My 30th fic!
She wakes up to the smell of coffee and a blaring alarm. Her mum walks in, and she opens an eye to see an apologetic look.
"Sorry sweetheart. I forgot, left the alarm on. It's Saturday," she says, and chuckles to herself. Rose tries to turn over, but Jackie's already there, determined to wake her up.
"How are you feeling?" Jackie asks. Rose grimaces slightly, and Jackie decides not to press the matter. She walks out to the hallway, and shouts something to Pete.
Rose sighs, and gets up. She leaves her room, and enters the dining room. An incredibly typical portrait is there, one that could be in the greeting card: the smiling father reading his newspaper, and the smiling mother, her stomach slightly rounded, pouring herself a cheerful cup of coffee on a happy, bright morning.
It's the perfect family scene, except where does Rose fit in? The twenty-year-old who has traveled in space, seen the past, been a goddess who could change time and space with a flick of her finger, and who most certainly is not wearing a smile on her face.
Her roots are beginning to show, and she wonders why she should even bother dying her hair blond again, if it's not for him.
"Nice weather today, Rose! The sun is shining!" Pete announces. Rose sits on a chair. The feebly shining yellow sun she can see through her window is dimmed by her memories of supernovas, glittering galaxies, and planets that are lit by fourteen alternating suns and moons, where day and night happen all at once.
The sun is shining, she supposes, but it seems a weak attempt at mimicking what she's seen.
"Lovely," says Rose, and her father smiles.
"Toast?" asks Jackie.
I've been to royal feasts disguised as a duchess, where the food sparkles and water is consumed in the form of half-solid orbs.
She smiles and grabs one. She crunches on one, half-burnt, Pete's signature touch. She swallows, the crumbs stick to her dry mouth. The patches of skin peeling off of her dry lips crack some more when she manages another dry smile. As she rubs blood off her bottom lip, she realizes she can't remember the last time she wore lip-gloss.
She does remember, but that day is too painful to bring back to mind.
Same way those clothes she's shoved in the back of her closet haunt her; especially that shirt with a Union Jack she last wore so long ago.
"So!" says Jackie, and both Pete and Rose jump. Everyone's worried; no one addresses the issue.
"Mickey's coming over for tea," she says, with a smile that says it all. It's the smile telling her to get over the Doctor once and for all. It's the same smile that usually accompanies her passing remarks about Mickey, and how he's a good bloke.
Rose pretends not to understand what her mother is implying. She wishes she honestly didn't know that she wanted her to move on. Rose almost snorts at the thought of moving on. Like she could just snap her fingers, forget him, and live a nice, full life, needing nothing more than food and sleep.
Maybe he leaves behind a string of broken people throughout history, wondering if the madman with a box will ever come back.
"Hm," says Rose, who pretends to still be chewing, although the last of the toast is already gone.
Jackie shakes her head and stands up. Rose looks towards her father, but his face is obscured by newspaper. In place of his face is a blaring headline about car sales.
No one notices when she opens the back door of their mansion, runs outside into the luxurious lawns, and stares off into the horizon. It's cold. She shivers and walks back inside the kitchen, feeling like a wounded puppy, retreating with a whine.
She's memorized the route to her room. All the hallways have red carpets, something Rose considered overly decadent the second she stepped in. Though she wonders how she could see through her tears that first day.
She's papered the fancy wallpapers of her room with pages from scientific magazines. Jackie hoped she would read them. Rose ripped every page out unceremoniously and pasted them on her wall carefully, covering the tasteful flowers.
Now her walls are a jumble of graphics and illustrations: quarks, black holes, stem cells, and other things. Maybe she could build a TARDIS to go between parallel universes.
But she never stops to read. Slowly, neurological diagrams creep onto her ceiling.
She lets herself fall unhappily onto her bed. It's the best this world has to offer – but somehow her plain TARDIS mattress was better.
At some point Rose stopped talking, because all that came out of her mouth was how much better things were with the Doctor.
She closes her eyes for a second, only to open them when a soft knock at her door disturbs the piece. Pete comes in holding a magazine. "Here you go," he says, shooting her a sad smile.
She takes it gratefully and he leaves. Sometimes she honestly wonders whether this isn't the same man she tried to save from the car that ran him over. She notices the cover: "SHOCKING CAVE DRAWINGS BAFFLE EXPERTS."
Rose looks more intently, and flips to page sixty. Her eyes widen as she sees the picture.
She runs downstairs, shouting, and loses a slipper in the process. She bursts into the living room. "MUM! DAD!" she shouts, happiness illuminating her face for the first time in months.
"Are you sure you don't need those antidepressants, sweetheart?" Jackie asks her daughter with a look of concern.
"Do I look depressed to you?" Rose asks with a wild smile. She throws the open magazine onto her mother's lap. Pete moves closer to see the large, full-color picture that takes up most of the page.
There are many carved and painted symbols on a cave. Pointed out with bright red circles are two of them in particular. There's a banana drawn among herds of prehistoric buffalo, and in a corner is a crudely carved man, with a clearly striped suit, ruffled hair, and some kind of long instrument in his hand. You can easily tell he's waving.