Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who.
Chapter 1
Rose had been back in her original world for two months now and she was still getting used to being back in her younger body. She was thrilled to be back, to have a second chance but she wondered why she had come back so far into her past.
Her mum had been true to her word, she had started going to therapy and had also started working at a local shop and with Rose working at a diner, the bills were paid easier. Rose remembered this time in her previous timeline and it sometimes surprised her that so much could change just because Rose had ended up in the hospital.
Last time her mum hadn't gotten help for her depression until Rose had moved in with Jimmy Stone, forcing her mum to start taking care of herself again. She was glad that she hadn't needed to repeat her former history in order to snap her mum out of her depressive episodes. She wanted to avoid Jimmy at all costs but she would've been willing to leave if it meant her mum would get the help she needed, thankfully though her visit to the hospital had shaken her mum enough to do so.
Rose had happily avoided entering into a relationship with Jimmy and instead of returning to college, she had chosen to enroll into online courses in order to provide herself with more time at home and to be able to work at her own pace.
Her mum had been surprisingly happy to allow Rose to set up a desktop computer with internet access for her schooling in her room. Her mum had apparently been considering having Rose drop either her schooling or quit her job in order to make sure she didn't overwork herself again.
Rose knew she had scared her mum with her hospital visit but it had been two months, she hadn't realized that she was still scared for her. She wanted to make sure she got her A levels this time, if only because she remembered how insecure people had made her feel when she had dropped out of school for a boy. That insecurity had stayed with her, so she was determined to get her A levels, she had an advantage in that she'd already taken and passed her A levels in Pete's World before she'd begun fading, she'd needed to in order to work at Torchwood.
Her mum was more than capable of making enough money to support them but now that they both were working and making enough to take care of the bills and even save up some money for individual wants, Rose didn't want to have either of them go back to living paycheck to paycheck.
So Rose decided to sell some of the paintings she'd done since coming back and hope they made as much as some of the paintings she'd done in Pete's World.
She wasn't really expecting much or even anything at all, so she was pretty surprised when a bidding war started on several of her paintings, four of thirty reaching just over five thousand pounds each before the bidding ended on it. She hadn't expected a bidding war but had set the minimum to one hundred pounds and set the auction to end in one week. Rose had checked on them the next week and immediately started yelling in excitement, waking her mum who she immediately told the good news to.
Her mum had been quite surprised and even thrilled that Rose had found another way to make money that wouldn't over work her. She had also been quite apologetic because her mum had once told her that being an artist wasn't a dependable career unless you were good at it. Rose had just laughed and waved it off, still too excited to be upset about much of anything.
Rose spent the rest of the day boxing all thirty of her paintings up and double checking that they were going to the correct place then she'd called Mickey and he'd driven her to the post office so she could have them sent off. Then he'd joined her and her mum for a celebratory dinner, where her mum had started talking about having to find a new place to live.
With all the profits from Rose selling her paintings, they would soon have to move out of the council estates in order to make room for someone who needed it more.
For a moment, Rose had panicked, she hadn't meant to change so much. They'd never been able to move out of the council estates in the previous timeline, but they'd only been able to do so because Rose had found the courage to sell her paintings this time. Last time she hadn't wanted to know how much they were worth because she had feared their worthlessness being confirmed. This time she was more confident in herself and had her mum's final words to her cheering her on.
Rose worried for several days before she realized that her location hadn't been important in meeting the Doctor. So long as she worked at Henrik's in May 2005, she'd meet him and then she'd just have to be sure to bring the plastic arm home with her in order to lure the Doctor. That sounded wrong and very manipulative but she was also trying to keep everything mostly the same.
She was quickly finding that having future knowledge was very draining and she had moments where she worried that she was going too far off track but then the painting profits hadn't been done on purpose, she had just been trying to earn some extra money in order to calm her mums worries.
Her mum was excited to leave the estates, but Rose worried and she shared those worries with Mickey and her mum, "The money I made off the paintings won't last forever. What if we move and I don't manage to sell anymore? It's very difficult to get back into the council estates once you've left them."
Mickey grimaced but shook his head sympathetically, "It really can't be helped, Rose. You've got more than fifty thousand in your bank account. The moment the council finds that out they'll give you an eviction notice."
Jackie nodded, her eyes were bright with tears as she looked around the flat. They'd been there ever since Rose had been born and while she was excited to move up in the world, she would be sad to leave.
"I could move out, get my own place and send mum my half of the money for the bills just in case it doesn't pan out?" Rose offered weakly.
Jackie tilted her head thoughtfully, it was a good fall back plan but her daughter was only seventeen and any place she found at her age wouldn't be suitable or safe to live alone, "We have a month after we receive the eviction notice to vacate the premises and we shouldn't receive one for a good month. By the end of this month if you don't managed a decent profit on your paintings, we'll find an alternative solution."
Rose had nodded, her excitement gone now and replaced with worry. It took her a few days to find her inspiration to paint again with all the worrying she had been doing, but she was on a deadline and she didn't have time to waste. The next couple of weeks she painted like her life depended on it, posting them nearly as soon as she had finished them.
By the end of the month it was determined. They would have to move. She'd managed twenty two paintings, sold all of them and had managed a profit of just under fifty five thousand pounds. Her mum had nearly had a heart attack, but Rose had felt a bit better about moving after her second batch of successful paintings being sold for a decent amount.
They'd stayed in London and moved into a two bedroom flat closer to the shops. Jackie decided to continue working but she told Rose that she should quit her diner job and focus on her A levels and paintings. Rose had been more than happy to give up being a diner lady to do just that.
It had taken some getting used to living in a new flat, learning a new neighborhood and relearning their new budget. Eventually they had settled their monthly budget as three thousand which included rent, utilities and daily costs. They'd never had such a high budget before and it was actually very nerve wracking. Rose spent a lot of time double checking her bank account and making sure that the bills were getting paid on time and correctly but they never did go over budget and she found herself slowly relaxing.
Rose continued working towards her A levels and selling her paintings as she finishes them, with just those two things on her plate she found herself with plenty of time to herself. Her savings was growing at a steady rate from all the paintings she was selling and she was speeding through her A levels as fast as she could. At the rate she was going she'd be able to finish her A levels by the time she was eighteen, though that mostly had to do with the fact that she already knew the material and could probably pass the exams right then but it'd catch the wrong sort of attention if she tried to take a shortcut now so she was forced to speed through all of the assignments before she could take the exams. At least this way people would just assume that she was just another overachiever student.
With all the extra time on her hands, Rose decided to tone her body back up. If she did end up meeting the Doctor and traveling with him, there would be an awful lot of running and she needed to be prepared for that. More than that if she was going to disappear for a year, she needed to prepare her mum for the idea of her traveling and with her mum out of the council estates she also needed to make sure her mum was financially stable.
She'd only been back in this world for four months in total, she had twenty more months before she met the Doctor, she could manage that.
She pushed herself harder than ever and on her days off when she spent time with her mum she told her of her dreams of traveling and painting beautiful landscapes. Telling her of places she wanted to see and paint, and as she talked or dreamed out loud her mum began smiling more at her enthusiasm. Her mum was steadily relaxing to the idea of her traveling on her own, of her leaving home.
At times Rose wondered about her Doctor and how he was getting on, if he would approve of what she was doing. Many things had changed since she had come back but only concerning Rose, her mum and Mickey.
They had been living in their new flat for a good three months and she'd been back for seven months before Rose talked to her mum about looking into buying a nice durable car and looking into what kind of house she wanted to buy.
Jackie wasn't really the type for fanciful dreams after Rose's dad had died and had pretty much settled into a simple life believing that she'd never get any further than where she was. She was fine living the way they did, but she was also aware that her daughter had bigger plans for her life. Her Rose wanted to travel, she wanted to see the world, she wanted adventure just like her father had, but she also knew that Rose wouldn't go without making sure that she was taken care of first. Jackie supposed she only had herself to blame for her daughter believing that she had to take care of her mother before she could live her life. After all her daughter had grown up watching her fall into episode after episode of drunken depression and she'd had to start working at a young age in order to help keep a roof over their heads and it had gotten worse after Rose had turned fifteen until Rose had her accident that had changed everything. She'd put so much pressure on her daughter and criticized her and her dreams, all because her husband had died and left her to take care of their child on her own. After Rose's accident Jackie had been forced to realize what she had done and she swore to take a step back and try being supportive instead of immediately sharing her doubts.
Then her Rose had shown her talent in painting, something else she had criticized and Jackie found herself ashamed of herself for trying to break her daughters spirit in her want to protect her. She was proud of her daughter though and she'd made sure to tell her so. Her daughter had found something she wanted to do with her life and she was so brilliant at it that after just four and a half months of doing it her Rose was actually talking about buying her a car and a house like it was a done deal. Her Rose was so beautiful, strong and independent, she couldn't help but want to cry at seeing her Rose bloom the way she was. Her daughter worried about her enough as it was though so she just pulled her Rose over to her own desktop computer and together they looked into pricing for durable cars and houses. A week later Rose did get her a car and Jackie happily showed it off to all her friends, bragging about her daughter getting it for her and how well Rose was doing. Even better her daughter was saving up money to buy her a lovely little two bedroom house just outside of London.
Rose had been back for a full year now and she had finally managed to get her mum the two bedroom house that she'd wanted. They'd called up Mickey, who'd been a regular visitor since they'd moved, to help them move her mum out to her new house and once finished they'd all gone out for dinner to celebrate. Once dinner was over, her mum had gotten into her car and drove to her new home, while Mickey had walked Rose back to her flat.
It was at that point that Rose had stumbled into a slight issue. He'd asked her out to dinner and she'd had to turn him down and when he questioned it, she'd had to tell him that she saw him as family, she couldn't see him in a romantic light. He hadn't talked to her for a week afterwards but they had grown up together and even he could see how she had come to that conclusion, so he'd taken some time to himself and came back determined to be the best big brother ever.
Rose was also determined to make sure that he knew she cared about him even if she couldn't love him romantically. With her mum living in her own home and Rose still living in her two bedroom flat, she decided to invite him to move in with her and off the estates since she had an extra room. He'd agreed and she'd spent nearly a month trying to talk him into putting his mechanic and computer skills to good use rather than stay working in a rundown mechanic shop that was steadily going out of business.
Turns out he just needed someone to encourage and listen to him. He wanted to have his own repair shop for computers and cars, but living on the estates meant that he couldn't get a decent enough job to save the money he needed without getting an eviction notice. He had just been planning to take over his bosses mechanic shop after he retired. Now that he'd moved into her spare room and off the estate, he was able to find himself a better job and while he did pay his half of the bills, he was also able to save more of his paycheck than he'd thought he'd be able to.
Jackie had made sure Mickey knew that she was grateful that he'd moved in with Rose, because Rose had a habit of working herself to exhaustion and he knew exactly what she meant. Mickey remembered Rose's accident and how worried he had been, so he was careful to keep an eye on her. It was this careful watch of her that made him discover something that she had kept from her mother. Rose was speeding through her A levels really fast and she was nearly done with them. It amazed him really and when he had asked her why she was keeping quiet about it, he learned something else that had really concerned him. Rose was a very good student when she wanted to be but before she had her accident she hadn't had the self-confidence to pursue her wants and dreams because she feared her mum's criticisms or upsetting her mum with her 'fanciful' dreams. Mickey had always known that Jackie had a hard time raising her daughter all by herself after her husband died, but he hadn't considered how Rose would take her mum's depressive episodes and cynical attitude towards life in general. No matter how scary her accident had been, Mickey would forever be grateful that it had woken Jackie up to what her daughter was going through. Now Rose could follow her heart and her dreams however she wanted and he was happy for her because she was doing wonderful, so much better than before her accident where he could now see that she had just been going through the motions.
He learned more about her after moving in with her than he did growing up with her and it made him realize how much she had changed, how much her mum's criticisms held her back and also just how much she hid from the world. Rose was very good at taking care of other people and was hyper aware of other people's feelings, except for when they were directed towards her. Rose was very determined to finish her A levels, not because she felt she needed them but because she didn't want people to use their absence as a reason to make her feel insecure and less of a person. Rose was very creative and passionate with her paintings and was making a very decent profit off of them and by that he meant that some of her paintings were being sold for what some people would buy a car for and that was very regularly. It was no wonder how she'd managed to buy her mum a car and a house straight out within eight months of continuously selling her paintings. He had thought she had wanted him to move in to help with bills after spending all her savings on her mum but that really wasn't the case at all, she didn't need his help at all. While it was true that sometimes her paintings didn't always get a good price, the lowest she'd ever gotten on one of her paintings was a hundred and fifty pounds and she always ended up selling multiple paintings every month, so she was clearly earning more than the three thousand pounds a month she'd need for her flat and monthly expenses by herself. Since he'd moved in and she was saving an extra fifteen hundred pounds she'd been using that money to collect books for the wall to wall book shelf she'd had brought in to her room not long after he'd moved in. Books that he'd catch her reading on her days off or while he was watching a football game. He'd had no idea that she was such an avid reader before but apparently it was another of the things Rose had stopped doing after her mum had criticized her for it.
Rose also loved cooking and baking and was very serious about making sure they both ate enough every day and this was actually something he understood after growing up on the estates and having to live paycheck to paycheck and worrying about going hungry. Yeah he got it.
Rose also seemed to constantly need to be moving, except for when she's reading or painting, although sometimes she did dance and sing while she painted. She did jogging and yoga in the mornings and the evenings, assignments most of the day, a painting or two after schoolwork, she danced through making meals or baking deserts, and when he was working late on a car or one of his friends had asked for some help with their computer she'd show up at his job with a packed meal or bring a plate of food to his room and start asking questions about how to fix this or how to fix that.
Rose was a very curious person and she was always very eager to learn, so one day while they both had a day off he dragged her down to his car under their assigned carport with his tool kit, (after of course she had jogged, done her yoga and fed them both. She was such a mother hen sometimes.) and they spent the day with him showing her how to fix and take care of a car. That ended up being a thing they did every Saturday and every Sunday he'd spend teaching her how to repair computers and other machines. Like when their dishwasher stopped working one day, or one of the game consoles stopped reading a disc, or even when their air conditioning unit stopped working during a particularly hot day. He'd laughed himself silly at Rose's blushing face when he caught her reading some new supplemental handyman books she'd gotten or when she'd been practicing stripping wires, copying the images in the books as she went, like he'd just caught her planning to rob a bank.
When Rose passed all of her A levels two months after she had turned eighteen, Mickey had called Jackie and together they had planned an outing to celebrate her success. It was that outing where Mickey learned that Rose was planning to travel the world after she saved up enough money. He had snickered into his pint when Rose's eye's had lit up as she talked about all the places she wanted to go to and paint. He'd also nearly punched Jimmy Stone when he'd come back from the bar to find him trying to sidle up to an inebriated and unsteady Rose. Even swaying in her seat Rose had looked both uncomfortable and irritated and there was absolutely no way in hell Mickey was letting that asshole get close to Rose. She was doing good in her life she didn't need someone leaching off her success and knocking her off course.
He'd already had to redirect a conversation between her and Jackie about Rose finding a boyfriend, settling down, and starting her life somewhere. Jackie had reminded Rose that she hadn't ever had a boyfriend and Mickey had found himself starring at Rose in surprise. He hadn't known that, but then Jackie had started going off into too much information territory and he'd changed the subject.
He'd been all geared up to hall off and pop Jimmy in the mouth, when Rose casually slipped her foot behind one of Jimmy's and thrown her drink in his face. Jimmy had yelled out and went to stumble back but he tripped over her foot and went careening into the table behind him, ruining an entire table of what looked like brand new drinks of a group of four livid strangers. Yeah, Mickey didn't think Rose would ever have to deal with Jimmy Stone again, if he didn't learn his lesson from that beating alone then he was just too stupid to worry about.
It was not long after New Year's 2005 when Rose suddenly told her mum and Mickey that she'd gotten a job at Henrik's. Both of them had stopped what they were doing and stared at her in confusion, although Mickey didn't seem quite as confused as her mum. It had gone quiet for a long moment before Mickey snorted in amusement, "You just can't sit still, can you?"
Her mum's head had snapped to look at him in surprise at his conclusion but he ignored her surprise.
Rose had rolled her eyes with a smile, "Not really. My income comes from my paintings but I'll drive myself crazy if I hole myself up in the flat and paint the entire time and if I'm going to be out for no reason then I might as well make some money while I do so. I'm going to need as much as I can if I'm going to start my world traveling in May."
Her mum hummed in understanding, "What are you going to do with the flat?"
"If Mickey's fine with taking over the lease by himself he can have it?" Rose looked over at him and he nodded, "Yeah, I make more than enough to take it over and when you get back you'll still have a room. I promise."
Rose snickered. She wasn't worried about something like that but she nodded anyway.
"Are you sure you'll be alright on your own?" Her mum question in concern.
Rose smiled brightly just as she did any other time she talked about traveling, "Yeah, I'll be fine. I'm tougher than I look."
Mickey chuckled from the front room, where he was watching the game and listening to their conversation as well, "After what she did to Jimmy Stone, I think she's good, Jackie."
Rose snorted in amusement as her mum looked at both of them in confusion. She had only seen her daughter throw her drink in his face before Jimmy had fallen back into a table of four strangers and gotten a beaten for it. Neither Mickey or Rose would tell her why Mickey seemed to think Rose had pulled that off on purpose and it didn't look like they were going to this time either, enjoying their private joke as they were. That's fine, she smiled to herself. Her daughter was a responsible, strong, and independent woman. Let her have some secrets.
When the end of April came along, Jackie and Mickey were treated to the amusing sight of Rose frantically packing and then unpacking and then repacking with something else added to her burden. She was trying to take all of her painting supplies including her easel and canvases. She kept tossing everything out double checking that she had her passport and her ids before replacing everything again, just to do it again the next day.
Then she'd apparently forgotten to turn in her two weeks' notice so she was going to be getting a late start on her world travel. Jackie and Mickey giggled over it for days. Luckily she hadn't been planning anything ahead of time saying that she wanted to just go with what felt right in that moment.
Rose would admit that a lot of her antics were a cover for both her excitement and anxiety in meeting the Doctor again. She was excited to see him again but she was also very worried that too much had been changed and she wouldn't see him again. She'd promised herself that if too much had changed and she didn't see him by the end of May then she was going to go on her world tour and hunt him down if she had to. Really shouldn't be too hard with all the trouble he got into on earth.
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