Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who.
Prologue
Rose Tyler had known for ages that she was fading from existence. It had been coming on ever since she'd been trapped in Pete's World, an alternate or parallel world to her original world where she had been born. This world knew she didn't belong and it was slowly deleting her from it.
She now understood why the Doctor had been so scared of them landing here the first time. It hadn't just been the temptations of an alternate world, like they had thought, like he had let her believe. Jackie Tyler, her mum and Mickey Smith, her ex-boyfriend and best friend were fine. They were simply replacing their alternate selves, but Rose Tyler had never existed in this world in the first place. She was an abnormality, a glitch and the world was trying to fix it.
The public forgot her first, then their friends, Torchwood and then even her alternate father, Pete Tyler. Mickey and her mum were the last to remember her and they had tried so hard to keep remembering her but they were only human and they couldn't fight the world, they couldn't fight off an invisible force that was altering their minds and memories.
In the end just before her mum forgot her completely, Rose finally figured out what was happening to her. Every time she faded in Pete's World, Rose would briefly wake in a hospital bed with a worried and frantic version of her mum at her bedside.
The last time she had faded, she had woken and had managed to speak to her mum, who had told her that she had fainted and hit her head at school due to overworking. Her mum had been hysterical and sobbing had told her that from now on her mum would get help for her depression and get a job to help pay the bills, that they would split the bills and Rose wouldn't need to push herself so much anymore.
Rose had faded back into Pete's World before Rose could answer or comfort her mum.
Rose immediately told her mum what she suspected was going on. Rose was going back to her original world, back to the beginning, long before she had met the Doctor. After all her mum had stated that she had fainted at school, that meant she was going back eighteen months to two years before meeting the Doctor. Probably closer to two years due to the fact that her mum had also mentioned getting a job herself to help take care of the bills, this meant that the time period had to be right before Rose had started seriously dating Jimmy Stone and debating whether she should move in with him to get away from her mum, who had fallen into another one of her drunken depressive phases that she'd had since dad had died.
Rose would've been just about to turn seventeen or had just turned seventeen. She was apparently still in school and working at the same time, something she had been doing since fourteen. Jimmy Stone and dropping out of school had happened about three months after turning seventeen.
Her mum had made her swear that Rose would do whatever it took to stay in her original world, even if it meant that she had to stay with the Doctor. She told Rose to make sure that she didn't let her mum interfere with Rose's personal happiness just to keep her happy like she had before. Her mum had told her that she had always feared that she had been responsible for Rose suddenly taking off with the Doctor like she had. Rose was like her father, an adventurer at heart and her head in the clouds, and after her mum had lost her dad, she wasn't able to handle Rose being just like him and had been overly criticizing of Rose's fanciful ideas of being an artist or a writer or a singer, constantly pushing her daughter to be more realistic, to get a proper job and to stop dreaming.
Her mum made her swear that she would keep dreaming this time, that she would fight for her dreams and never let her mum stop her again. Her mum wanted her to be happy for longer this time, not just for when the Doctor started showing her the world. Just before Rose faded into her original world for good, her mum told her that she would always be proud of her and that no matter what Rose did she would always love her.
She woke up back in the hospital bed, her mum still crying hysterically and Rose realized quickly that time had passed faster in Pete's World, which meant that barely a few seconds had passed for her mum in this world and Rose was grateful for that.
"Everything will be fine, mum. We'll both do better." Rose smiled tiredly up at her mum, who immediately began sobbing harder and threw herself over Rose to hug her.
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