Chapter 5: Monday

At five o'clock in the morning, on Monday, two groups of aliens arrived and demanded to speak to Rose Tyler. She was shaken awake by Jake, who seemed to be mad at her for some reason and, because she'd rather have been asleep, she grumbled at him. "What in the name of Rassilon do you want?" she asked.

"Come join the rest of the stupid apes, Rose, your reputation has preceded you."

"Where'd you hear that phrase?" she asked.

"You said it to me, yesterday, remember?"

She stared at him blankly, wondering if maybe she was still dreaming. "Did I? That was a terrible thing to say, Jake. I'm so sorry!"

Jake blinked in surprise. "Oh. Oh, good, I…"

"No, trust me, it's an awful thing to say. If I ever say it again, please feel free to remind me that your IQ is pushing 160 and for a human, that's impressive."

"Right. How 'bout you don't say it again and we'll call it pax, yeah?"

"No prob," she agreed with a smile. "So what've we got?"

"Two bunches of aliens – or maybe they're factions of one bunch? And they want you to mediate, since Earth is neutral."

"Great," she grumbled. "Just fantastic."

They held negotiations at Torchwood Tower because Pete thought Rose probably shouldn't be off planet again any time soon if it could at all be avoided. When she found out the aliens were Tasins, she ordered a triangular table be painted blue and put into the large round conference room. She could just imagine what her mum would say about the blue table and the red carpet, but it would have to do, since there wasn't time to get an orange carpet (which would, admittedly, have been worse).

She couldn't remember ever having met any Tasins in her travels, but she knew exactly what she needed. She had her team dress-up in long blue tunics with white trousers (which Jake complained about vociferously) and armed with small, bright knives (which stopped the complaining.) Then she lined them up on either side of the corridor and stood in the center with a large ceremonial sword she had borrowed from Pete's house.

The two parties' carefully timed arrival was simultaneous. They brought entire contingents, armed to the teeth (literally, as they had more teeth than a great white shark) and looking rather alarming for all that they were only four foot high. "Welcome to Earth. I am Rose Tyler, and I'll try to help you in every way I can." Then she took the sword and dropped it to the floor.

The two leaders also drew and dropped their swords. As mediator, she immediately collected them and had Pete stow them in her office. They entered the conference room, the two leaders shoulder to shoulder while Rose rolled her eyes and followed them. They each selected the ceremonially correct sides of the table and then their separate entourages entered. At a signal from Rose, all the daggers in the room were drawn and dropped into the middle of the table.

She took the refreshments from a side table, tasted from each and every flask and goblet and then poured out measures for each of them. Mickey's note appeared on her screen, "This is worse than peace talks with the UN." She nodded at him and then turned to her guests.

"Well, you came to talk," she said flippantly. "So talk."

And so they did, for two hours, while Mickey made copious notes behind her and Rose absorbed every word said. The sheer effort expended in not rolling her eyes was enormous. They were arguing, apparently, over a small, useless planetoid in between their two planets. It had no wealth, it had no resources or people. It didn't even have a tactical advantage because it was too unstable to build anything like a base on it.

Finally, Rose had had enough. So she said so, loud and clear. "Allow me to offer you a quote, gentlemen, from the greatest writer this world has ever known. 'Witness this army of such mass and charge/ …Exposing what is mortal and unsure/ To all that fortune, death and danger dare,/ Even for an egg-shell.' He also said 'We go to gain a little patch of ground/ that hath no profit in it but the name'."

They both looked at her as if she were mad. She wondered, briefly, if they were right, and if it mattered even if she were.

"You can, if you wish, summon all your armies and fight and die, but if you do, what will you get for your trouble? The blood of your brothers and the blood of your sons will be on your head and on your hands, and never a moment of peace, or quiet or trust. And suppose you win? What good will it do you? The planet isn't worth the empty space it hangs in, is it? How can it be so precious that it must be bought in lives? How can the barren soil there be so valuable that it must be watered in blood?" She felt very strongly about this topic, anyway, so the words came from her lips in an elegiac diatribe of compassionate sorrow. "You'll have let them die, you who are summoned to lead and to guide them. You'll have made them die, you'll have killed them with your own words. And for what?" She rose to her feet and glared down at them, hearing singing in her head as she spoke. "There's very little worth that, and this… you'll become murderers of your own people over a charred lump of rubble. Is that what you want?"

The two looked at each other, their mouths parted, a sign of grief in their species. "No," the one on her right said, while the one on her left shook his flipper in the air, their gesture of 'no'. He was, to judge from his body language, literally too ashamed to speak.

"Then let it lie. Call it common ground, or neutral territory. Call it off-limits, if you must, but forget it. It will never do you any good to have it."

"But what if…?"

"If in the future it has treasures you can use that you can't use now?" She smiled. "Then renegotiate. Agree here and now to renegotiate if it ever comes to that. Of course, it's unlikely to come to that, so maybe by the time it does, you'll have such a permanent peace between you that you can exploit it jointly."

The negotiations after that took seven more minutes to resolve. Rose typed up a resolution in Galacti-speak and had them sign it, then signed it herself and made Mickey and Pete sign as witnesses. Then she made them each a copy and sent the original to her office. "I'll have this," she promised. "If I hear that you did not honor this, there will be problems. Do you understand?"

"We do," they agreed before they teleported away.

The President of the United Kingdom asked if he could borrow her speech next time he had to deal with certain factions from the Middle East.

At noon, she noticed her TARDIS key glowing as it hung around her neck. She took it off and studied it, wondering if was heavier like it felt, and stared at it until Mickey came and got her for lunch.

When lunch was over, she pulled the key out again and looked at it and smiled to herself. "It takes two hundred years to grow a TARDIS," she told Mickey.

She failed to notice his concerned glance or his dark face lined with worry.

At 3:30 that same afternoon, someone dumped half-a-dozen tribbles into a local Tesco. Rose and Mickey went to get the silly little things, both of them astounded that such ridiculous creatures actually existed. There were over four hundred tribbles in the store by the time they got there, but sadly all but two of them were dead. As nearly as Rose could tell, they were allergic to the lift music playing on the store speakers.

Jake locked them up in a small cage with the huge note "Do not feed" attached to them.

At midnight, Rose was still up doing paperwork when a troupe of creatures who looked letter-perfect like elves straight out of Tolkien turned up and asked for the tribbles back. The creatures had apparently been dropped there by mistake and were meant to be a prank on someone in Alpha Centauri, not Earth's system.

She gave them back, both of them, and suggested they play pranks when she wasn't at work.

When she slept, she dreamed of legends, whispered in her mind, stories of a world she could have known and never would. She dreamed of a life so alien and so familiar that it ached and burned inside her. She dreamed of fire in her blood and light in her eyes and time standing still all around her.

She dreamed of a man who was not a man, who she would ever want and never have, and a wish she once made to be with him forever.