A/N: I had pretty much given up on this story during a major bout of writer's block about two years ago, but through all that time I have been receiving email notifications at least once every few weeks about someone new having favorited it or written a review, and I always go and read them and consider continuing the story but usually end up not feeling motivated enough. Well, it took two years, but I did finally get inspired to update it. Just look at it this way: that's two whole years of Doctor/Rose angst just building up in my heart with no outlet until now. The way the story is taking me now is not exactly the same place as I had originally intended when I started the fic, but it'll definitely be an adventure (this is the first AU I've written for any fandom, normally I would write prequels or sequels but keep everything essentially canon, so please bear with me here. :) and feel free to come follow me on tumblr, too (bobbypinroachclip).

"Rose!"

Raxacoricofallapatorius. Lather. Raxacoricofallapatorius. Scrub. Raxacoricofallapatorius. Rinse. Raxacoricofallapatorius. Lather. Raxacoricofallapa-

"ROSE!"

I rolled my eyes and set the plate in the dish drainer. I'd heard my mum's wailing the first time 'round, but thought she'd give it up if I ignored her. Obviously, I'd underestimated the gravity of the situation. Eyes closed, I leaned my face forward toward the sink, letting the steam from the hot, soapy water warm my nose and fill my lungs. Shutting off the water and wiping my pruney hands roughly down the legs of my jeans, I turned from the kitchen and followed the sound of my mother's voice down the hall of my small apartment into the bedroom.

"RO-"

"I'm right here, Mum," I cut her off. The words came out sounding lifeless, but not harsh. I just didn't have the energy to bother much with emphasis or expression lately. She jumped and looked up at me, as if I was the last thing she'd expected to be standing at the door. She was looking pretty rough, sitting on the floor, surrounded by boxes and bags half full and heaping piles of clothes waiting to be sorted through. I'd been found out at last. John and I had been moved into this apartment for nearly four months and I hadn't brought myself to unpack anything I didn't absolutely need, so finally she had taken it upon herself to invade on a day I had off work and do it for me.

"Oh, Rose," she sighed in that raking nasally voice I'd come to love over the past two and a half decades but somehow still managed to make me cringe or roll my eyes every time. I knew she didn't actually have anything to say, she was just silently scolding me for failing at real life. She looked up at me and held up a pair of faded blue jeans that didn't fit me anymore, as if to say just by showing them to me that she knows I wouldn't be able to wear them, so why, oh why, are they balled up in a trash bag full of other clothing I actually wear?

I could have easily said something snarky-I didn't ask or particularly want her to be rummaging through my stuff-but at that moment my eyes fell on the bed behind her, where, rumpled and nearly forgotten, lay a light pink zip-up hoodie, normal to anyone else but whose every stitch reeked with memories I'd trained myself to glance over, whose scent-imagined, probably, now-made my head spin uncomfortably. My breathing became heavy very suddenly and I felt like I needed to sit down. I tried to roll my eyes at my mom as I pivoted out of my doorway and turned down the hall toward the living room of our small apartment.

Lost and buried words whispered in my head as I collapsed onto the couch. Humans decay. You wither and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone that you l- God, if only he'd finished that sentence. If only... Maybe now he wouldn't be alone. And maybe I wouldn't feel so alone. God, I know it's selfish to wish things like that... I mean... John wouldn't even exist... Who knows, maybe my mum wouldn't even have come over to this world with me. Pete's World, we called it. What-if's are so bad for me, I could get lost in them for hours. I can remember every word the man ever said to me, and I've had way too much time to overanalyze each one. You can spend the rest of your life with me. But I can't spend the rest of mine with you,he'd said a long time ago-years before he knew exactly how true the statement would ring.

I sound pathetic, I know. But I'm not just some dramatic girl mooning over an ex or a missed opportunity. I lost my future. I was the luckiest girl in the world to have been handed the excitement and the adventure and the opportunities I was given travelling with him. Because of him and my life with him I have a father, something I'd wished for every day for twenty years; because of him I've seen the future of humanity, seen the end of the world, seen time itself. All that is gone, now, and the man I love sealed me out of his world permanently... So yeah, I'm depressed, sue me.

I pushed the sound of his voice to the back of my mind with great effort and shoved myself up from the couch. I have John. It should feel the same. It should feel better. Should. So it will, I'll make it work. I tell myself every day that I can make it work and I do. What's not to be happy about with John? He remembers all of it, everything that I miss. He's got the same face, the same mannerisms, the same whack fashion sense. I remind myself of all of this because I have to-because I have to recall their similarities to push away thoughts of their differences, to pretend things can be the same again. Yep, that's me: cruel, depressed, delusional Rose Tyler. Sometimes I'm glad he can't see me now.

I got up to go back to the kitchen where I'd been cleaning dishes, but on my way out of the room something caught my eye. On one side of our cramped living room we had a two and a half person couch, the door to the hallway, and a standing lamp with a table built into it. There was a coffee table in the middle of the room and the opposite wall featured a small tv in one corner and fake fireplace with a painting, large for the size of the room, of three deer running through a forest hanging over it. The painting was something the previous tenants had left hanging there and we'd not had anything to replace it with so it had just become part of our décor. Normally I'd have just walked right past it into the kitchen without a second glance, but normally there wouldn't have been a huge crack running all the way across the painting and clear out onto the wall as if they were one surface.

I'd seen that crack before, a few weeks back... the same shape, size... but it couldn't be, because I'd been concussed that day at work. I'd been delusional.

I took a step toward the crack and reached out my hand, but for some reason didn't touch the broken wall in front of me. What could have caused this? I hadn't felt an earthquake. And how could the crack be on both the wall and the painting as one? Quickly, I ran into the kitchen and started pulling things out of the cupboards that lined the opposite side of that same wall. I felt the surface there behind the shelves, ran my hands across the smooth wood and the wall behind it showing no trace of structural damage. Impossible... The word used to not be a part of my vocabulary, but the time for all things possible was something I'd accepted I'd never get back. Didn't mean I was happy about it, but I had accepted that it was a thing of the past. But this... my heart skipped a beat.

Coming back into the living room, I stood directly in front of the crack. Maybe I hadn't been hallucinating that day in the shop after all... Maybe I couldn't have my life back, but maybe the way I had been living it for the past few months didn't have to be the only other option. I still felt the constant heartache of missing what was before, but for the first time in a while, I simultaneously felt hope that my life here in Pete's World didn't necessarily have to be as boring as waking up to an alarm every morning, doing my best to love my boyfriend while both of us knew he was my second choice, working 40 hours a week, paying bills, doing dishes... It may sound human and natural and normal, but natural, normal, and human are all things that are just not good enough for me after everything I've seen.

With this hope in mind and little fear of losing what I had built here, I let go of whatever had been holding me back from touching the crack and again reached out my hand. When my fingertips were about to touch the surface of it, the crack suddenly widened to nearly two inches and a very soft light slipped through. I pulled my arm back to my body but leaned my face precariously close to the light and closed one eye, attempting to focus in, trying to see something.

"Where are you?" The girl's voice was a little louder this time, as though she were in the room with me, but with the same Scottish accent I'd heard before in the crack. Ha!I exhaled excitedly, taking this to mean I hadn't been making all of this up because of a head injury a few weeks ago. I put my hand over my mouth to stop myself making too much noise and risk my mum coming to check on me out here.

"Amelia?" I asked in a loud whisper, recalling that to be the name of the little girl who'd spoken to me at work that day a few weeks ago. No answer. I got as close as I could get without touching the edges of the crack in my wall and focused my vision the best I could. I could sort of make out a bedroom. Looked like any old bedroom to me. As the edges sharpened I could see it was a young girl's bedroom. The biggest indicator was the fact that there was a young girl there, facing away from me. She was kneeling in front of the bed like a child praying, her long red hair falling to about the middle of her nightgown. Although this was one of the strangest situations I had ever been in and I wasn't sure what proper conduct would be for it, I felt uncomfortable watching a little girl pray. It felt like an invasion of privacy, so I tried to announce myself. "Amelia, can you hear me?"

"I've been waiting, like you told me," the girl said, but not to me. A strange prayer, I thought, but she clearly couldn't hear me calling her name. It was rude to listen, I'm sure, but what would you have done? "You said you'd take me with you... You said to pack a bag... It's been months."

She sounded so sad. I wasn't sure what I was seeing, but I wasn't sure I wanted to know anymore, because the girl sounded the kind of sad that I feel every day, like the magic had been sucked out of life and left her with a day-to-day routine. I don't know how I could tell, I couldn't even see her face. But I could feel it-her sadness was akin to my own.

"Please come back for me, Raggedy Man. Please come back, strange doctor... I'm scared."

My heart slammed against my chest at the sound of those words. They wouldn't have made sense to anyone who'd never begged out loud for their doctor to come back to them while they're all alone. Hell, they didn't entirely make sense to me, but just hearing such familiar words was enough for me to forget about any reason I had for not touching the crack and reach my hand out toward it. I don't know if I'd reached out to comfort the girl, or if I'd been wishing for a miracle to take me to wherever she was, but the second my fingertips brushed the surface of the crack, I was pulled forward into it with a force I couldn't have stopped if I had changed my mind. Realistically, the crack was nowhere near wide enough for me to fall into, but then again realistically, a crack like this couldn't possibly exist. And so I fell forward like Alice down the rabbit hole. The whooshing feeling in the pit of my stomach was similar to the jolt of a vortex manipulator and everything was happening so fast and then suddenly everything was just dark.