It started with a memo, as most office drama did.
Most office drama, however, didn't involve weaponry, along with any number of interestingly useful devices, from other worlds.
The dimension cannon project had been decommissioned after her return; its files burnt, equipment disassembled. With the worlds now sealed off for good, it would no longer function. The Director of Torchwood, Peter Tyler, reallocated his dimensional physicists to other projects.
Rose was placed with Marc Dagenais, an experienced silver-haired veteran, to be trained as an official interplanetary liaison – making official the part she'd played for nearly five years already – as a supplement to the research work that Doctor Carron had requested her for. Years spent traipsing from one planet to the next had prepared her well, though she and the Doctor had never felt the need to train themselves for combat, a requirement of Torchwood liaisons, considering wits to be the greatest weapons.
Five months into her on-the-job training with Marc, she'd received an email from Director: Operations Gina Johns, a subordinate of Pete's who had lost her family in the Cyber War.
The memo was brief, and to the point.
All appointments on the attached Conflict of Interest report are immediately rescinded.
Rose's name was one of only four on the list. She had, in a heartbeat, found herself out of a job because Pete had been the one to place her in it.
John Lord had had his position as an external consultant immediately terminated as well. Two young security guards whose parents had achieved supervisory status rounded out the list.
The order, she later learned, had come from above Torchwood. The president of Great Britain – a title Rose still found herself having trouble speaking – Harriet Jones had sent instructions directly to Gina Johns.
Rose found herself, all of a sudden, at the very bottom of the Torchwood hierarchy. A lowly research assistant, nothing more. Johns had been unable to take away her research job as Pete's post as director had had nothing to do with it; Carron had requested she assist him after the publication of her master's thesis.
She had started quietly investigating Gina Johns and President Jones, but before long found her efforts hindered. Her computer access was slowly eroded. She could not access the same databases as she had previously, and her access codes opened fewer directories. Less and less information was available to her as, very gradually, the people she had befriended in IT found themselves transferred, terminated, or assigned to field work, so Rose did the only sensible thing she could manage.
She resigned from Torchwood.
U.N.I.T. had contacted her by day's end and offered her a commission – she'd be a Captain – and her choice of location for her posting.
To her delight, they'd agreed to allow her to continue her studies with Doctor Carron, for whom they arranged a faculty appointment at Oxford. Rose had been registered as his PhD student. She had U.N.I.T. to thank for her doctorate, much as she had Torchwood to thank for her MPhys.
Daughter of one of the richest men in Britain and she'd never paid a pound in school fees. She couldn't help but laugh whenever she thought about it.
Six months following her return to Pete's World, as she and the Doctor – John – had taken to calling it, she had a new job, a new flat she shared with John as their fledgling relationship took wing, and a position as a Ph.D. student at Oxford. Richard Carron was a kindly supervisor, requiring her at the university only occasionally which allowed her to choose Cardiff, for its likelihood of being a good location to grow a TARDIS, as her base of operations. Her work was primarily theoretical, and she had more than enough computing power at home to compute the dimensional models they were working on.
It was the happiest she had been in years, not that it would last.
Gina Johns remained a thorn in Rose's side well after her resignation from Torchwood. She'd attempted to block a number of Rose's official functions with U.N.I.T. and had made quite a nuisance of herself any time Rose attempted to schedule meetings with offworld contacts. It was why, on this surprisingly warm and sunny Sunday morning in December, Rose found herself ensconced in a dark, windowless room in U.N.I.T.U.K. headquarters beneath the Tower, where she had found herself each Sunday for the last month.
Timothy, the Major's executive assistant, scampered in with a paper cup of coffee for her. Rose thanked him as he breezed out of the room, taking a sip of the scalding beverage as her eyes scanned back and forth over the screen before her, reviewing the activity logs of the last week for one of their monitoring channels.
"Erisa," she called to the other room. "I've got something."
Major Erisa Magambo strode into the room, dressed, like Rose, in casual attire. Sundays in the Tower were informal affairs.
"What is it?"
"It's one of the codes John warned about," she said, tapping the small blue book on the desk beside her. "Just came up - something going on here. Seems it's a web-based subnet comm channel, like he said it would be. Can you get an echo of it? Was yesterday from the look of it."
"Maybe." She pushed Rose aside, fingers flying over the keyboard. "I think this is it, but I'm not hearing anything."
Rose looked over the commands in the shell that Erisa had opened. While she would never be as adept with the U.N.I.T. computer system as her friend and commanding officer, she didn't see anything that jumped out at her as wrong. "Are we receiving any data?"
Erisa typed in another short string and perused the information that came up in response. "Looks like it. Computer's recording. Should be able to hear what's going on. Don't know why we can't."
They spent another minute poring over the command lines, disconnecting and reconnecting from the feed.
"I am a bleeding idiot," Rose groaned. She reached over and used the scroll wheel on the mouse to increase the volume, which had been muted.
Erisa burst into peals of laughter, but sobered quickly as the voices of Gina Johns and Harriet Jones came through the speakers.
"…Friday. How's Red?" Jones was saying.
Gina seemed to scoff. "As expected. No surprises there. We'll be ready when you give us the go."
"You'd better be. You know we can't afford any of your screw-ups on this."
"Iran was not my fault" came the icy reply from the Torchwood Director of Operations. Rose mouthed 'Iran?' to Erisa, who shrugged.
"Yes, it was. Just don't fuck this one up. You'll hear from me soon. Usual channels."
"Understood." The channel died. Erisa closed the command shell.
"Sounds like we missed everything important," Magumbo said.
Rose shrugged "Should be recorded, anyway. Can you play it back?"
A moment's clicking later and the conversation began.
The President's unmistakeable voice began. "Crow 2, Lynx here. Are you in?"
"Yes. Clearance seven-seven-two. Identify please."
"Clearance four-seven-four-eight. I want an update."
"Timeline has been met. See the report delivered Friday – should be accurate to the hour."
"Have you confirmed access?"
"Weeks ago. We're set and ready to go, honestly. I confirmed all of this last week." Johns' voice was clipped, her tone annoyed.
"And you will confirm it again as many times as I request," Jones responded, her words laced with venom. "You need to be ready for Friday. How's red?"
Rose stopped the playback and leaned back in her seat.
"Well, that was cryptic," Erisa said unnecessarily. "What did she mean about Iran?"
"Haven't a clue. I think Friday's more important than figuring that out, though. What's Friday?"
"The twenty third." Erisa leaned back as well, taking a long drink of her coffee.
"Twenty third… the twenty third of December." Rose's eyes widened and her mouth ran dry. "It's the Torchwood Christmas party at the mansion."
Erisa's lips drew into a tight line. "Well, I guess you'll be attending this year after all."
Rose had been unofficially uninvited to Pete's Christmas parties since her departure from Torchwood five years prior. As someone who had left Torchwood in the lurch on an important project when she had resigned and dragged a primary researcher away with her, it was understood that she wasn't precisely welcome, even if as daughter of the host no one would stop her.
Her strained relationship with Pete had her feeling awkward as her finger hovered over his name in her contacts list. Swallowing her hesitation, she tapped the entry for Pete Tyler, Dir. Torchwood Institute.
"Rose?" he asked a moment later, not bothering with a greeting. She rarely called. "Everything alright?"
"Um, yeah. Yeah, nothing wrong. I was just wondering if I could come to the Christmas party next week." No need to dance around the reason for her call. "I know it's last minute, but I was hoping to see Tony and Mum. I'm on call at Christmas so I'll be stuck in Cardiff and I won't get to see them and…"
"Rose, Rose, it's okay," he assured, cutting off her rambling. "Your mum will be thrilled to see you. You know how she is with these things." He sounded amused.
She breathed a sigh of relief. Easier than she thought.
"Do you need me to send a car?"
"No, I'll be fine to drive up after work. What time is it at?"
"Starts 'round seven."
"Okay. You sure it won't be a problem for anyone?" she asked hesitantly. Of course it would be. Much of the upper management at Torchwood loathed her.
Pete chuckled. "'Course not." He knew the lie as well as she did. "Everyone'll love to see you again. Been a while."
"'Kay. I'll see you Friday, then?"
"Sure thing." Pete and Rose said their goodbyes and rang off.
Erisa, who had sat quietly by as Rose called her dad – stepdad? She'd still not completely figured that part out – smiled widely at her. "So, what're you going to wear?"
Rose dropped her forehead to the desk. "Uuuugh," she groaned, remembering her mum's requirement that she never wear a special occasion dress twice. Erisa laughed at her friend's dismay then set the computer to continue logging, and dragged the blonde woman towards the door.
"Won't hear a word out of you. This is official U.N.I.T. work so we can use the organization credit card. Come on now. To the shops!"
A zipped garment bag hung in the back seat of her car for the three hour drive from Cardiff to her parents' London manor. Rose had been honest when she informed Pete that she was on call over Christmas. What she had neglected to tell him was that it was her own choice to cover the Christmas call shifts so her coworkers could be home with their children. Rose knew that this Christmas would be hard, and so she had decided to keep herself busy, even if it meant her mum and Tony would be disappointed at her absence.
Deciding at the last minute to go up a day early to surprise her family, Rose had loaded her dress and the presents for her family into her Mini and made for London on Thursday morning.
"Mum!" she called into the house, pushing open the kitchen door with her hip as she entered with her garment bag in one hand, blue knapsack containing presents in the other.
She stepped through the large kitchen and ran towards the sweeping main staircase in the entry hall. Bounding up two stairs at a time, she listened for the telltale sounds of her mother ordering the event staff about. A man passed her by, a vase containing an ornate arrangement of flowers, greenery, and holly clasped in his hands. He craned his neck to the side to see around it and nodded in greeting, with a clipped "Good day," when he spotted Rose. The vaguely terrified look in his eyes confirmed her mum was back in her element. In this way, Jackie Tyler had stepped into her parallel counterpart's shoes easily enough. She'd proven a natural at ordering people about when she followed Pete back to his own universe.
Listening carefully, it became apparent that Jackie was still deep in discussion with some sort of vendor so Rose turned right, down the hall lined with soft cream carpet that would take her to Tony's school room. She pushed open the door quietly and peeked in.
The young boy pushed his unruly blonde fringe from his eyes, not tearing his gaze away from the book in front of him. Rose spotted Mister George, Tony's maths tutor. He was the very stereotype of an academic; tweed jacket, thick glasses, perfectly straight posture, as rigid as the expectations placed on his young charge, and he spoke in BBC English. Tony, for his part, had risen to the challenges Mister George – who never permitted anyone to call him by his Christian name – had placed before him. Rose had watched with interest over the previous years as the youngest Tyler bloomed under the one-on-one guidance of the array of tutors Pete had employed.
Rose marveled, not for the first time, at how different Tony's upbringing was from hers. While he had the best of everything that could be provided him and lived in a veritable palace, he was a profoundly lonely little boy. Rose, for her part, had spent her childhood in the constant company of many friends, and she spent her days outside of school roaming the estate with her friends, finding themselves in all sorts of childish trouble.
There had been no encouragement from Jackie for Rose to better herself; in fact, she'd not hesitated to remind Rose of her place in the world. Her decision to not pursue her A-levels had been met with apathy and a reminder that Henrik's was hiring, though Jackie later spoke negatively of the shop, telling Rose her work there was giving her airs and graces.
But Tony was given every opportunity and unending encouragement. The golden child of the Tyler clan, he had an unending parade of OxBridge educated tutors teaching him maths and English, history, science, even Latin and classical literature, in his own home and at his own pace. He was receiving the best, most comprehensive education that money could buy and it appeared to Rose to be money well spent. He was brilliant.
As she watched the youngest Tyler's sky-blue eyes dart left to right over the maths text he was reading, intent on understanding some new topic that had been put before him, her heart clenched a little in her chest. Tony was brilliant, with a mind that could change the world, but she felt the ache of his loneliness radiating from him, particularly since John's death.
Deciding to do what she could to alleviate the broken heart of Antony Tyler, Rose pushed the door open the rest of the way and grinned as she saw his eyes light up as he darted out of the chair and collided with her in a hug.