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“SHE IS TOO A PRINCESS!” Five-year-old Piper bellowed at her now former friend, Allen. Allen was a good year older than her, but the littlest Tyler woman didn’t find this daunting.
“No she isn’t!” Allen insisted. He whacked the ball out of Piper’s hands and away to the other side of the playground. “You think you’re so special because your grandad is Pete Tyler, but you’re not!”
“My mummy is a princess and I am a princess because my daddy told me so! And he’s the Doctor!”
Piper tried to hide her tears with her rage. She balled her small hands into fists at her side so the older boy wouldn’t see her wipe her eyes.
“Well MY mum says your nan and grandad were livin’ on an estate when they had your mum!” The boy nodded with a smirk. “Self-made man, that’s what my dad called him. Your mum’s no more royalty than any ol’ chav.”
That’s when Piper Tyler, age five, slapped a boy for the very first time.
The Doctor walked into the gymnasium on the ground floor of Torchwood 1 that hosted the afterschool program for children of Torchwood employees and scanned the area for his daughter, but he didn’t see her anywhere.
“Cynthia,” he asked the approaching afterschool program director, “I’m not seeing Piper. Did Rose already pick her up?”
The 30-something woman sighed and shook her dark curls.
“No… Doctor, there’s something we need to talk about in my office. Piper has something she needs to... explain.”
He raised his eyebrows and followed her to the administrative office hallway. Sitting on a bench near the nurse’s station was a boy around Piper’s age, perhaps a little older, holding an ice pack to his cheek and glaring at the Doctor.
His dad intuition kicked in, and he had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. What had his little girl done?
He almost laughed when he saw her, which would have been very inappropriate for the situation, but the miniature version of Rose Tyler scowling at him from a chair in the administrator’s office brought back such memories. The pigtails, the pink shirt, the way her lips expressed her indigence, the crinkles of her brow, the way her chin held noble pride…
He crouched down in front of Piper and took her hands into his own.
“Ms. Wright says you have something to tell me, princess.”
“Don’t call me that,” Piper sniffed. A slight wobble to her lip and a swallow bobbing in her throat told him she was trying not to cry.
“What happened?” He rubbed the back of her hands, comforting her without letting her off the hook. After all, she wasn’t the one with an ice pack on her face. And he had a feeling she was the reason the other kid did.
“I hit a boy.” Ah, yes. There it was.
“Why did you hit him?” The Doctor tried to keep his voice curious until he had all the details.
“He said Mummy isn’t… That she was…” Piper sniffed again and looked away. He tried all the harder to make eye contact.
“Did he say something mean about Mummy?” The Doctor prodded.
“He said sheisn’taprincess,” Piper rushed out in a mumble.
“She isn’t a…?” The Doctor tried to translate what she had said. Then he remembered how she had asked not to be called by his pet name for her, a problem she’d never had in the past. “Ohhhh, he said your mum isn’t a princess.”
Piper nodded.
“Ok. Well. We’ll unpack that later.” The Doctor blinked, trying to get a handle on the situation. “For now, you know you need to apologize to the other kid, yeah?”
She nodded again.
“You know that is never a reason to hit someone? We never resort to violence…”
“… unless it is absolutely necessary to keep someone else from being hurt,” she finished.
He stood and apologized to Cynthia for the trouble, and then steered his daughter to the bench outside the nurse’s station.
Piper was not thrilled about having to apologize to Allen, but was obedient and didn’t make a fuss, so the Doctor let her stew in silence as they rode the elevator up to Rose’s office. When they reached the right floor, Piper took off running, past the receptionist, past Rose’s assistant, until she reached her mummy. Rose spun around in her desk chair and brightened to see her little girl. She rang off of the business call to Torchwood 6 and lifted Piper into her lap.
“Hello, darling!” Rose kissed Piper’s forehead. “How was your day?”
“I missed you, Mummy.” Piper hugged her close.
“Aw, I missed you too, love.” Rose shot a look of concern to her husband, who raised an eyebrow and nodded, scratching the back of his neck.
“Piper,” he said in his dad voice, “do you have something you want to tell your mother?”
Rose gently pulled Piper away by the shoulders so she could see the little sheepish face trying her best to be too cute to be punished.
“Umm… I got in a fight.” Piper fluttered her eyelashes, but it didn’t work. After all, she was talking to the creator of the eyelash flutter herself. Unfazed, Rose just waited for further explanation. “I hit Allen.”
“Was he hurt?”
Piper shook her head and scrunched up her brow as if the question was absurd. The Doctor confirmed, “Not gravely injured, but we might call Allen’s parents in the morning to apologize to them too and explain why their son had an ice pack on his cheek.”
Rose winced. “Yeah, good idea.”
Piper wrinkled her nose, but Rose pressed on before any whining could begin.
“Did he hit you back?” She searched her daughter, but didn’t see any sign of a struggle.
“No, I think he was too surprised,” Piper offered with her five-year-old frankness.
Rose and the Doctor almost laughed at that, but held it in check.
“But why would you hit Allen?” Rose prodded. It didn’t make any sense. She had seen them playing together and they seemed to like each other just fine.
Piper sat up straighter, ready to tell all. The Doctor, who had been standing nearby, settled in for the full story, sitting on a clean section of Rose’s desk.
“He said you weren’t a princess, Mummy! I had to! He was wrong. We’re princesses, right?”
Rose exchanged glances with the Doctor. “This is your fault,” she told him flatly.
He shrugged. “I didn’t think she’d take an endearment so literally!”
“She’s five!” Rose returned her attention to their daughter, who was getting very confused and hated when her parents talked over her head. “Sweetheart, I think we need to have a talk. You apologized to Allen, yes? And you know it was wrong to hit him?”
Piper nodded.
“We didn’t get further than this earlier,” the Doctor explained. “First off, why do you think your mum is a princess?”
Searching her parents’ serious expressions, Piper answered as honestly as she could, though she had a sinking feeling that she was wrong based on their confusion.
“Princesses are pretty and Mummy’s the prettiest of anybody.”
“Well, you’re right there,” the Doctor admitted, making Rose blush.
“And princesses wear pretty dresses and go to balls and kiss a prince – that’s you, Daddy – and Nan and Grandad’s house is like a castle and you even said so! You called her a hair-ess!”
“I have to admit, that’s pretty good evidence there.” The Doctor shrugged and ran a hand through his hair, unsure of how to break the news to her.
Rose chuckled softly. “Heiress. It’s… well, it’s not royalty. It means that Grandad is very successful in his businesses and has made a lot of money. And when he and your nan die, by law, that money goes to me and Uncle Tony. That’s all it means, sweetheart, sorry. That’s why we get dressed up and go to charity events and sometimes people take pictures of us at them.”
“And why your grandparents have a house the size of a cruiseliner,” the Doctor finished, but not without a smack on the shoulder from his wife.
“Hey! No fair, you hit Dad!” Piper protested.
“That’s different,” Rose explained. “I didn’t hurt him and he deserved it.”
“Such a bad influence,” he teased.
Rose rolled her eyes and shook her head, but a smile was blooming on her lips. She caught sight of the window and realized it was getting dark out.
“We should get home.” She lifted Piper from her lap. “Are we good?”
“I suppose,” Piper sighed. “So we’re not really princesses?”
“Not in the traditional sense, no. But we’re something even better.” Rose leaned in and grinned at her daughter as if she held a great secret.
“What?” Piper whispered, enraptured.
“We’re time travelers!” she whispered back.
“Shhh! We can’t tell anyone!” Piper reminded her with a glance to Rose’s office door.
The Doctor laughed at his girls and picked up Piper, settling her on his hip.
Rose stood and stroked her daughter’s hair back from her face. “You’re something else very special too, you know. Something else we can’t say.”
“I’m part Gal-freyan!” Piper declared before clapping a hand over her mouth. “Oops. I mean I’m part Gal-freyan.” The second time was in a whisper-shout, the way kids do. Her parents laughed again.
“Yes, you are, my alien-child.” Rose kissed her forehead again, the way she had when she greeted her. Piper wiggled away in her father’s arms but secretly loved the attention from her favorite person in the world.
That evening after dinner, Rose surprised her daughter by letting her stay up an hour past her bedtime for a very special movie.
“What’s it about, Mummy?” Piper tilted her head in curiosity.
“Well, it’s about a girl like you, a long time ago, whose daddy tells her she is a princess, but no one else believes her. She isn’t royalty like the ones we meet on other planets, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t a princess in her heart, yeah?”
The Doctor brought the overflowing popcorn bowl from the kitchen and took his spot on the sofa next to his favorite princesses. Piper snuggled into his side and Rose tucked in the huge blanket around her family.
“It’s very sad in parts,” he warned. “And maybe a little scary. But I want you to know why I call you my princess. Not just because you are beautiful. It’s not about money or a title or having a prince charming or a big posh house.”
“Or about wearing dresses and going to dances,” Rose added.
“It’s about what’s in your heart,” he finished. “It’s about… well, let’s just watch the film, shall we?”
“Yay!” Piper cheered. But she was thinking about what her parents had said about being a princess and was concentrating so hard she almost missed the beginning. A little girl was telling a story set in India about a prince and a princess…
Rose was grateful Piper was so glued to the screen and didn’t see her tears when the movie turned sad. The Doctor slipped his hand around her shoulders and sent her an understanding glance as she discretely wiped away her tears.
Of course, she had a dad now in this universe’s Pete, and he was wonderful, but the heroine in the movie missing her dad tore at her heart and reminded her of many nights when she would stay up late watching her old universe’s version as a kid when it was first released. She’d been older than Piper, but young enough that she still believed deep down that some day, if she just wished hard enough, that her dad would come back to her the way the Little Princess’s did. She looked for him in the faces of men she passed on the street, on the bus, all over. Hoping to see the man in the photo albums her mum had showed her.
Then, thanks to the Doctor, she did. Only he had to die in the end. But that visited was planned, an answer to her request to see him. It was seeing her dad’s face in a Vitex ad, hearing his voice, here unexpectedly that threw her off her defenses to that old ache. Seeing him at that party for the first time in this world… she could almost hear the theme of the movie’s soundtrack playing in her head.
She looked down to where her daughter was dozing off against the Doctor. It stole her heart when he cared for Piper and protected her and taught her and showed her the universe. Parenting a “highly spirited” part-alien child was no easy task, but in these quiet moments, it made Rose fall even more in love with him when she saw him with their child – and made her even more certain that they were making the right decision in trying for another.
As the moon kindles the night
As the wind kindles the fire
As the rain fills every ocean
With your heart kindle my heart
Take my heart, take my heart
Kindle it with your heart
And my heart cannot be kindled without you
With your heart kindle my heart