Planet Gallifrey, CIA Headquarters, The Capitol
Deep in the darkened chambers that served as the central information nexus of the Agency, two Time Lords, clad in black robes, surrounded by brightly glowing tri-dimensional representations of thousands of space sectors across billions of years, conferred as the universe seemed to shimmer and shift around them.
"Must we use Blyledge?" The voice of the first Time Lord was old, tired, frustrated.
"I don't like it any more than you do, Co-ordinator, but it *is* her terrain, and considering the circumstances--"
"But she's a half-breed, decadent... outsider," the first Time Lord retorted, hissing the last word like an epithet.
"She *is* a Time Lord," the second replied a bit harshly. "Anatomically. Academically. She passed her Academy exams with a Double Alpha minus designation, and has eight doctorates to her name. Not to mention that she is the legitimate heir to the House Blyledge--"
"Adopted. And her political ties are all that have kept her welcome on this world. She's taken that once noble house into a state of shameful ruin! The grounds of house Blyledge are filled with drunken Shobogan hooligans from Low Town!"
The Co-ordinator's assistant sighed. "She does have an annoying egalitarian streak, yes. But you cannot dispute her results."
"No, no I suppose you cannot," the Co-ordinator conceded. "Send for her."
As his assistant did so, the Co-ordinator chuckled. His objections had been merely for show, of course. He had made certain Sakuraxadiumainoshinguujiblyledge would be drawn for this assignment. It was far beyond her skills of course-- and when she failed more competent forces would be deployed to clean up what would be her very public mess-- but even if by some miracle she should succeed, she would humilate that other member of her family who had brought so much shame to Gallifrey. Either way, this mission would give him something he wanted.
House Blyledge, Overlooking the Capitol City
"Raise it another five point six three-five degrees!" Sakura yelled, her voice carrying high to the shobogan youths clustered on the roof of her palatial, gothic-styled mansion. She could barely make out their outlines in the silvery burnt orange twighlight night.
"Right!" yelled one of the lads working the cannon-like device mounted there. "Done!"
"FIRE!" Sakura ordered. With a THOOM, a large volley of ale kegs, fireworks and toilet paper lauched high into the air, streaking out over the Capitol at hypersonic speed, blossoming into a huge fireball cloud of detrius.
"Five hundred meters!" one of the girls keeping track exclaimed. "A new record!!"
"w00t!" Sakura exclaimed.
"Yes, woot," a Capitol guard, who had been watching the whole spectacle dimly, intoned dryly, as Sakura sweatdropped.
"Come to celebrate the christening of the brilliantly blazing baryonic boomcannon, buddy?" Sakura asked mirthfully, as the guard narrowed his eyes and squinted, at her stone-faced. His cardinal-red and gold uniform
marked him as an elite guard. When he spoke, it was with a forced deference social structure demanded he
display to the "nobility", no matter how outre their manner of dress, heredity or habits.
"No... milady," he forced out. "I am here to escort you to the capitol, on urgent business."
"Whaaaaaaat??" Sakura asked with a pleading, whining voice as the young people with her let out a collective noise of dissappointment. "But it's barely nightfall! The party's just getting staaarted~!!"
"These... are important matters of state..." the guard muttered, trying not to look too closely at Sakura's strange attire, her quasi-victorian white shirt, beige pants and tie, brown leather vest and orange hairbow. It was such... retrograde attire for a Time Lord!
"Man, the state makes minor molehills matters of magnificent meaning," Sakura continued to whine, turning back to the revelers. "One of the Cardinals probably got a hangnail or something. I'll go in the mornin'." She turned back to the others, pausing only when the slight pressure of a gloved hand on her arm stopped her.
Swinging around, she narrowed her eyes and snapped archly, "Are you *touching me*, guard?" Her tone was so formal, so haughty and angry that even her friends quieted. This was what nobles were supposed to sound like.
The guard instinctively pulled his hand back as if it had been burnt, and he bowed. "Sorry, milady."
Sakura made a show of jerking her arm away. "Yes, well, it will be overlooked, this time." She turned to her friends, her face breaking back into a wide grin, "now if you will excuse meees, my friends and I are gonna PAAAAAAAARTY~~~~!"
"I'm afraid you can't, milady," the guard almost pleaded. Something about his tone struck Sakura, and she turned back to face him, looking at him, head tilted in curiosity.
Taking a great liberty, the guard leaned forward and whispered in her ear. Sakura visibly paled, and she bade her friends goodnight, giving them the run of her house. She tursted them to leave it intact, and in truth they would. The Shobogans of Low town would die for "their noble," not that she would ever allow such a thing.
As Sakura and the guard hurried by air car to the Capitol, his words to her echoed in her mind over and over again.
"It's CIA Business."
The Capitol Building, Upper Level 34,410
Sakura stepped out of the aircar landing bay and into one of the typical, sterile, well-lit gleaming white hallways that marked the upper levels of the Capitol. They were cold and antiseptic, so far removed from the dark, gloomy depths of the older lower levels where the true power resided. It was an architectural metaphor for the whole of her planet's society and mindset, she mused, making her way to a lift. Dark and grim on the inside, bright and shiny on the outside.
CIA Business. What could the Celestial Intervention Agency want now? What new mess had they gotten themselves into? She had joined their ranks because the idea of intervention-- of actively stepping in to make things right-- had naturally called to her, as opposed to the stolid, stodgy, static, set-apart ways and means of most of the other Time Lords. After all, as a great Terran philosopher had said, "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility.. But the organization was steeped in blood and shadow, and she had come to learn that it was far from a perfect solution to the universe's problems. Still. it was better than sitting back and letting the cosmos burn around one.
So engrossed with her musings was Sakura that she barely noticed when she bumped into someone going the other way in the hall.
"Sorries..." she began idly, not really paying attention to the man she had bumped into.
"My fault," the man replied, equally distracted.
Suddenly, both passers-by stopped, the sound of each other's voices triggering long-buried memories. Memories they had each sought to suppress, for various reasons.
Years Earlier
"Well if it isn't the half-breed bitch," a male voice said from behind Sakura. "And stealing information to boot. That's an expulsion-worthy offense." The Young man sneered at her. He smiled crookedly. "But I might be willing to overlook it, if you give me some of what you've been givin' old Blyledge."
"Aren't your tastes running a little low, if you want to do it with a half-breed?" Sakura asked dangerously, getting up and putting some distance between herself and the leering fellow.
"Shut up, bitch!" The boy advanced, wielding a low-grade staser pistol. Sakura heard the sounds of two, possibly three more men coming up behind her from down the hall.
"All right," she said as seductively as she could, sidling up to him, and running her fingers across his chest. "I'll show you what the daughter of the house of Venus can do to a man..."
The boy smiled and drew her close, his eyes crossing as she kneed him violently and simultaneously grabbed his staser. With a smashing chop to the neck, she dropped him.
Aiming the staser at the others, she tried to fire, but it did nothing.
"A FRELLING TOY?!" She yelled, catching herself. The others came running with pipes and chains.
hose definitely weren't toys. She ran as fast as she could, away from the, and towards the TARDIS cradles. She still had the key to Blyledge's TARDIS, if she could get to it, she could hole up in there until they left.
"You had me running for my life, so many years ago," Sakura said through gritted teeth, looking straight ahead, away from the man who had tried to rape her so long ago.
"I was... a young fool," the man replied, a hint of shame in his voice, unable to look up at Sakura.
"It was you..." Sakura continued, looking down at her black and white 50's style golf shoes. "You put Atrex up to pushing me out that window."
"Everything..." the man continued, balling up his fists, tears forming in his eyes. "Everything came so easily for you. You waltz in here from offworld, and get adopted by the one man who was literally all of Old Gallifrey
wrapped up in one. You get instant access to the elite academy, you even get to work on a TARDIS. And I...
me and the others... we worked our fratzing LIVES to get in through the door..."
His voiced choked and he slammed his fist on the wall. Sakura, for her part, narrowed her eyes, widened her mind, trying to understand.
"You hated me... because you thought I was receiving some kind of fratzing ENTITLEMENT?!" she spat out with disbelief. "I thought my parents were dead. That I had nothing left to live for. I was prepared to DIE. Lord B. took me in and gave me a purpose in life. That's all. I was happy to be here, to be home with my people, that's all I wanted!" Tears formed in her eyes as well.
"'Lord B.'," the man replied quietly, darkly. "Even now, you make light of everything he stood for, everything he was. You do not even do him the honor of using his full name. You make me ill--"
Faster than the man could blink, Sakura had spun and pinned him against the wall, her forearm hard against his throat.
"Lord Blyledge was a FATHER to me when I had no others!" Sakura snapped angrily, her voice hard and cold, a slow rage building. She tapped her forehead. "This symbiotic nuclei in me *is* his! He sacrificed his VERY LIFE to make me the person I am today!" She narrowed her eyes and stared daggers into the man without really looking at him. Heh. She still knew him only as "the man". With her connections, she could have found out his identity and those of the others who had assaulted her so long ago. But she never had. For some reason she had never wanted to. She had told herself she had just wanted to put it in the past. But part of her knew what she really wanted was to not have to face them again, to face what she, in her black rage, might do to them in retaliation.
"Even now," she hissed, "you're still the same insecure little boy who came at me with a toy staser."
"I'm-- I'm not," he croaked, trying to breathe. "I have changed, if you can believe that. I... I am sorry, for what I did to you, even if I despise your manner, your affectations, your terran habits."
Sakura leaned in closer, bringing her lips to his ears, but not letting up the pressure on his neck. "Are you truly sorry for what you did to me, the 'half-breed bitch', or are you sorry that you got to see that side of yourself that you try to hard to hide under that smug, sanctimonious, supercillious veneer? That I lowered you to the level of a FIELD ROVIE in rutting season?"
"I didn't care about pleasure," the man replied, smirking despite himself. "Pleasure with an offworlder? Disgusting. I simply wanted to shame you, humilate you, show you what a lowly creature you were-" he checked himself, realizing what he had just said. He looked Sakura in the eye, a mix of regret and fear in his eyes-- but not fear for his safety so much as for what his words meant about himself.
"And how do you feel about me now?" Sakura asked, voice hard as ice.
The man looked her in the eyes. "You... are not a creature. You are-- are Gallifreyan," he began.
"I am a *Time Lord*", she said darkly. "Just. Like. You."
"Not just like me!" he snapped reflexively, then checked himself again. "Different. Odd. Unalike. Strange." As he said the words, he furrowed his brow, looking at Sakura-- really looking at her for the first time, it seemed.
Finally, he sighed. "I don't know what to make of you, honestly."
Sakura was taken aback by the candor and let him go, stepping back and lowering her arm. She was awash with confusion. She had imagined many things upon confronting this man, the man who had ruined her life and sent her fleeing from her home in tears and grief, thinking herself outcast. She had imagined slowly breaking his fingers one after the other, causing him pain after pain until he had passed out, then scaring the life out of him., lording her hardened resolve and continued life--despite his attempts-- over him. But now... now she was confused. Sympathy for the Devil? For someone who had tried to have her gang-raped? She was not above meteing out capital punishment for wretches such as those. But they had failed in the attempt and run off like cowards, even as she had fled. She didn't know what to do. So she did nothing. She turned her back on him.
"Blyledge," the man began plaintively, using the contracted form of her name she usually used on Gallifrey. His voice spoke of apologies to be made, or more excuses given. But Sakura did not wait around to hear. His words meant nothing to her. He was either sincere or he was not. He would either learn or he would not. rei.bot had taught her that stoicism. She was no longer the fresh-faced naiive young woman from a century ago. If he or his friends tried again, they would not live to tell the tale. His fate was completely in his hands. And as she walked off, the loud authoritative "click-clack" of adamantine soles against permatanium floor left the anonymous man from what seemed like a lifetime ago with exactly that parting message.
A few minutes later, Sakura made her way down to the CIA headquarters, which was nestled deep in a time-proof bubble within the very heart of the capitol. The universe could burn around it, and as long as the power held, the CIA could continue on, insulated, protected, preparing to strike back.
The Time Lady shivered slightly as time itself seemed to come to a standstill for a moment as she crossed the perimeter of the bubble, entering the disparate micro-continuum that was the central office. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness as she began instinctively scanning all the holographic readouts, taking in the intelligence reports and digesting the relevant bits of information.
"Ahh, Blyledge," the Co-ordinator said slowly, standing with his back to her. He waved his hand in a braod gesture, causing the large map of the galaxy in front of him to shimmer, zooming in rapidly and refocusing on a tiny blue world in one of the lower spiral arms.
Sakura immediately recognized it as Earth, of course. The pollution content of the atmosphere, coupled
with the handy time-reference label underneath the shimmering image, told her it was the Earth of
the 3000's... the period she "lived" in in "realtime", whatever that meant.
"Assignment for you," the Co-ordinator muttered, pulling a datapadd from within his robes and extending his arm sideways, still not turning to face Sakura.
Sakura walked forward slowly and took the Padd, reading it, her eyes narrowing as she took in the salient details of the assignment. She bit her lip slightly, but said nothing.
After a few moments of leaden silence, the Co-ordinator spoke again, still not looking at her. "Problem, Blyledge?"
Sakura resisted the urge to chuckle or say something flip. The fact that on Gallifrey everyone only called her "Blyledge" was not lost on her. They respected the one part of her name that was not really hers, the honourable name of the prestigious family she had been adopted into. The rest of her name, Sakuraxadiumainoshinguuji, the identifiers that marked her as being of human / venusian / hybrid descent, they denied by omission-- implicitly denying the rest of her that was not purely of Gallifrey.
"No, I've read the information," she responded politely, with the cold, somewhat neutral tone she used
amongst the other Time Lords.
"Perhaps you shouldn't skim over it," the Co-ordinator said, turning to look Sakura in the eye, traces of a
smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
Sakura raised her eyebrows slightly, taking on a slightly aloof demeanour as she matched the Co-ordinator's gaze levelly. She knew full well the Co-ordinator was relishing the task he had set her, putting her against her own father, who had been given the exact opposite assignment by the High Council just two days before. She knew he was expecting her to feel distress, conflict, worry-- perhaps even to decline the assignment. She knew he wanted to find weakness in her, to expose it, to use it against her. But what he didn't know, she thought darkly, was that she thought the CIA was right in this matter,
and that it didn't matter who fate put in her path.
"Oh, I've read it quite closely, and find everything to be quite satisfactory," she replied in an almost bored tone, doing her best not to show signs of mirth as the Co-ordinator's smile died. "I anticipate full mission success within two milli-spans."
The Co-ordinator nodded curtly, carefully hiding any signs of dissappointment, and dismissed her.
Sakura made her way back to her TARDIS. Privately, she wondered what her mother would make of all this.
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