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Agent Rose Tyler had known terrifying situations in her 32 years.
She had been teleported against her will, escaped prisons all over this universe and the last, crossed dimensions, and defeated Daleks and Cybermen and too many hostile aliens to count. She faced death and laughed in its face… or eyestalk. Whatever form it took. She was the Bad Wolf, defender of the Earth and Torchwood’s director of field operations.
But today, today she was properly frightened.
Her panic attack came in the most unlikely of places: an ordinary shop, not unlike the one she used to work in another lifetime ago.
But, she reasoned to herself as she tore through the store, her fear was at least entirely justifiable.
The miniature version of herself who had been following close by her side was now missing. The girl was every bit her mother’s daughter down to the dirty-blonde hair and big emotive eyes. And apparently, a shared talent for wandering off.
Rose prayed her offspring hadn’t also inherited her jeopardy-friendly reputation.
“Please,” Rose begged the young man at the customer service desk. “You have to help me find my little girl. She’s about this high and looks just like me but smaller, obviously, and… uh… she’s clever. Truly, properly, brilliant. I don’t even understand everything she says sometimes. And, um, she’s wearing a pink jumper. It’s her favorite.”
“Slow down, ma’am,” the clerk soothed with raised hands, as if comforting a spooked animal. “We’ll find her. Just tell us her name and we’ll call for her over the system.”
He gestured to a microphone. Rose took in a shaky breath and pulled herself together.
“Piper. Her name’s Piper. After the goddess on– never mind, it doesn’t matter what planet, just please, she’s never been lost before!”
“It’s alright, just stay calm,” the clerk instructed, moving to the microphone. He hesitated before he pressed the button, brow knitted as he looked back to her. “Wait, I recognize you from the papers. Aren’t you the Vitex heiress who-?”
However he was going to finish that sentence, no one would ever know. The expression Agent Tyler leveled at him in that moment was enough to make evil dictators cower on their thrones. And had on more than one occasion.
“Right,” he continued after a moment. “Got it. Let me just call for her on here. Piper, you said?”
“Yeah,” she sighed, the knot in her stomach growing more tense by the second. She didn’t know what she would do if her daughter didn’t respond to the page. She considered calling the Doctor, but there was no way she was reaching out to him telepathically in her current state and Piper had been playing games on her phone earlier, and thus, had it in her pocket when they got separated. The battery was probably dead by now anyway. Rose mentally kicked herself for not taking the phone back when they got off the Tube. And for not paying better attention. For not holding tight to her hand at all times. And for not letting the Doctor give their daughter a “locket necklace” that was really a tracking device (Rose had thought it was creepy and likely to backfire as a tool for potential stalkers. God, she really was jaded from a decade at Torchwood.)
“Is there a Miss Piper Tyler in the store? Piper, your mum is looking for you at the customer service desk. Please come to the big blue desk immediately.”
“Thank you,” Rose managed in her distress. She scanned the area around customer service, listening through the noise of department store busyness for a familiar voice or footsteps or even crying. She didn’t even realize she was holding her breath until she was forced to take a stinging gulp of air into her lungs. Pacing the perimeter and wringing her hands together, she tried to get her spinning anxiety back into control.
What if she had been taken? It wasn’t impossible. Maybe not even unlikely. Granddaughter of Pete Tyler, daughter of an heiress and a widely acclaimed genius, occasional victims of paparazzi harassment, not to mention their off-world activities and questionable genetics... Perfectly normal kids had been abducted for much less.
Rose was a split second away from opening her telepathic bond with the Doctor to start a search party when she heard the most wonderful sound.
“Hi, mum!”
Tears sprung to Rose’s eyes as she spun around to see innocent brown eyes, a pink jumper and a soft small hand holding a yellow cupcake.
“Oh my god,” was all Rose got out as she scooped her daughter up in her arms and peppered her face with kisses. “You’re safe. You’re ok. I’ve got you.”
“Mummy? Are you alright?” The curious concern in her child’s voice made Rose laugh in joy through her tears.
“You weren’t scared at all were you? My brave girl.”
“Of course not. The nice couple over there took care of me until I could find you. They gave me a fairy cake. The old man said you’d know what it meant.”
Rose stared down at the sweet in her daughter’s sticky fingers. The top was covered in edible silver ball bearings. No. It couldn’t be. She quickly searched the area for the older couple, but just as she suspected, they were long out of sight.
“Sweetheart, what did they look like?” She had to ask. If she was supposed to be back here someday, she needed to know exactly how to keep her baby safe.
“Kinda like you and Daddy.” Piper scrunched up her nose the way she did when something didn’t make sense to her. “But OLD. Really old. Older than Gram and Grandad.”
Rose laughed again, too happy at having her child back in her arms to worry any more at how they had pulled it off without disrupting the timestream. She had never been so grateful for time travel in her life.
“Oh, how I love you, my darling.” She snuggled the pig-tailed, crumb-covered piece of her heart.
“Love you too, Mummy. But I have a question.”
“What’s that?”
“Can I get down now? And we can go home?”
“Yes,” Rose agreed, lowering her daughter to the ground but not letting go of her hand. “Home sounds perfect.”
He waited until their daughter was tucked away asleep in bed before he brought it up with her.
“What happened today, Rose?” His tone held neither room for negotiation nor anger. He crossed his arms as he casually leaned against the kitchen counter, but loving concern radiated from his features and through their connection.
“What do you mean?” she asked, voice already shaking. She concentrated on drying the last of the clean dishes.
He leveled a look at her that said she should know he knew her better than that.
“We had an… incident while out shopping this afternoon.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“I could feel you. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t tell what it was. You were more scared than I’ve felt… well, in a long time. But you had your barriers up enough that I couldn’t get through to ask what was wrong. And your mobile was off.”
“Dead. The mobile was dead. Piper ran down the battery before…” She trailed off and swallowed, unable to meet his pained expression.
“Before what? What happened today? Please, love.”
“I… I lost her,” she admitted. As she confessed to her husband, the emotions of the day caught up with her. “It was only a few minutes, but Doctor, it was awful.” She fought back the well of tears that was rushing upon her.
At seeing her mouth move but no more words able to form, he pulled her close and wrapped her in a protective embrace.
“Shh, it’s alright. It’s ok. She came back.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she wept into his shoulder.
“What? Rose, it’s not your fault. I know you.”
“I’m a terrible mum!”
“No, no, this happens to everyone. I swear. Ask anyone.”
“Don’t you see? What if she had been taken? What if someone… I don’t know… used her to get to us? Or Dad? Or… found out about who we are. Where we go. It’s not that unrealistic. Don’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind.” She pulled back and regarded him seriously. “It has, hasn’t it? You already know all this. You’ve thought this through, I know you have.”
“From the day she was born.” He nodded and stroked her hair. “You two were so perfect, lying there sleeping after you fed her for the first time. And that’s when I promised myself. I would never let anyone harm either of you or take you from me, no matter how many ways I knew they might try. I couldn’t, I can’t lose you two.”
He kissed her gently but with a hint of desperation hinting at the Oncoming Storm beneath the calm surface. She sensed this through their bond and sighed.
“Oh Doctor, this is why I couldn’t let you in earlier. I wasn’t trying to hide it from you, not really, I just didn’t want you to find out like that, feeling my panic through the bond… because I was.” She let out a rueful bark of a laugh. “I was panicking. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that scared. And there she was, of course, I turn around and what is she like? ‘oh, hi Mum.’ As if she hadn’t been gone at all.”
“I hate to say it, but you know who you sounded exactly like just then?” The Doctor shook his head in amused observation.
The realization hit Rose far harder than the Doctor had intended. The shock must have registered on her face because he rubbed her arm and began to apologize even though she knew he wasn’t quite sure what for.
“All those times we flew off traveling. That whole year. She was waiting so much longer, my mum. It hardly seemed like any time at all to us, but… Oh god. I’d never let Piper run off like that with an alien in a phone box!”
“Well, you didn’t exactly ask your mum’s permission,” he pointed out with a twinkle in his eye.
“Bloody hell, I’m officially turning into my mother.” She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, and he turned his head to kiss her temple.
“She did eventually trust me, you know. We had a talk and everything.”
“You did?” Rose leaned back in his arms. “When was this and where was I?”
“Yup. After I regenerated. You were packing up your Christmas presents to take home with us.”
“And she cornered you for some motherly threatening?”
“Well, not so much threatening as an understanding. She could see how I loved you and made me promise to always bring you home safe.”
“And you did. Every time. She never even knew how dangerous it was out there. But we do. Doctor, how are we going to do this? Raise kids knowing all we do about the universe?”
“Well, we take it one day at a time. Starting first thing tomorrow. We’ll be honest with her, but not frighten her, just make sure she knows why we’re worried, I suppose.”
Rose hummed her agreement and slid her fingers down to entwine with his. The two made their nightly rounds through the house, switching off lights and putting things away as they went. He stopped them once they were in their dimly lit bedroom and turned to her, perplexed.
“Hold on, you never said. What was she doing when she was lost? If she wasn’t taken, where was she?”
Rose blew out a breath and sank onto the bed.
“You’ll never believe it. An older couple found her and gave her a fairy cake.”
“What? In the middle of a department store? Thought she would know better than to accept sweets from strangers. Textbook, that.”
“No, you don’t understand. She said they looked just like us, but older. Doctor, the cake had those ball bearings. They told her that I would know what it meant. It looked just like the ones from that night, after the Olympics.”
His jaw dropped as he sat down beside her. “It was us from the future? We took care of her until she found you?”
Rose nodded. “Even though things are going to be harder for us than normal parents in some ways, I suppose in other ways we have a bit of an advantage.”
A smile broke out on the Doctor’s face. “Tomorrow I’ll pre-program the TARDIS. When the time is right, when it won’t cause a paradox and fits into the timestream, she’ll take us back automatically. Even make the cake if we want.”
“I was wondering about that. Probably best we don’t tell Piper, though. Don’t want her to rely on us to come back to get her out of trouble.”
“Wandering off, jeopardy friendly, who does that sound like?” he teased.
“You forgot stunningly beautiful and extraordinarily clever,” she returned.
“Ah, true. My mistake.” He kissed her nose and she giggled.
“She really is too much like me,” Rose admitted.
“Well, maybe this next one will be just as gobby and brilliant and handsome as his father.” He placed a hand on her middle, where she wasn’t yet showing.
“You don’t know it’s a boy yet. Could be another girl. Even more ponytails to worry about.”
He shrugged. “Just a feeling.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder and he wrapped an arm around her as they took in the stars out their bedroom window. She knew they had much more danger and fear ahead of them as parents, and she now better understood what her mum must have gone through when she was gone, but her faith never shattered. Looking up at the black sky through the glass pane, she felt like repeating what she said on a night like this so long ago:
“They keep trying to split us up, but they never ever will… We’ll always be ok, you and me.”
After all, this was a night for lost things to be found.