Freak like me
"Hello Rose Tyler." Rose almost screamed at the sight. Harry Saxon was standing right in front of her. "It's so nice to see you again."
"What are you doing here?"
"I thought that oaf Jack Harkness told you? No? I'm stalking you!"
"What do you want?"
"Revenge, obviously. But I'll settle for answers for now. What are you?"
"What the hell are you?"
"No, that's not how we play this game" he said and roughly shoved her into the alley. "I ask the questions and you answer!"
"You don't scare me. You might have been President in the other world, but here you are nothing!"
"That's not exactly true, though. I'm still a Time Lord which makes me quite dangerous!"
Rose felt like someone had slapped her. "What?"
"Please don't insult me by pretending you don't know what a Time Lord is."
"No, but… They're gone, they're all gone. He said he was the last."
Harry Saxon suddenly griped her shoulders in a vice-like manner. "What are you talking about?"
Rose had always felt uneasy around Harry Saxon in the alternative universe. He was weird and unpredictable, but she had never truly feared him before now. "Let go."
"Little girl, I am going to kill you and do a happy little tap dance on your grave. It's only a matter of time. So be a good little ape and tell me what you know now and we can continue this some other time!"
Rose violently kneed him in the groin. "I am not a stupid ape" she yelled as Harry Saxon crumpled infront of her. She kicked him in the stomach for good measure before she turned on her heel and ran for her life.
"Harry Saxon is a Time Lord!"
"Rose, is that you?" Pete was sitting at his desk in the newly renovated Torchwood Tower.
"Listen! He's a Time Lord."
Rose sounded out of breath and she was panting the words. "What are you talking about? Harry Saxon is dead! I shot him, remember."
Rose stopped. Pete was right, he had told them he had shot the President, that was the reason they needed to cross over. How could she be so thick? "But… He looks the same!"
"I'm not sure I understand, Rose."
"He looks the same" she yelled. "Oh god! Dad, he's following me!"
It wasn't often Rose called Pete "dad", it could probably be counted on one hand. Pete had hurt her deeply by refusing her parentage when she and the Doctor ended up in the alternative universe and perhaps she hadn't truly recovered from that, even though their relationship was mostly like that of a father and daughter. "Rose, are you in Cardiff?"
"I was on my way home after work. He was just there!" She was crying now.
"Rose, breath! Go to a friends place, stay there! Call Jack and tell him as soon as you get there. Whatever you do, you do not go out alone, you don't go anywhere alone. Are you close to someone from Torchwood?"
Rose looked around, she had been running aimlessly, her only goal was to put as much distance between herself and Harry. "Yeah, Owen lives around the block."
"Good, go there! Stay on the line until you're safe!"
Rose nodded and started to run again. She reached Owen's apartment moments later and frantically rang on the door.
"Yes" a tired voice said over the intercom.
"Owen, it's Rose, I need to get in, hurry!"
"Alright love, don't get your knickers in a knot" he mumbled and buzzed her in.
Rose practically burst through Owen's front door second later, looking like she had just run a marathon. "I'm here, I'm safe" she panted into the phone.
"Good. You need to call Jack now and inform him, okay? And have Jack call me afterwards, I want a word!"
"What's going on" Owen asked, but Rose ignored him and started to dial. "Jack? Harry Saxon is a Time Lord!"
An hour after Rose's confrontation with Harry Saxon, the whole team was gathered in Owen's living room.
"How can he be a Time Lord" Jack asked for the fifteenth time.
"Pete says he's sure he shot him and that he died, but obviously they didn't hang around to watch the body, checking for weird alien things" Ianto said. Jack had been so concerned for Rose that Ianto had offered to call Pete instead. "What is regeneration."
"It's um, when a Time Lord is about to die. They sorta just… change" Rose said. "I don't know the technical terms."
"It's a way of cheating death. Their body heals itself but changes all the cells" Jack said. "But you say he still looks the same?"
"Yeah, good old Harry Saxon" Rose said and thanked Tosh for the tea.
"What does he want" Owen asked.
"Revenge. And answers."
"Answers to what" Tosh asked.
"I don't know. But he knew I knew about Time Lords."
"So he knows about the Doctor" Gwen said. "Is that good or bad?"
"No but the thing is, he seemed surprised when I said that the Doctor was the last. I don't think he knew."
"What the bloody hell is a Time Lord" Owen suddenly asked. They all turned to look at him. "Explain, for those of us who aren't important enough to be included!"
"It's a Lord of Time" Jack said.
"Oh, are they really" Owen asked in a sarcastic tone. "I never would have guessed."
"They're aliens, their home planet was called Gallifrey, but it burned and the Time Lords died in a war. All except the Doctor."
"And what, they don't die?"
"They're not immortal, they just have ways of cheating death" Rose said. "But if he doesn't know about the Time War…"
"Then something is really really wrong" Jack said. "Does he have a TARDIS?"
"I don't know, he never mentioned anything like that" Rose said.
"We need to know everything we can about him. Pete is going to send me all the information they gathered and then we're going to have to investigate…" Jack was cut off by Rose's phone.
"Hello?"
"Tsk tsk tsk, miss Tyler" a voice breathed. "Running away from me like that is not going to change anything!"
Rose almost violently threw the phone away. Jack picked it up, guessing who was on he other line. "Harry Saxon?"
"Actually, I've quite outgrown that name. You can call me the Master!"
"I'll pass" Jack said. "How did you get this number?"
"The yellow pages. I presume this is the infamous Jack Harkness?"
"It's captain Jack Harkness, actually."
"Actually, it's not really, is it? I mean, captain Jack Harkness died many many years ago, did he not? You just happened to be there to takeover poor Jack's life."
Jack turned away from the others in the living room. "How do you know this?"
"I have my ways, just ask your lovely blonde friend. Who is the Time Lord you're working with."
"I don't know what you're talking about" Jack lied.
"If there ever was a time not to play dumb, this would be it. Trust me, I know, I am a Lord of Time after all."
"They're gone, all of them. The Time Lords died!"
"You lie!"
"You seemed to be rather well connected. Look up the Time War" Jack said and hung up. He turned to the others. "We have a problem!"
Tosh and Gwen had both fallen asleep on Owen's couch, while Rose, Jack, Ianto and Owen was sitting in the kitchen, talking in hushed voices.
"How can he know all these things" Jack asked in a frustrated voice.
"I've checked all my sources in the official government. No record of a Harry Saxon" Ianto said and closed the laptop. "Wherever he is getting his information from, it's not an official source."
"We're hardly the only off-the-books-operation out there" Owen said. "He could be working for UNIT or any other institute like that."
"I've checked with UNIT, they were reluctant to give away personnel files, but they assured me there is no one of the name Harry Saxon working with them."
"He probably doesn't use that name anymore" Jack said. "And there must be dozens fitting his description."
"So what, we're back to square one" Rose asked.
"Sorry, Rose. I know this is hard for you. Until we get him, maybe you should move to London? Stay with Mickey?"
"What's the point, he'll follow me anyway. I want to stay here. There's still the cracks, we need to do something about that."
"And we will, but we need to take some precautions now. Obviously he has access to intel on all of us, probably the hub as well, which means he knows where we are and what we do. This will make it easier for him to find you, Rose" Jack said.
"Yeah, but he wants answers, he said so himself. He wont do anything before he gets them" Rose countered.
"I'm not sure we should hang our hopes on a crazy Time Lord" Owen said and for once, both Jack and Ianto agreed.
"Until we either apprehend him or kill him, we need to stay together. No one goes out alone and we work mainly from the hub" Jack said.
"Have you called the Doctor?"
"I think I've left about five hundred messages on Martha's answering machine, but I haven't heard anything. Either she lost it or she is purposely ignoring us."
"So we're on our own for now" Ianto asked.
"I'm afraid so."
It had been surprisingly easy for the Master to convince Laura Dermott, desk jockey at UNIT's base in London, that he needed help in locating his sister, one Rose Tyler. After she had granted him access to UNIT's classified papers, it had been almost as easy to dispose of her body.
It hadn't told him everything he wanted to know, but he got the larger picture: Rose Tyler was working for Torchwood three, based in Cardiff. Her boss, one captain Jack Harkness (an easy google search had revealed pretty much everything he needed to know that captain Jack Harkness was most certainly not captain Jack Harkness). Medical officer Owen Harper had joined after his fiancé's brain had exploded, Toshiko Sato had been recruited from a UNIT jail cell, coffee boy Ianto Jones had sought Jack out, begging for a job after the fall of Torchwood one and Gwen Cooper, a former Cardiff P.O., had been lured into a job after the demise of a Suzie Costello.
"I see you" the Master said with a smile, as he copied everything UNIT had on Torchwood, to his own computer.
Now came the harder part. The Master knew how humans smelled, how Time Lords smelled, how most of the universe smelled. He had no idea what Rose Tyler and captain Jack Harkness smelled of. There was a certain amount of decay surrounding Harkness, like he was wrong, but Rose Tyler was a mystery. She looked human, but then again, so did he, and he wasn't fooled by her outer appearances. She was something else entirely and he really wanted to know what that was, before he ripped her heart out (if she actually had one).
A small file caught his attention. "The Headhunter" he read aloud and clicked on it. This was just what he needed.
A/N: I kicked writers blocks ass! Thanks for the reviews, alerts and faves, they always make me smile and I charish them so much, so keep them coming, pretty please (I think I have developed a dangerous addiction to reviews, but they really do fuel me to write more and hopefully also better). I hope you will let me know if you like the story so far and guesses to where it's going would be kinda awesome and fun. Let me know if you want me to respond to reviews individually, then I'll try to figure that out (I'm sort of technically challenged).
Thanks for reading
xoxo Anne