Chapter Text
The retrieval was supposed to take forty minutes.
Rose Tyler had done it a hundred times before. Routine anomaly sweeps on the outskirts of London, part of the ‘monthly checks for alien threats’ required by Torchwood. It was the kind of job she could do in her sleep after three years. Go in, collect the readings, come back, write the report, go home and eat something that wasn't from a vending machine for once. Pete had signed off on it himself. Her mum had made her take a sandwich.
A sandwich that was still in her bag when the rift opened.
She hadn’t noticed anything changed until it was too late. One moment she was standing in a puddle wearing wellies and a raincoat, scanning the perimeter of a derelict car park while rain dripped off the back of her hood, when then the scanner made a sound it had never made before. A kind of ascending whine that she'd later think of as the universe clearing its throat, and then the puddle was gone, and the rain was gone, and the car park was gone, and she was somewhere else entirely.
An alley. If she could call it that.
An alley very much not on Earth.
The sky was the wrong color. A bruised purple, with greenish hues and swirls of yellow near the horizon, and not a cloud in sight. The air was warm, but not dry, and smelled of copper and something floral. It was almost… pleasant, which surprised her. Somewhere nearby she could hear noises. Voices, even, and music, and the unmistakable trill of a very busy place. It sounded real. It felt real, but the light hit the alley walls in a way that made them look almost painted, and she had the sudden, absurd urge to reach out and touch one, just to make sure. Just to make sure she was real.
The wall was solid and stone, and she allowed herself approximately four seconds to be frightened. It was a habit she'd developed at some point in the parallel world. Maybe it was because grief was a funny thing, and that it wasn’t too far away from fear or anger, but she’d learned that while she needed to feel properly if she was going to survive, she could handle emotions only in short bursts before she had put them somewhere useful and moved on. It was the only way she got through a single day.
One. Two. Three. Four.
She moved on.
Her comm was dead. The translation chip that would connect her back to Mickey and the others flickered at zero percent. Her weapon was still holstered, a simple stun gun that was only to be used in emergencies, and she reached into her bag to see what else she had with her. Forty-three pounds, which may be useful, depending on where she was.
She pulled her earpiece out and pocketed it, then she checked the scanner, which may or may not have gotten a reading at the carpark. She had no way of knowing. It was dead too. Which was… odd. And probably not good.
The sandwich was still there. Untouched and judgemental.
She ignored it.
The alley opened to a marketplace, bustling and alien, she realized with a surge of something deep in her gut. It sprawled in every direction, stall after stall, draped in fabrics she’d never seen before, selling things she couldn't identify, packed with people in a variety of species. Some looked human. That was good, that meant she could blend in if she got a change of clothes. Others were more reptilian, some with gold skin, some who looked like dogs.
The noise hit her like a wave, and she let it wash over her for a moment, cataloguing everything, just as she’d been trained to do. Every transaction and interaction, every greeting. She'd been in stranger situations. Satellite 5, for example. That was more dangerous than this.
Probably.
Maybe.
The first thing she needed was information. The second was to eat that damn sandwich. The third (and perhaps most important, if she was being honest with herself), was to try and not to think too hard about the fact that she was alone in an unknown place in an unknown solar system with no way of contacting anyone who knew her name. Without the dimension cannon to pull her back, faulty as it may be.
Of all the weeks to stop wearing it like a necklace.
“Rose, no! You could get sucked somewhere and not be able to return. It’s not ready,” Mickey had said, only a few days prior.
"It's never going to be a sure thing, Mick," she'd said when he’d given her that look that was the perfect mix of fear and dread. “But I have to try.”
But he was right. The cannon wasn’t ready, and she knew it. Her last test had been the riskiest yet, and after making it back barely in one piece, she'd left it on a workbench at Torchwood. Which, at this moment, apparently proved what everyone had been telling her for years. When it came to time travel, she was never the brilliant one.
She wasn’t going to understand how she got here. She just knew she was here, wherever here was.
Great.
The market did seem to have some sort of plan to it, she noticed as she began to walk. Food stalls lined the edges, goods and wares were toward the center, and somewhere further south the smell of something industrial cut through all the noise and spice. Docks. She'd grown up in London. She knew what a working waterfront smelled like, even one several universes away, and there were definitely docks nearby.
She kept her head up as walked, trying to look like she knew what she was doing, even though she didn’t. Trying to blend in. It worked. No one paid her any attention, and she was halfway down the main road when a stall caught her eye.
The vendor was old. Ancient, maybe, in the way that certain aliens were ancient. Not frail, but settled, with four-arms and grey skin and large silver eyes that tracked her approach with calm interest. All around him were maps of constellations and galaxies, painted on a material that wasn't quite paper, but rather something closer to papyrus, all pinned and stacked and rolled in overlapping layers, until the whole stall looked like it was being slowly swallowed by the universe itself.
She knew she shouldn't. She had forty-three pounds and a long way to go and absolutely no business browsing. But there was something about this stall that called to her, and before she could stop herself she was standing in front of him, gazing up at the largest piece of parchment.
"Verath," the vendor said. He spoke slowly, like words were worth the time it took to say them properly, and she smiled.
“What?”
"You've been standing there for thirty seconds," the vendor said. “That is the full map of Verath. Do you like it?”
"Yeah, I do,” Rose said wistfully, gazing at the swirls of supernovas and stars. “But I should tell you, I can't actually afford anything. I'm a bit stranded at the moment. I just wanted to look."
"Looking is free."
"Not everywhere."
"Here it is," he said simply. “Have a look around, love. Let me know if you have any questions.”
Rose nodded, then did as he said, picking up the nearest chart carefully. Another solar system she didn't recognise, drawn in fine dark lines with tiny notations at the edges. She touched it gently, looking at her finger when she pulled it away, which was suddenly stained with charcoal.
"These are hand-drawn," she said.
"Everything worth having is."
She glanced up. The silver eyes were steady, and faintly, she thought, kind.
"How long does one take?"
"A small galaxy like that, a few weeks. Something like this—" his second arm gestured at the large map she’d looked at earlier, stretching from the floor to ceiling. "—forty years."
"Forty years?" Rose repeated quietly, stepping closer to the map of Verath without thinking, placing the small chart in her hand down on the table. For several seconds, she gazed up at the map, tracing each supernova and star with awe. The colors were exquisite, outlining what appeared to be eleven planets connected by countless constellations, some crisp and certain, some softer at the edges, and in the margins, in very small writing, were notes she couldn't read.
She wanted to know what they said, and her mind drifted to someone else who would have known immediately, who would have read them aloud and probably gone off on a tangent she'd have pretended to find annoying.
For several seconds she gazed up at it, a small smile widening on her face.
“I know someone who would love this.”
The vendor said nothing. Rose took another moment before she stepped back and cleared her throat.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. The vendor inclined his head. "Where am I exactly? I know that sounds like a mad question but I've had a bit of a morning." She gestured vaguely upward, at the wrong-colored sky. "Long story."
The vendor studied her for a moment, apparently unsurprised by this. Old enough, she supposed, to have heard stranger things.
"The Callax Bazaar," he said. Then, using one of his arms, pointing at one of the planets on the map in the far left corner. "A trading post on the planet Sura, on the outer rim of the Verath sector." His fourth arm reached beneath the table and pulled out a small printed card. Cheap and functional, like a business card, the kind of thing every market vendor had more than likely, and slid it across to her. "The sector runs eleven systems, and the transit hub is at the centre. Verath Station. It can take you to several intergalactic satellites if you need to make your way someplace else."
“What universe?” she asked. The vendor furrowed his brow, as if he didn’t understand the question.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Universe?” Rose repeated. The vendor shook his head.
“There is only one universe, love,” he said.
He gestured to his maps, and Rose swallowed. Hard.
"Right," she said. "Right, yeah. ‘Course there is." She picked up the card and tucked it into her pocket before she gave herself away in any way. One universe. That was wrong, of course, but she wasn’t surprised he didn’t know that. So very few did. She wasn't in Pete's World, but it didn't mean she was home. She had learned the hard way that the Void connected to more than two points. There was no guarantee that whatever gap she may have slipped through pulled her in the right direction. She could be in any universe that wasn't Pete's World. There were infinite of those, but only one that had him in it.
A girl could hope, though.
So she kept her face very still and professional, just as Torchwood taught her.
"How do I get to Verath Station?"
"Cargo haulers run from the south docks every two days. Next one leaves tomorrow morning."
"Right."
Tomorrow morning. She could work with that. She needed somewhere to sleep, something to trade for passage in case forty-three pounds weren’t enough to buy a ticket (or in case they didn’t accept an alternate universe’s currency), and she'd deal with the rest as it came.
"Thank you,” she said. “The map is extraordinary. Forty years well spent."
She turned, but before she could carry on any farther, the vendor called after her.
"The person you know,” he said slowly. "You said it like they were far away."
Rose stiffened, her heart beginning to race in her chest. “They are.”
“Then I hope you find your way back to them,” he said. “From one admirer of the universe to another.”
Rose smiled.
“Me too.”
She only made it a few more stalls before someone screamed, and she turned just in time to see the crowd start to disperse, all running in the opposite direction of where she was looking.
A child was pinned to the ground by a man in a dark green uniform, a gun pressed to its back. The child screamed again, and Rose ran, catching fragments of whatever threats the man was screaming in the child’s face. Something about a debt, about work, about ‘every last one.’ When he cocked the gun, Rose reached for hers.
"OI!!!!"
The man looked up. He was humanoid and large, with the flat expression of someone encountering an obstacle thinking it was far more insulting than threatening.
“Move on, ma’am,” he ordered. “This is none of your – ”
"Let go of him!" Rose said, full of authority and rage. "Right now."
"Ma’am, put the weapon down. You are interfering – "
"I said let go."
The man laughed as he stepped away from the child. Mostly, she suspected, out of sheer surprise, or perhaps because he now intended to pin her to the ground. It was probably both. She'd smelled the testosterone the moment he'd looked at her, and she sighed, bracing herself for what came next.
The child bolted without a sound, and the man lifted his gun to fire after him, but Rose struck first, sending a beam of frequencies to the guard’s chest that made him collapse to the ground with his arms still outreached, as though he had been frozen him in place.
“Are you alright?” Rose asked, turning toward the child, but they had managed to run away, leaving Rose alone in the middle of the square. Around her, the market had gone very still and very watchful. She could feel the weight of eyes and suspended transactions as everyone waited. She slowly holstered her weapon again.
So much for blending in.
“Is everyone here alright?” she asked, but suddenly a new guard grabbed her and threw her entire body up against a wall.
"That," he shouted with the volume of someone who wanted an audience, "was three months of unpaid debt you just interfered with."
"No, that was a child," Rose shot back,
The vendors all hid behind their stalls, eyes wide and mouths agape.
The sound of something scanning her from head to toe filled the air, and Rose winced as cuffs were sharply closed around her wrists.
"You are under arrest for assaulting a Compact Officer, human," the officer spat, reading the scanner carefully, his tone implying her race offended him somehow. "And for interference with a legal debt contract."
"He’s just stunned, he’ll be fine in an hour!" Rose said with dignity, but more officers had appeared, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to fight them off. She struggled anyway, but they managed to hold her down.
“Are you all just going to stand there?!” she asked every vendor or customer she could see. “They attacked a child, what is wrong with you?!”
Everyone just stared.
The ancient man with four arms stared longest.
“Take her away,” one of the officers said. Then something hit her head, and the world went black.