When Rose Tyler was five years old, she’d been cast as Sheep #3 in her school’s Nativity play.
It wasn’t a very impressive part—not like Keisha, who’d played Mary—but she remembers the pride that’d blazed through her when her Mum’d declared her brief stint as a farmyard animal as ‘incredibly convincing’.
(Which probably wasn’t all that much of a compliment, considering her role had consisted of little more than crouching into herself and some occasional bleating.)
Still, the experience had remained one of her fondest from childhood; her mum had taken her out for chips after, and there was a photo of the two of them outside the chippy—flushed and pink-cheeked from the cold, Rose still in costume, baring her teeth at the camera in a very un-sheeplike manner—framed and hooked onto the wall at their old lost flat.
Years later, (and a universe away,) in the woes of late-stage-pregnancy-induced nostalgia, she’d told the Doctor about it.
Unluckily for her, the Doctor, who was only a recent member of the human race, had never been part of a school stage performance. He’d thought it hilarious, and Rose had had to endure three extremely long days of her husband trying to sneak in the most absurd sheep puns into every conversation.
Until she’d had enough, and the Doctor had learned not to poke the extremely hormonal bear.
“Rooose,” he’d said with the air of a man who simply couldn’t help himself. “ Let me out of the baaathroom.”
When their five year old skips into the kitchen with a crumpled pamphlet and a massive grin, however, the Doctor sings an entirely different song.
“I knew it all along,” he says loudly, sweeping Mia into his arms. “Of course you’ve been cast—no surprises there. It’s in your blood, you know. Your mum was the finest actor her school ever saw.”
Rose groans, exasperated, turning just in time to see her daughter’s face pucker up into a frown.
“Really?” she asks dubiously. Even at her tender age, she knows her father can sometimes be full of it.
“Oh, yes,” the Doctor says, eyes twinkling, pushing a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “They could hardly tell the difference.”
“Shut up,” Rose tells him, whacking his shoulder lightly with a tea towel, before leaning in to press a kiss to their daughter’s forehead. “You’re going to be brilliant, darling.”
The Doctor tells everyone who will listen, and then he tells everyone who won’t, too.
His daughter’s playing a moon. She’s got two whole lines. She’s brilliant.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he tells her suddenly, late at night.
Rose squints up at him, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. “Wha’?”
“This!” he says, wrestling with an extremely worn piece of paper. “This!”
Rose squints harder, and the script for Mia’s play comes into vision. The text’s been underlined and circled in several places, overwritten with the Doctor’s rapid, slanting hand, the margins full of swirling patterns and ovals she’s come to recognise as the Doctor’s language, the same ones she’d seen on the TARDIS.
The play’s about a boy from an alien planet, the Doctor explains with some amusement, and he’s looking for his pet cat (the starring role, naturally) but he’s lost, and Rose yawns, wondering why this world couldn’t just stick to something simple like the Nativity.
“Why would the moon even know where Abbadon is? And Abbadon—come on. Name a cat that and it’s like you deserve to lose it…”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to,” Rose tells him drowsily.
“What, lose a cat?”
“Think about it this much.”
But the Doctor’s muttering to himself again, something about inflections and enunciation, pen in hand, so Rose turns to her side, succumbing to the warm embrace of sleep.
It's a warm autumn night, the day of the big show. Rose isn’t sure who’s more excited, Mia or the Doctor.
The school’s bustling late into the evening, only for tonight, and her heart grows warm as she notices Mia, who can barely walk in a straight line at the moment, taking in the familiar building like it’s something she’s never seen before.
It’s a whole new entity at night; wind rustling through the neatly trimmed shrubbery, the ducky swings swaying slightly in the playground, excited chattering from all the children running about behind stage and the all too familiar hissed instructions to stay still by exasperated teachers and parents.
They come to a stop backstage. Mia’s nearly vibrating with energy when she turns to look at Rose, eyes flashing sudden worry. “Are you leaving now?”
“I have to,” Rose tells her, squatting so she can be level with her daughter’s small face. “Have to get a good seat, don’t I? You’ll do brilliantly, Mia, we’re already so proud of you.”
The girl nods once, and then her name’s being called, and Mia’s teacher shuffles her away for her costume fitting.
She’s easily one of the smallest children there, and Rose feels a strange twisting in her gut when her daughter turns to give her one last timid wave.
The Doctor’s saved her a seat in the front row, because of course he has, and his extremely battered Converse tap the ground restlessly as he bickers with her mother. It’s a habit he still hasn’t given up, the shoes—no matter how posh he’s dressed, and it endears him to her, impossibly as it may seem, even more.
And he is dressed posh tonight—in his best tux, in fact; Rose simply hadn’t the heart to tell him that he’d gone a little overboard.
“Well?” he asks her immediately, ignoring whatever it was her mum was saying before he caught sight of her.
“All good,” Rose says, plonking down on the seat next to him. “A little nervous, but that’s natural.”
“Nervous?” the Doctor scoffs a bit too loudly, even as his frame visibly relaxes. “There’s nothing to be nervous about. It’s these other parents who’ve got to be nervous. No one’s even going to notice their children after ours—”
“Doctor, shh!”
It’s only when the lights turn on that Rose realises how large the audience actually is.
The auditorium’s packed to the brim, and she feels a swooping unease in the pit of her stomach as she imagines their tiny daughter reciting her two lines under those harsh stage lights.
Had it been this hard on her mum? She spares Jackie Tyler a glance, who is chatting away happily to Pete, and wonders if it gets easier when there’s a bit of a gap in relation.
The Doctor’s muttering to himself again, and Rose wonders if her experience would’ve been as good if she hadn’t successfully pulled off her bleating—if she’d gone on stage, frozen in front of that massive audience and forgotten her lines. She wonders if she should’ve actually checked on what the father-daughter duo were up to every spare moment they got, because God knows what the Doctor’s taught Mia, and—
“Good evening, everyone! Thank you so much for being here today. Our students are so excited to…”
It’s probably a good thing that the Doctor knows the entire script by heart, and proceeds to perform it live, because Rose can barely hear over the pounding in her ears.
Her grip on his palm (when had she grabbed his hand?) tightens when Mia stumbles slightly on entrance, the massive cardboard moon she’s been taped to getting in the way of her feet in her haste to enter stage, but she regains balance swiftly.
“Don’t worry,” she enunciates loudly, her voice clear as a bell. “I’ll show you the way.”
And Rose’s entire being swells with pride.
It’s magnificent, it is—even if the Doctor begins applauding right after (only to be stopped by a mortified Rose), and she can tell by the way her daughter is beaming that all that bubbling anxiety’s now glee, and it’s positively overflowing.
There’s probably not that much she’ll remember about this age in her life but this moment? Of looking into the audience with a sense of accomplishment, and seeing her parents unbearably proud?
This moment is eternal.
The rest of the play flies past, the two of them barely paying attention, still coming off the high that this is their life, and this is their daughter—
“I love you,” the Doctor says abruptly, lifting her palm to his lips. “Thank you.”
For what? she wants to say, but the words never make it out of her throat.
Mia is, thankfully, moon-less when she barrels into her adoring fans, less than half an hour later.
“How was it? HOW WAS IT?”
“Amazing,” Rose says truthfully, giving the girl a big hug, matching a wild smile with one of her own. “You were amazing!”
Mia turns to the last member of the foursome now, the one whose opinion probably matters the most, on tenterhooks.
“Well,” the Doctor frowns, tugging on his ear. “Honestly, I’m a little disappointed.”
Mia’s face falls instantly. Jackie tuts in disapproval.
“Disappointed,” the Doctor continues, “because I didn’t know we raised a thief. What—you thought you could just steal the show like that and get away with it? The other parents are furious, you know. We’ve been getting requests all evening—haven’t we, Rose? They all want to take you home, all jumping at the chance to have such a brilliant performer in the family. I told them I’d think about it, of course…maybe for the right price—”
“DADDY,” Mia shrieks when the penny finally drops. “YOU LIKED IT!”
“Of course I liked it!” the Doctor roars, sweeping the girl into his arms. “I loved it. Nine hundred years, I’ve never seen a better…”
Rose watches them bid her parents goodbye with a slight stinging in her eyes; the Doctor’s face is alight with happiness, and Mia looks like she’s on another planet altogether.
The Doctor notices, because of course he does, stepping closer to Rose.
“What,” he says to Mia, even as his eyes never leave hers, “d’you say to some chips?”
“YES!”
The Doctor chuckles fondly, before lowering the spirited girl to the ground, from where she takes off immediately after her grandparents, probably in the hopes of haggling for a few more sweeties.
He reaches into his jacket pocket then, retrieving a battered looking instant camera. She knows it must’ve been hard to track one of them down—they hadn’t much been in fashion in Pete’s World.
“I know it’s not the same,” he says almost shyly.
Her heart is expanding so much and so fast she thinks it’s a miracle her ribs aren’t cracking from the force of it.
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