Chapter Text
“Miss Tyler,” said the man, an oily smile fixed onto his face. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I was a great admirer of your father.”
Rose swallowed her distaste. Being heiress to the Vitex industry had completely changed how she was treated. Sometimes, like now, it helped her out. But a mere handful of years ago, this man would’ve treated her like garbage for being poor.
“Thank you, Mr. Ackerly,” Rose said, forcing a posh, clean accent. “My father always spoke very highly of your work at TKM.”
The man’s dead eyes crinkled in a mockery of sympathy. “I was so sorry to hear about his passing.”
Rose nodded along, banally. In reality, of course, Ackerly had never met her father. He’d never heard about him until last week. But when a mysterious woman met with his private secretary asking for a meeting, blatantly showing off how much money she had, the truth only mattered so much.
It wasn’t difficult to provide the echoes of former infrastructure for Vitex; her father had had all the paperwork filled out and everything, filing for patents and the like, before he died. With that- plus the millions of pounds now in her bank account, no one tended to ask very many questions.
Her real father, of course, had died when she was a baby. But her father from the other dimension, the one her mother was still living and raising a child with, he was alive and well.
He’d given her a few million pounds cash before sending her off on her journey to find the Doctor again. He’d said her mother had made him, but the tears in his eyes had betrayed his own soft heart entirely.
Rose endured a seemingly endless round of meaningless conversation with Ackerly, nodding along, her cheeks beginning to sting from smiling politely. She may not have been raised in this kind of life, but she’d watched plenty of Downton Abbey. She could swallow every decent thought she’d ever had criticizing the slimy upper class. She could do it for the Doctor.
After their meal, Rose delicately set her espresso cup down onto its saucer, folded her hands in front of her, and looked the man directly in the eye.
“I’ve heard a lot of things about you, Mr. Ackerly,” she said, still in her affected accent.
“Have you?” he asked, mouth curling into a smile that made her blood curdle.
She swallowed down her nausea, disguising it with a vigorous nod. “I have heard that you are a man with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies.”
Ackerly chuckled. “That is true.”
“Really?” she asked, artificially widening her eyes to feign interest and amazement. “Is it true, then, about-”
And here she glanced from side to side, eyeing the servants lining the walls nervously.
“About the aliens?” she whispered. “Genuine visitors from different planets? Have you heard anything about them?”
Ackerly’s smile widened. “I’ve done more than hear about them.”
“So it’s true,” she breathed. “Everything they said, all that nasty business with the Neon corporation, and Joshua Naismith?”
The man’s smile faded, and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Now, I had nothing to do with Naismith. That man was working with things he didn’t understand, all for his own gain.”
“Oh, of course,” Rose hurried to add. “I never thought a man such as yourself would be involved in anything…” Dodgy. “…untoward.”
He seemed to relax at that.
There were times Rose wanted to grab one of her guns, round up all the men she interacted with, and shoot the lot of them. Most of them had always treated her terribly, either for her class or her looks. A full face of makeup wasn’t an invitation for someone to grab her arse. But in this particular circumstance, her being young and pretty was working to her advantage. It was much easier to get information out of people this way. They never suspected she was anything other than a slightly addled, airhead rich girl, searching for the latest piece of gossip.
“Well, if you must know,” he said, leaning forward, “not only am I…in the loop on the Naismith scandal, but I have in my possession the security tapes from his mansion. Everything that went on that day, I have on camera.”
“No,” Rose gasped.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “And I swear to you, there were at least two distinct alien species in Naismith’s house that day. Some of them look like cactuses, but some of them look just like us!”
Could Rose ask to see the tapes without arousing suspicion? Would she need to wait, or would he brush it off as her just being nosy and bored?
At that moment, loud fire alarms began to blare. Lights that had been invisible up to that moment flashed and spun, bathing the entire room in strobes of red light.
Ackerly shot to his feet. He pulled out his phone, dialing rapidly.
“What’s happened?” Rose asked. “Is everything alright?”
Ackerly had the phone to his ear, utterly distracted, before he turned to face her again, squinting in confusion. “Why are you talking like a chav?”
Rose’s grin was more a bearing of teeth than anything genuine. She laughed, breathy and nervous. “Yeah. About that.”
“Word of advice, Ackerly,” came a woman’s voice, far above them, her accent crisp and clear.
Rose whirled around, eyes catching on the woman, perched in an open window. Her hair was large and curly, frizzing about her face. She was dressed in all black, holding a large, leather satchel.
“If you’ve got top secret materials in your possession,” she continued, “don’t brag about them on the internet.”
And with that, she dropped, backwards, onto the street below.
Ignoring Ackerly’s squawking protests, Rose stripped off her heels and ran toward the exit in her bare feet. She threw open the front door, scanning the lawn for the woman’s body. When she found nothing, Rose couldn’t stifle her appreciative laughter.
“There!”
Rose snapped to attention at the guard’s shout. Satchel still in hand, the woman was running at breakneck speed into the forest bordering Ackerly’s property.
Heels still in hand, Rose raced after her, the dewy grass slicking her feet with water. The thief had made it to the edge of the property, jumping inside a black, nondescript car and speeding away.
Rose smiled to herself, panting. She pulled out her hopper, set the coordinates accounting for where the car would be in the next few seconds, and hit the button.
A flash of light, and she was in the backseat. God bless Captain Magambo.
Rose met the woman’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. She only got a glimpse of startled, grey-green panic before the car swerved to the side of the road.
Rose braced her body against the car door, holding on to the ceiling for dear life. “Oi, watch it!”
Admirably, the woman recovered from her shock quickly, continuing to drive down the road, fingers gripping the steering wheel tight enough to turn her knuckles white.
“How did you get in here?” the woman asked. “Who are you?”
“What, never seen a teleport before?”
Rose rummaged in her purse and found another one of UNIT’s goodies- a mock version of the Doctor’s psychic paper. It wasn’t nearly as powerful or versatile as the Doctor’s, as they’d had to start from scratch and had no idea where he’d gotten the blasted thing from in the first place, but it would do.
Rose concentrated hard. Jacquelyn Smith, Chief Investigator for UNIT, ID #31415926.
The woman reached around to snatch the paper from Rose’s hands, glancing down at it briefly. She handed it back to Rose with a small smile on her face, turning back to focus on the road.
“Well,” the woman began, voice honey-smooth, “this just got interesting. How did a shopgirl from the London Estates get her hands on psychic paper?”