LISA's name. After that, Torchwood had been forced to check the deactivated cybermen were still in hibernation.
That team never reported back.
Now there was a war to fight, Torchwood and the Human race on one side, LISA and the cybermen on the other. Lumic's Intelligence Support Agency or LISA was dangerous, and that meant war, on her own, without her Doctor. She didn't want to save the world without him, and part of her didn't want to save the world at all.
An abandoned store alcove was where Rose had been told to stand and wait until she was introduced to Torchwood's new chief battle scientist. Rose had glanced through his file, annoyed there was no mug shot. Good test scores, very good, strangely good. Doctor good. And a past which seemed to only go back as far as six years. Not something Torchwood would have accepted, but the organization was desperate. Especially with the head Communication and Cybermen Intelligence specialist refusing to fight in the war. Rose only had a few months left, only had to stay until January, then no more Torchwood. She was finished; let them fight this war, for her it was over.
Taking down her umbrella, she walked into a small alcove and waited.
"Miss Tyler?"
Rose spun around, suddenly realising that she had been unable to hear the footsteps as well as the rain.
"Yeah?" Rose replied.
"Ianto Jones," nodded the man, before taking down his black umbrella and stepping into the alcove next to her. "The door's open."
Rose turned pushed the once white door open; its green graffiti looked like the most recent thing, in a decade.
Rose was surprised not to be greeted into the centre of the shop but to a small set of downwards spiralling stairs. Looking behind, her Rose saw Mr Jones following right after her. Turning to where the hop window should have been, she saw two old grey cabinets, one side stuck with a faded poster of Blondie. The shutters on the outside were just for show.
Rose descended the steps, noticing how the walls changed from a dirty cream to a bight white, the floor from a pale brown with crusty mystery splodges to a hard white tiled floor. A dentist, a hospital or a lab.
Her father's voice echoed through the downwards corridor.
"Hope this ok then, had the boys down here for months getting it ready"
"Sir, it's a dream I assure you,"
That voice.
Rose knew that voice. One was her step father sure, but the other?
"I did expect something a little grander on the outside but when undercover, it can't be helped. This is the start of a war after all."
That man, the man in the car, the man Torchwood had let off for believing it really had been an accident. Her Mum had even called her paranoid, the whole idea was laughable. Or at least it was until now.
The crash earlier that week, watching the man get taken away in a Torchwood high security van, after he had made an attempt on her life. Only to be let off later as there was 'no evidence'?
The corridor got small and Rose was forced to duck her head.
A bright white lab greater her. Something was bubbling on a lab table in the centre an emerald shade of green. Pipes and a Bunsen burner as well as several other jars connected together a complex piece of chemistry equipment. A periodic table on the wall, a cyberman helmet in glass cabinet, along side a humanoid skull. A white board full of artist familiar squiggles.
"Ah, Rose" the man she regarded as her father smiled, standing side by side with another suit clad man.
The man smiled at her smugly.
"This is Harold Saxon, your new partner."
Sorry for the delay, University applications. Need I say more?
Please review, I think I'm the only one who reads this now.