A/n: I should be working on my other fic, but I got attacked by a plot bunny and this happened. For this story to resemble any kind of sense, pretend that Rose didn't get pulled into the void or the other universe after Doomsday. I don't care how you justify that (she held on just long enough and the void closed before she could hit it, the lever didn't fail, the other lever failed and the doctor, being the superiorly (if that's a word) agile time lord he is managed to fix it without getting pulled into the void himself) but just pretend that it's true. That's where the AU bit comes in.
You'll also have to bear with me when I tell you that Rose and the Doctor are not traveling together when this fic starts. That's the other place where the AU bit comes in. I'll probably explain why that is if I ever get around to finishing this, although if I do it will probably be very roundabout because that's pretty much how the writing seems to be turning out at this point.
000
She walks through the world, never quite seeing the things around her, never hearing the sound of people living their lives in harmony or discord, never smelling anything, not bread baking, not rotting corpses, nothing.
No. She smelled the apple grass, but she doesn't know what and she can't remember it anyway.
She walks, through revolutions and genocides, through peace and love, and none of it touches her. She tries to pretend that she is like those who live wherever she happens to be. She speaks when spoken to, she dances when someone asks her to, she accepts when people offer.
Except when they offer her a home, a place to live out her days. That she can't accept, even if she doesn't know why.
Sometimes someone will guess that something is wrong, that there is a void inside her that needs to be filled. A few of them try, and she smiles at them and says thank you. Rarely do they realize that they failed. In fact, only one woman ever did, and even she never found out why. None of them can fix her. She is empty, empty of life and empty of feelings.
Well, almost empty. There is something that drives her, an endless, wordless song that calls her, never letting her rest. But most days she can't hear it.
Sometimes people try to use her, and she usually lets them. It's written inside her, somewhere, to let the strangers do whatever they want to, because she is nothing, nobody, the lowest of the low because of something she did so long ago, so, so long ago when things still mattered to her. It hurts to think about that time, though, so she doesn't.
Mostly, anyway. Whenever something happens, something familiar and glowing, whenever she smells apple grass or is offered a home, whenever she hears the song and knows deep down that something out there is waiting for her, to hold her, to make her better, to love her, then the memories of way back when pull at her consciousness, trying to bring it out of hiding and stick it back together and make it work, somehow. She feels like an old computer that was hidden in the back of an attic only to have a psychotic psychologist hit her with a baseball bat again and again until she's in a thousand pieces and then scatter them all over the house so that even a hyperactive child pretending to be an explorer could never find her.
Only, she doesn't know what that means, computer and psychologist and baseball bat and explorer. She knows she should, but the emptiness always consumes the meaning and twists them until she forgets and can only walk forward, never looking back, because there's nothing to look at.
Absolutely nothing.