I thought today was supposed to be one of the happiest days of the years, Rose thought to herself as she string the stale bits of popcorn up for the tree. She didn't feel particularly happy, despite her mother's best efforts to distract her, to keep her busy. It had been nearly a year now, since she'd been stuck here…there wasn't much that could take her mind off of that.
She stabbed her needle through a kernel of popcorn with a harder husk, and, of course, it embedded itself deeply into the pad of her index finger. She yelped and jumped up, dropping the bowl of popcorn and spilling its contents all over the floor. Tears had risen, unbidden, to her eyes, and she quickly wiped them away. She pulled the needle out of her flesh and immediately stuck her finger in her mouth. Okay, so she was done with this bloody (literally) popcorn-stringing. Her mother could do it herself if she wanted stinking popcorn strands on this stinking stupid pine tree.
She had to get out of here. Maybe just the house, maybe this whole stupid universe. It might not be that bad…it wasn't that different from the one she'd grown up in. That was what 'parallel universe' was supposed to mean, after all. He hadn't been in her first universe, not technically, so it wasn't like he was really missing from this one. Traveling with him had just been a temporary thing—she'd been fooling herself, thinking she could stay with him forever. It'd been naïve, childish. She sighed and inspected her finger, which had yet to stop bleeding. Fantastic. She shook her head and grabbed her jacket, shoving her feet into her boots before heading out the door. The people here…her family wouldn't miss her too much, after all.
Rose walked through the snowy streets, so familiar and still so strange to her. She kept waiting for the day that things would click, that this would suddenly become her home. Nothing yet. Nearly a year, and still…nothing. She shoved her hands into her pockets against the bitter wind, bloody finger and all. The streetlamps gave the streets a somewhat orange glow, reflected up off the snow. This was a beautiful place—there was really no disputing that. But beauty had nothing to do with it. Home, to her, had long since become a tiny blue police box, with strange, antler-like growths and blinking, flashing lights. And one strange man with a pinstriped suit and perpetually untamable hair.
Stop it, Rose, she commanded herself, stopping in her tracks. This, of course, quickly proved to be a bad idea—the cold crept up her legs that much faster when she wasn't moving. He wouldn't want you to act like this. He would want you to at least try to get on with your life. It's really your own fault you're so depressed—stupid twit can't get over it. She sighed and looked around the empty streets. What did she expect, to see the Doctor standing across the street and laughing at her or something? No one was out here—no one in their right mind, anyway. They were all warm at home, as she should be.
Except for the fact that her home was worlds away from here.