Disclaimer: Anything you recognize belongs to BBC. I'm just playing around with the characters.
Warning: Slow burn. I dislike the way Ten treated Rose and will not just have her take him back. Canon up to at least Journey's End, but since this is a do-it-again story that won't mean much. Further characters will be added as they appear.
The sound of slamming door marked Rose Tyler's entrance to her newly-minted TARDIS.
'Rude', she mumbled to herself, only slightly apologetic. 'That's me, rude and also not ginger.'
"Right, final check!" The light blinked twice in irritation. It showed how deeply in tune with her TARDIS Rose was to automatically understand blinking lights as irritation without the help of the empathic link.
"Oi, don't give me that. Fine! At least re-check the flight systems. First takeoff, don't want any trouble… Oh and that was supposed to reassure me?! I know how you used to fly, I was there!"
The light blinked again, but the screen obediently showed a system check. Rose carefully kept any smugness to herself. No need to risk getting the ship all worked up and rebellious.
"First time in this universe, where do you think we should go?" She said out loud, pulling up the limited data she'd managed to gather about this universe and its history with the help of Torchwood. "Do you think they have Barcelona here? The planet, not the city." It was an old habit to banish any memory it pulled up before they even registered in her conscious mind. "Never managed to get there in the other universe. If its relative position to its sun is still the same, maybe the whole evolutional process is similar enough that they still ended up with dogs with no nose?"
The TARDIS sent her the equivalent of an amused grumble and showed her the coordinate of the planet Barcelona, or at least the one in her old universe.
"Right, off we go then!"
Of course, as is typical in the life of Rose Tyler, at least from the moment she took the Doctor's hand onward, things immediately went wrong. The ship lunged, then shook violently, alarms blared, and the lights in the console room all turned mauve.
"This is Emergency Program One…"
And then, all of the sudden, the ship stilled, the lights returned to normal, and all in all it was as if the last ten seconds were only her imagination. Except for the fact that she was now unexplainably standing twenty feet away from where she remembered standing, and someone was talking. In her formerly empty TARDIS.
"—safe in here. The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through that door, and believe me they've tried. Now, shut up a minute."
It was a familiar voice, coming from a familiar, if impossible, face. The owner of that face was turning slightly away from her, doing something on the console that she now realized was similar but subtly different from her own. The explanation for what he was doing washed over her, numb as she was in the face of the dawning implication.
"Right," the impossible man – not a human, just looked like one – "You humans look like us, Rose. We came first." – turned to face her and asked. "Where do you want to start?"
"You have got to be kidding me."
All things considered, it was quite understandable how she reacted during the next few minutes. As well as the rest of the night. She blamed the shock.
"Riiight," her first Doctor, whom she never thought she'd see again, drawled out awkwardly. Or at least, awkward to those who knew how to read him. "Can't say that's never happened before. Mind you, I was expecting 'It's bigger on the inside!' Still, continue."
"I would think I was dreaming," she obediently continued. "Except even my dreams don't get as unbelievable as this."
"Okayyy," he gave a slow nod with raised eyebrows as if she was the crazy one. "That would be the culture shock. Happens to the best of us."
When she only stared, he went on explaining.
"It's called the TARDIS, this thing. T-A-R-D-I-S, that's-"
"Time and Relative Dimension in Space, yeah."
It was his turn to stare. Oops, maybe shouldn't have said that.
"Look, weren't you doing something?" She tried. As was typical, he went on and ignored her, rapidly crowded her and waved his screwdriver all over her face.
"How do you know that? Are you sure you're human? I checked for plastic, this morning, but you could be a Zygon and bypassed my scan somehow for all I know-"
And just like that, Rose Tyler, time-and-space traveller, Head of Torchwood, Defender of Earth, she who did the impossible and crossed the barrier between universes twice when a Time Lord couldn't manage, snapped. In true Tyler-women style.
"Ouch!" the Doctor cradled his cheek, eyes comically wide. "Did you just slap me?!"
"Look," only years of being the mediator between trigger-happy governments and alien visitors managed to give her the calm she needed to speak without shouting. "You have the Nestene Consciousness somewhere out there planning to conquer the planet, my friend Mickey is in its grab and might get killed at any moment, I think whatever you want to know about me can actually wait until humanity's not at risk of dying by shop window dummies and would you just get your priorities straight before plastic-Mickey's head finish melting?!" Ok, so maybe not completely without shouting.
"Melting?" At last! "Aw, no, no, no, NO! The signal is fading!" The Doctor pulled some levels, and TARDIS started making groaning sounds and gently tipped side to side as she jumped through space. "No, no, no, no, no, no, NO! Almost there, almost there. Here we go!" As soon as the sounds stopped, he ran outside without giving her another glance, with her following sedately behind. In the back of her mind, Rose wondered if this dreamy feeling is normal for people in shock.
"I got the signal. I got so close!" The Doctor kept on with the unneeded explanation, her slip-up seemingly forgotten. She thought, maybe a bit unkindly, that he just liked the sound of his own voice.
"The Nestene Consciousness, the Living Plastic, its food stock was destroyed in the war, all its protein planets rotted. Planet Earth must seem like an all-you-can-eat buffet. All the smoke and oil, toxins, dioxins, yum. How can you hide something that big in a city this small?"
The rapid change of subject nearly gave her whiplash. "Sorry, hide what?"
"The transmitter! Controlling every piece of plastic all over the world is beyond the Nestene Consciousness unaided, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal. Something round, massive, slap-bang in the middle of London. A huge, metal, circular, dish-like structure, like a wheel, radical, close to where we're standing." And with that, he came to stand directly in front of the London Eye, all lightened up with white and blue lights. "Must be completely invisible."
She stared. Experiencing this once didn't spare her the absurdity of this moment.
He stared back. "What?"
She raised her eyebrows, signaling him to look behind. "If I wasn't still in shock, this would be quite funny."
He turned and looked. Turned back. Still didn't get it. "What?"
If she raised her eyebrows any higher they would be lost in her hairline. "Okay, it's still funny."
He turned again. Turned back. "What is it? What?"
She busted out laughing. "Oh, I've missed you," then went off to look for the man-hole she noticed last time. From the corner of her eye, she saw the oblivious Doctor turned back one last time and blurted out, "Oh, fantastic!"
She just couldn't help her smile.
The meeting with the Nestene Consciousness went almost exactly as she remembered. The Doctor started negotiation with the plastic creature with suitable seriousness, ruined it with an inappropriate joke, then whipped back to being deadly serious like he was bipolar. Meanwhile she located Mickey cowering in a corner. (It was funny how he managed to make a straight corridor seem like a corner with his cowering. Nothing like the Torchwood-Mickey she got to know.) She swanned up to him, still in the dreamlike trance she'd fallen into in her shock, and didn't even get annoyed when he hugged her legs like she was a lifeline, stammering about the talking plastic. If anything, she only got even more amused, which she knew was not a suitable reaction to the situation where the whole of the human race is at risk. Though in her defense, that was the conditioned reaction to this kind of things when one had travelled long enough with the Doctor.
She still ended up rescuing the Doctor with her rusty gymnastic skills. (She went back to practicing, back in the other universe, but it seemed to her much younger body she still stopped years ago.) With a manic smile, and a "Now we're in trouble!" like it was Christmas, he rushed all three of them into the TARDIS to escape the exploding vat of plastic. And that was where the familiarity ended, and Rose Tyler crashed back down to Earth.