They had told her to spend the night with her mum and family and that was honestly her plan. Spend the last safe night surrounded by those who loved her and to give them some happy memories in case tomorrow didn't work out the way they all hoped. But on her way to the grand house her mum now lived in, she turned left and drove out of the city. Laying on her back, she stared up at the stars. Tomorrow she would be back among them.
In the beginning she left the city a lot. It was too difficult looking up towards the sky and seeing such a tangible reminder that she was stuck in a universe that she didn't belong to. While it wasn't easy, she could pretend that the air didn't just feel slightly static. She travelled and explored and kept moving because if she stood still for too long, she could feel the turn of the earth, as if the planet itself was trying to eject her from orbit and send her flying into space. But looking up the zeppelins made it completely impossible to forget that she didn't belong here. Zeppelins belonged to the war. They belonged to her and Jack and London, to the backdrop of an invisible spaceship and dancing in front of Big Ben to Glenn Miller.
So she left the city often. She had exploration in her blood now and was completely unable to stay in one place for long periods of time. Once it had been planets and time that she travelled. Now cities and countries and the overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia of being confined to this one planet that looked like hers but wasn't, that threatened her hold on sanity. She never truly understood the Doctor's horror at being stuck on Krop Tor, but she knew that feeling now. Torchwood helped her, gave her a reason to continue on and it was a great cover story for her frequent disappearances. Aliens noticed this Earth more than her Earth, which she found quite unbelievable in the beginning, and she had a vast knowledge of different species and a leftover gift from the Tardis in her ability to speak and understand every language that she came across. Rose was waiting desperately for the day that the ability disappeared because it terrified her. When the Doctor regenerated, the Tardis had stopped translating until he woke up, so how was she still translating for Rose universes apart? She didn't quite understand it so she tended to push those thoughts aside and ignore them. She was getting good at ignoring things.
Just as she pushed aside thoughts of the Tardis. Losing the Tardis was a gaping wound in the back of her skull that wouldn't heal. It left her feeling like she had lost one of her senses and she was left fumbling in the dark, desperately trying to find a lightswitch. She hadn't slept a proper night she had been stuck here. She hadn't quite realized how much she had come to rely on the faint humming that had been in the back of her head, until it was abruptly silenced and there was an empty abyss left behind. In the beginning, the silence had overwhelmed her to the point where she almost lost her grip on reality twice. They had performed all kinds of tests and found nothing. Pete looked at her with suspicion in those days and that hadn't really helped. Eventually she came to manage the quiet and was able to put on a good front so no one even thought back on those days. But inside her head, the silence screamed.
She shifted and thought of how she liked when she could escape to the country the best. Very few zeppelins tainted the sky, giving her an unobstructed view of the stars. It always twisted her insides, looking up at what had once been her backyard. She knew many of the planets that circled those stars intimately. A universe away, she had friends all across time and space, on different planets, and in different galaxies. Now all she had was faint twinklings in a sky that didn't know her footprint. It was so difficult going from running through time, to being confined here. Yes, she gained a baby brother that she absolutely adored, thankfully her mum and Mickey were here, in Pete she had an almost father now. But it was hard to look at him some days and not think of the man in a church who recognized her as his daughter before he consciously realized it. It was hard to speak to him and not think of how her Pete had sacrificed himself to save her. She couldn't bear to hug him because when he wrapped his arms around her, her mind flashed back to him catching her before she fell into the void. Impossible not to think of the Doctor screaming her name in terror, his eyes huge with panic as he desperately tried to hold on and not follow her there, but still straining to grab her. Jackie was so happy here, living a life of airs and graces even while wearing those same tracksuits. But for all that Jackie had gained, Rose had lost so much more. Her universe, friends, the Tardis, the man that she…
Ruthlessly, she squashed down the last word. She wouldn't think of that, or of his arms around her, the crinkles near his eyes when he smiled, or the way when he changed his entire body, his accent almost matched hers. There were a million reasons that she wouldn't think the word, but it boiled down to that word belonging to him. She had said it last on the worst day of her life and wouldn't think it again until she had fixed this.
Mostly she just wanted to go home. Back to where her life was insane to most people, but made sense to her. Back to where she was happy. Absently, she reached up to stroke the Tardis key around her neck. After being stranded and locked out of the Tardis, she never took it off. All she had left of home now and even though the metal was cold -body head didn't warm it, only the physical proximity of the Tardis did that- it gave her a small measure of comfort.
With a heavy sigh she raised to her feet. She had been laying flat on her back, looking up at the stars (once she had burned like the sun and now she breathed for just a glimpse.) She wasn't here tonight to escape for a few hours. Torchwood was in panic mode. It had been realized that there was an anomaly on Earth, faint fissures that couldn't be explained. They had their best people working on it, but that had been put on hold when something even more pressing had been discovered.
The stars were going out.
No warnings, no novas, no anything. They were there one minute and then there was nothing. Just black emptiness. Thankfully it wasn't obvious yet, from Earth everything looked the same. Only those with very powerful telescopes had noticed...something...and they were keeping it amongst themselves. But that would only last for so long and soon the public would be in a state of panic. Which is where the Dimension Cannon had come into play.
Rose made no secret that she wouldn't stay here if she had an option. From the moment he had left her for the final time on that awful beach. "I'm just an image, no touch." From that exact second, she had been determined to prove him wrong and claw her way back to him. Pete, bless him, had been very supportive from the beginning. Rose studied and she gathered the best from around the planet and together they had built the Dimension Cannon. They were mindful of the sake of universe and never, not once used it on full power. On full power, they could have punched their own holes in the walls of universes and she could have already been searching. But Rose would never risk so many living creatures like that. So they waited to see if anything would happen, while they worked to figure out a way to use it without collapsing reality. But then the stars started going out and the damn machine lit up. Rose was miles away and felt when the cracks opened. It was almost like a strong wind, the feeling of something pulling her away. She ran back to the office, arriving heaving for breath, as the entire team of scientists were in an uproar. She was ready to go then, a pull so powerful she almost couldn't control it begging her to jump now. Of course they tested it first, she knew the risks. They started with small inanimate objects, before moving to mice, which Rose hated. But they needed something alive to make it through and back before they sent her. They tested until they were mostly satisfied, which was as good as it would get under these circumstances.
Tomorrow would be her first trip through and she was terrified. She had built the damn thing but it sometimes baffled her how it worked. She would be scattered into atoms (you are tiny. I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I divide them), and hurdled across the void into hopefully her universe, before the atoms rearranged themselves back into Rose proper. Not even including the fact that she could land anywhere, in anywhen, and in any universe. She was properly terrified.
Yeah, she was scared. But Rose Tyler ate scared for breakfast. She had once killed the devil himself. She poured the Time Vortex into the Emperor's head and destroyed him and his entire race. Scared was nothing new for her.
She was thrilled.