Title: Fleur de Temps
Author: TardisIsTheOnlyWaytoTravel
Pairings: Reinette/Ten, retrospective Rose/Nine, a bit of post- Rose/Ten.
Story Summary:
What if Reinette had come aboard the TARDIS after all? Smart, ambitious and beautiful, the Doctor is dazzled by her and neglects Rose and Mickey, with calamitous results. AU.
Setting: Series Two. After "The Girl in the Fireplace."
Author notes:
This is… pure self-indulgence, really. Not even written with an audience in mind. Personally I like Reinette, but I can see conflict between her and Rose there, so I've exaggerated potential character faults here. Most anti-Reinette stories make her cheap and stupid though, which is a shame because in the episode she wasn't. I feel making her like that detracts from the story, so I've tried to write one that's different. Yah. I didn't bother trying to make this as good as usual, though, so be warned… I think the dialogues fairly good and in character, though.
--
FLEUR DE TEMPS
--
The Doctor was not – quite the person he used to be. The other regenerations would certainly never have gone around snogging mistresses of the king, the TARDIS thought, even if they were French, and pretty, and smart, and clever. It just wasn't something that would have occurred to them. Of course, Time Lords were always unbelievably thick about some things, the number of times she's wished she'd had arms to slap understanding into his head when one of his companions – but that was pointless, Time Lords were just made that way.
But now, here he was, ignoring precious, alive Rose who understood some things about the universe in ways he didn't, treating the clever, small-minded woman he'd brought with him like some special crystal and letting her treat Rose the way she did. She could see his thoughts, and he was as vain and pleased as a peacock, over a shrewd flighty woman who admired him only because of her, the TARDIS, the ship that was ignored –
-
Rose had looked into the TARDIS, and the TARDIS had looked back, and deep in Rose's subconscious mind a bond had formed between them. Every hurt, every word or gesture, every little fear and worry that makes up a human's life the TARDIS felt also.
The Doctor was damaging the wonderful, alive, powerful core of Rose, and the TARDIS couldn't allow that. If he didn't come to his senses soon, she'd have to take direct action, no matter how forbidden it was…
oo o0o oo
Rose wandered gloomily over and sat at the table next to Mickey, having just been given another 'friendly' hint about decorous attire by Reinette. Mickey glanced at her sympathetically.
"Don't listen to her, she's just stuck in the nineteenth century," he told Rose.
"Eighteenth."
"Whatever." He gestured the inaccuracy away as trivial. "You look nice, you always look nice."
Rose sighed.
"Thanks." She slumped in her seat. "She's like, I don't know, this great blonde cat. Always getting her claws in, and the Doctor thinks she's being nice."
Mickey snorted in disgust.
"I never thought I'd say this but this Doctor is a fool. The last one was a bastard –"
"Mickey…"
" – well he was Rose, he was always calling me Ricky and saying I was an idiot, but he was smart and alright and looked after you Rose. But then he changed his face and now he's a prick." He gestured angrily despite Rose's shocked look. "I mean it, Rose. He sees some fickle upper-class snob and next thing he's all over her like a rash like she's the best thing ever and ignores his best friend and lets that bint insult you every chance she gets. I'm sick of it Rose. You're worth more than that. The old Doctor knew that. He doesn't deserve you."
Rose found that tears were prickling in her eyes as Mickey folded his arms in a glaring, earnest way.
"What am I supposed to do?" she choked out. "I mean, I can't just leave him – "
"Why not?" Mickey demanded.
"He's the Doctor!" Rose protested.
"Ah, but that's just it, he's not anymore, is he? Not your Doctor, anyway. And if he's forgotten everything you two have been through coz he's too busy flirting and who knows what else, God, why not leave him." His tone of voice made it a statement of fact rather than a question.
Rose didn't say anything. Everything that Mickey had just said rang true. She had loved the Doctor, still loved him in fact, but he wasn't the man she'd first fallen in love with. Wasn't the snarky, matter-of-fact bloke who had shown her the universe, who patiently explained things he thought were simple, who shied away from emotion but who somehow made it clear to her that he cared… This new Doctor was flippant, unreliable, sometimes unreasonable, inadvertently callous… so selfish sometimes. Rose would give up anything and everything for him, really, she would, but to be thrown away for an ambitious narrow-minded woman who couldn't see what was really there underneath everything…?
-
Rose didn't know what to do.
oo o0o oo
It was at this point that the TARDIS's extremely stretchy temper finally snapped. If TARDISes saw any point in cursing, she would have done so.
Right, she decided, he's hurt Rose too much. It's time to sort things out before the imbecile makes a complete mess of things.
oo o0o oo
Rose dreamt that night.
-
It was a peculiar dream. Rose had never been able to remember what had happened after she'd looked into the TARDIS, before she woke up on the console room floor with the other Doctor dying in front of her. Well, obviously the thing that vaguely resembled a plan had worked, sort of, well he wasn't permanently dead and the Daleks was gone, so obviously it had worked more or less…
But now, here was memory, flooding forth from some previously untapped reservoir.
Rose burned.
-
It was astonishing, wonderful, and utterly terrifying. Everything that was, had been could be, would be, it was all spread out in front of her. She was drowning in it, burning in the flames of existence on every plane, but even so one small thought crept through,
is this what the TARDIS sees all the time?
and there reassuringly at the back of her mind where she was stopping Rose from being utterly consumed, the TARDIS said
Yes.
And things flowed between, Rose, TARDIS, which was which she didn't know and honestly it didn't matter because really they were all about the same thing right now – saving the Doctor. And Rose had stepped out, truly seeing everything for what it was. The Daleks were so small and insignificant, just dust in a different configuration that was all, but there was the Doctor, just as frail and fragile but burning brighter than any dull star, acting like a pebble to the universe's lake and his emotions sloshing forward like a wave.
My Doctor, one of them had said. Possibly it was both of them.
He looked so frightened, so afraid for her, so desperate to help her, and he took the power from her and absorbed it and released it, never caring that it burned through his bodily self like a flame to tissue paper. And Rose had forgotten, had forgotten that her own Doctor had given up himself in order to save her. But now she remembered, and could feel the subdued lingering echo of power running at the bottom of her mind where the TARDIS waited.
-
Rose woke with a gasp in the dark, her mind reeling.
oo o0o oo
The Doctor hummed cheerfully as he waited around outside Reinette's door, hands in pockets, waiting for her to finish her toilette so that he could escort her to breakfast.
Oh, she was amazing, his Reinette – well, not his, he corrected himself, but he knew what he meant – so clever and amusing and it did help that she was beautiful, yes, but honestly what did it matter when she was so clever and made him laugh and understood him and looked around at the universe with such bright eyes?
Reinette's door opened and she came out in a rustle of skirts, smiling.
"Good morning, my lonely angel," she greeted him. "I see that my tardiness has inconvenienced you yet again."
He grinned back.
"Oh not at all," he began, "gives me time to think, frankly not enough of that with all these adventures I always seem to be on, of course I find the time anyway because I'm brilliant, did I mention that? but it's nice to have a bit of quiet time to think to myself, especially," he smiled at her with mischief dancing in his eyes, "about a certain beautiful, very intelligent young woman of my acquaintance."
The smile was returned.
"Oh, really?"
"Mm, yes, did I ever tell you some of the smart things Rose has done?" he asked in a deliberately offhand manner.
She gave a gasp, and a choked gurgle of laughter. She tried to look piqued, but the laughter in her eyes gave her away.
"Really, Doctor, it is not polite to talk of another young woman when you are already talking, and I might add, flirting with one," she told him coyly.
"Oh, is that right?" he scratched the back of his head, "well I'm terribly rude sometimes, thought I might have mentioned that."
"Well," and she looked demurely up through her lashes, "I'm sure quite a lot can be excused for such an man as yourself, Doctor."
The Doctor grinned at her and together they walked through the door into the dining room. Before they'd simply had a kitchen, but the TARDIS has made the usual polite adjustments for her new guest.
Mickey and Rose were eating breakfast already. They were a bit quiet this morning, the Doctor noted, ah well, probably not quite awake yet.
He helped Reinette into a chair opposite Rose and next to his own.
"Thank you," she said briskly but politely. She smiled softly and brightly at Rose.
"What a nice colour," Reinette complimented her. "It suits you very well."
"Thanks," Rose muttered.
"Although," Reinette's voice became so apologetic and so kind, "are you sure it is quite becoming to wear such a shapeless garment? And trousers, quite indelicate, don't you think? Of course, it's not your fault, it was the way you were raised – "
"What, in a midden?"
"Rose!" the Doctor exclaimed, shocked.
But to his surprise a slight tinge of colour had appeared in Reinette's cheeks.
"Well," she said repressively, "if you don't know help when someone tries to give it –"
"What, because I'm too stupid and lower-class and cheap to realise how much more qualified you are at everything?" Rose was on her feet. The Doctor noticed in surprise that she was wearing one of her old hoodies, a red one, and a shirt and jeans. And was her hair longer? …Of course not, he reassured himself, hair doesn't grow inches overnight…
"You think I don't know what you think?" Rose spat. "You with your little digs about me and my mother and how hard it must have been for me and always telling me how I could dress better, like I'm some cheap tart –" her eyes turned dark and blazing " – and implying I'm not good enough or smart enough or talented enough to be here, and the way you just ignore Mickey completely because he's beneath your notice – "
"Hear hear!" Mickey added.
"and thinking way inside your head about special you are and how dull we are and how clever you were to get here and how we're just a silly ship even if we travel in time –"
Rose stopped, but she'd already slipped.
"Hang on," the Doctor demanded, "a silly ship? That bit wasn't you." He folded his arms and frowned.
Rose just looked at him.
"It's both of us, just like we've always been since we looked into each other," she said in a flat voice. "I didn't realise until last night. But deep down I knew, I just didn't know how I knew things." She looked down, pushing her hair out of her face before looking up again. "The you that was here before, he would have noticed. The you that died for me."
Reinette went "what?" sharply, but he barely noticed. He'd gone cold.
"What are you talking about?"
"I remember," Rose went on in that unnaturally steady, clear voice, "what happened. You know, I've been thinking about leaving, because you never notice, you just ignore things and ignore people like sometimes they're just not important. But people are always important. And last night I remembered what happened after I looked into the TARDIS and she looked into me and I thought, 'why am I still sticking around?' The old you died for me, you didn't do it just so you could ignore like some bit of furniture or something, or replace me or just abandon me like you did Sarah Jane –"
"Leave her out of this," he said sharply.
" – and the last thing you said, before I was left in London while you faced the Daleks, was that if there was one thing I could do for you it was live. 'Live, Rose Tyler.' You remember that?"
And he did, it all came rushing back in perfect clarity, the love, what he was sacrificing himself for
– and remembering who he had been made him begin to realise what was happening.
"No," he said, the beginnings of fear in his voice.
"So I'm going to take your advice. I'm going to live. And that means leaving."
"You can't," he said desperately.
"You're just going to leave him?" Reinette asked sharply. "After everything he –"
"Oh shut up," Mickey told her. "You made it clear you want to be Queen Bee. All this 'I'm better than you, the Doctor's mine' stuff you've been doing. Well it's worked. You can have him. Rose deserves better."
"What, and you think that you are the alternative?" Her voice was cutting.
When he replied Mickey's voice was full of reluctant, raw pain.
"No. Not me. I know that. Rose's way beyond me."
"Mickey," Rose began.
"No Rose," he interrupted, "Maybe we had something once and it was good, I'll admit that. It was great. But you've… I don't know, grown maybe. You deserve someone who can match you, be as good as you are. And the old Doctor was that. But this one's not, that's all." He looked the Doctor in the eye. "I just hope you realise what you've done." He turned to Rose. "Come on, let's go before he starts all the lame justification." There was disgust in Mickey's voice.
Rose just looked at him, and he felt everything stripped away in that gaze.
"Bye Doctor," she said, and together she and Mickey left.
-
The Doctor stood, disbelieving, then ran to follow, but the TARDIS had other ideas. The door slammed shut and she began dematerialising.
"No!" the Doctor shouted, banging on the door and whirling to frantically work at the console to no avail, "I won't lose her again!"
Reinette put a hand on his shoulder. He stood still, then reached up to grip it.
"I've lost her," and the ages showed through in his voice, "I've lost her."
Reinette's face was unreadable.
