It Thunders Loudest Near the Throne
Title: It Thunders Loudest Near the Throne
Rating: G
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Madame de Pompadour
Words: ~2,000
Spoilers: The Girl In The Fireplace, Journey's End
Beta: curriejean
Summary: Set immediately after Journey's End. Having lost everything, the Doctor returns to a place where he can at least have one thing.
These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth, circa Regna tonat.
-Thomas Wyatt
Her eyes stopped halfway across the page when she became aware of his presence. She lowered the book into her lap and folded her hands on top of it, and did not look up. “I did not expect that I would see you again.”
She heard him laugh, a false little sound that echoed in her chamber, and she let herself lift her eyes and see: he stood in the arched doorway, leaning on an elbow, his gaze lifted toward the high ceiling, unseeing, she knew. His expression was complex, but showed some extent of misery. He turned his eyes to her. “Hello, Reinette.”
She nodded. “Doctor.” She set her book on the side table, feeling the heat of the fire in the hearth against her arms as she reached out. The flames were pale in the light from the windows, the grey half-light of an early evening drenched in rain. “It has been three years for me.” She looked back up at him. “But I suspect it has been more for you.”
He dropped his elbow and stood upright, putting his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He stared down at the floor. “I honestly couldn’t tell you.”
Her mouth twitched. “Losing track of time is an odd trait for one called a Time Lord, I should think.”
The Doctor looked up and smiled, but it slowly faded as he looked at her, as he let his eyes trace the lines worn by time into her face, faint but steadily more noticeable, steadily becoming more real. He came further into the room. “I left you,” he said.
“Oh, did you?” she asked, and turned to retrieve her book, smiling. “Well, off with you, then. I’ll not have the man who abandoned me at the fireplace come back and repeat his offense.”
He stopped halfway between the door and her chair. She caught his expression, turning back, and she faltered in the joke; he was lost. He gazed at her with eyes that begged for something - a benediction, a need for grace, for forgiveness beyond whatever offense he had done to her those years ago, when she stood at her window and looked for a star, any star. She watched him sway on his feet with a mind that was too heavy for his body, a grief too great to be bound in his shape. She held out her hand, and he came to take it, and he fell to his knees at her feet.
“Doctor,” she said, surprised, and reached out to smooth his hair. “You’re wet,” she murmured, leaning forward to brush the beads of water from the tips of his locks. “The storm is strong out there.”
He shook his head. He was staring at the skirt of her dress where it collected in a bunch at the floor. “It isn’t from this storm. It’s from another one. A long way off.”
She brushed her fingers through his hair. “In time?”
He nodded. His fingers shifted in hers, and she tightened her grip. She was pleased when he tightened his in return, clasping her hand like a man who was drowning, who thought she could save him. “I’ve lost--” he said, and let out a harsh, halting breath, one with tears at the edges. “They’ve all gone. I’m alone.”
“The girl,” Reinette said. “The one you were with when we met. She loved you. I could see it in her eyes when she spoke of you.”
“She’s gone.” The Doctor set his forehead against her knee. “She isn’t dead, but she might as well be. Rose. My Rose.” She could hear the smile in his voice, and the anguish behind it, cruel and dark and so deeply human. “And Martha,” he said. “I ruined her. I took everything good in her life and stripped it away.” He let out a breath. “Donna.”
“So many women,” Reinette said, light, smiling very slightly. “Were I not a mistress myself, I would take issue.”
The Doctor shook his head, rolling it back and forth along her covered knee. “Donna was different. Donna was--” He took a loud breath, and her fingers carding through his hair stilled. The wet soaking through her skirt was not rainwater, and the shaking of the Doctor’s shoulders was not a trick of the firelight. All pretense thrown aside, she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his shoulders and let him cry into her lap, whispering comfort and kissing his temples, the top of his head. Outside, the storm raged, and thunder rolled and echoed through her chamber, a tormented din.
He gripped her skirt in his fists and let himself lose control, his high, keening sobs muffled by fabric and by her body leaning over his; he let go of everything he had needed to keep from showing: his grief over leaving Rose once more on that unreachable shore, her hand held by someone identical to him but still not him; his uneasy regret watching Jack and Martha and Mickey walking away and toward the lives they had built without him, fiancés and teams and triumphs that they would not share with him. And the absolute devastation over Donna. Donna, who had been his perfect match, the mate he’d needed, who had saved worlds and worlds and worlds and saved him from himself, who had truly, madly loved the life they had. Donna would never know how wonderful she had been. She would never hear the singing. She could never look for him. Donna, with tears in her eyes, begging him to let her stay.
“I think I may have gotten off the lightest,” Reinette said quietly, and the Doctor sat up, looking at her. She smiled, sheepish. “I’m sorry. A door once opened…”
He shook his head. “You’re right,” he said. He sat back, almost embarrassed, but she thought that the Doctor only ever came this close to true embarrassment; he knew himself too well to feel awkwardness. “It’s better that you never came with me at all. Everyone I care about…” He trailed off. He looked as though the statement was too immense, was too true, to actually phrase.
She reached out to take his face in her hands, tilting it up so that he was looking at her. “I told your Rose, once, that you were worth the monsters. I still believe that.” He put his hand over hers on his cheek, but whether in gratitude or for comfort, she could not tell. She rubbed her thumb against his. “It is a kind of augury, the storms we share.” She smiled. “A sign that it was right to come to me.”
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t be here. There are rules, guidelines for traveling the way I do, and messing about with them could cause the universe to collapse. But I needed--” He broke off.
“You needed someone,” she said. She kissed his forehead. “You haven’t lost me.”
He sighed, his entire body relaxed, tension draining out of him. “Thank you.”
She slid off of the chair and onto the floor, to his level, her long dress bunching and gathering around her kneels in a pool of fabric. They were like children, she thought, playing in front of the hearth. Hearts as light as clouds, or very nearly. She put her hand in his and laced their fingers. “If I am granted the same freedom as they are to feel what it is like to be loved by you, then I can tell you from my own experience that they do not regret their time with you.”
He squeezed her hand. “We spent one day together.”
She smiled, shaking her head. “We spent thirty years together, Doctor. I have spent most of my life imagining the things you could be doing. The Fireplace Man, my lonely angel, with all of time and the universe before him.”
The Doctor sat back against the front of the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Do you wish that I’d stayed with you? The slow path? Puttering around Versailles, annoying your Louis?”
Reinette laughed. “The king would cease his jealousy out of love for me. Or if he wouldn’t, I would end our arrangement.” Her smile slipped, its edges fading like the grey light was through the windows.
The fire was getting brighter before them.
“I do not wish that you had stayed with me,” she said. “I cannot say that it wasn’t difficult - there was a time when I was certain you would return, but it passed, and I was left to find the good in all of it. I found it after searching for a time.” She squeezed his hand. “You are not a man meant to be tied down. If there is one place out there, among all of the infinite stars that you can number and name as easily as though you had made them, where it would be fit for you to settle down, it would not be here, in the court of Versailles. It would be a place so foreign to me, and with people so strange and wondrous as to make me certain that you would never feel the pull of the universe calling you to travel once again.” She looked into his face. “I do not know that this place exists. It is probably just the dream of a foolish girl, a woman who never really left her imaginary friend or the monsters beneath her bed.”
The Doctor smiled. He reached out and tucked a thread of hair behind her ear, cupped her cheek in his hand. “The best of us keep our childhoods forever.”
She closed her eyes, leaning into his touch. “You will not be a lonely little boy forever, Doctor. There will be someone waiting for you, somewhere.”
“I don’t know if I want that to be true.”
She opened her eyes and smiled. “There will be a time when you know. In matters of love, Doctor, I am past master. I am a woman, and French. Both are in my favour.” The Doctor laughed, and she took the moment to lean over and kiss him. He was surprised, at first, the way he was the first time, pressed against her mantle with his image of her still that of a little girl. But it had passed then, as it did now, and he kissed her back, gentle, one hand still on her cheek and the other with its fingers wrapped in her own. When she sat back, he was red, and she smiled. “You don’t often get a chance to do that, do you?”
“The last time I kissed someone, I was poisoned.”
Reinette wrinkled her nose. “It’s a strange life you live, Doctor. But the fire has dried you, and your tears have fled, and you have been kissed by the Marquise de Pompadour.” She looked out of the windows, now dark, with the room around them cast in shadow but for their little spot before the fireplace. “And it appears,” she said, “as though the storm has passed.”
The Doctor sighed. “Sometimes I wish I had been really trapped here. Then everything that happened after I left--”
“Would have found some way to happen whether you were there or not.” She squeezed his hand again. “Terrible things don’t immediately stop occurring once you cannot be there to see them, Doctor. The fact that you have been there to stop them, or to fix them, is a blessing.” She looked him in the eye. “You are an extremely important man, Doctor. The burden is heavy on your heart and your mind, and on the hearts and minds of those you love. But it is a burden that must be carried, and you are the man that can meet that challenge.” She smiled. “The man I love must be worthy of whatever challenge is presented to him.”
The Doctor smiled. He kissed her, once. Then he stood up, and helped her up after him, keeping hold of her hand. “Thank you,” he said.
She shook her head. “There’s no need.” She cast her eyes down, and added, “I suspect this is the last time I will be seeing you.”
He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I can’t come back. The risk--”
“I understand.” She looked up again, and the edges of her lips tilted up very slightly. “But a very kind man once told me never to listen to reason, and so I will not leave this as our final goodbye. It was good to see you, Doctor. I look forward to our next meeting.”
The Doctor smiled, and it was sad and filled with love and gratitude. “Goodbye, Reinette.”
He let go of her hand and walked out of her chamber.
Reinette watched until his form and his shadow were gone. Then she raised her fingers to her lips, touched them there, and smiled in the dark.
Rating: G
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Madame de Pompadour
Words: ~2,000
Spoilers: The Girl In The Fireplace, Journey's End
Beta: curriejean
Summary: Set immediately after Journey's End. Having lost everything, the Doctor returns to a place where he can at least have one thing.
These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth, circa Regna tonat.
-Thomas Wyatt
Her eyes stopped halfway across the page when she became aware of his presence. She lowered the book into her lap and folded her hands on top of it, and did not look up. “I did not expect that I would see you again.”
She heard him laugh, a false little sound that echoed in her chamber, and she let herself lift her eyes and see: he stood in the arched doorway, leaning on an elbow, his gaze lifted toward the high ceiling, unseeing, she knew. His expression was complex, but showed some extent of misery. He turned his eyes to her. “Hello, Reinette.”
She nodded. “Doctor.” She set her book on the side table, feeling the heat of the fire in the hearth against her arms as she reached out. The flames were pale in the light from the windows, the grey half-light of an early evening drenched in rain. “It has been three years for me.” She looked back up at him. “But I suspect it has been more for you.”
He dropped his elbow and stood upright, putting his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He stared down at the floor. “I honestly couldn’t tell you.”
Her mouth twitched. “Losing track of time is an odd trait for one called a Time Lord, I should think.”
The Doctor looked up and smiled, but it slowly faded as he looked at her, as he let his eyes trace the lines worn by time into her face, faint but steadily more noticeable, steadily becoming more real. He came further into the room. “I left you,” he said.
“Oh, did you?” she asked, and turned to retrieve her book, smiling. “Well, off with you, then. I’ll not have the man who abandoned me at the fireplace come back and repeat his offense.”
He stopped halfway between the door and her chair. She caught his expression, turning back, and she faltered in the joke; he was lost. He gazed at her with eyes that begged for something - a benediction, a need for grace, for forgiveness beyond whatever offense he had done to her those years ago, when she stood at her window and looked for a star, any star. She watched him sway on his feet with a mind that was too heavy for his body, a grief too great to be bound in his shape. She held out her hand, and he came to take it, and he fell to his knees at her feet.
“Doctor,” she said, surprised, and reached out to smooth his hair. “You’re wet,” she murmured, leaning forward to brush the beads of water from the tips of his locks. “The storm is strong out there.”
He shook his head. He was staring at the skirt of her dress where it collected in a bunch at the floor. “It isn’t from this storm. It’s from another one. A long way off.”
She brushed her fingers through his hair. “In time?”
He nodded. His fingers shifted in hers, and she tightened her grip. She was pleased when he tightened his in return, clasping her hand like a man who was drowning, who thought she could save him. “I’ve lost--” he said, and let out a harsh, halting breath, one with tears at the edges. “They’ve all gone. I’m alone.”
“The girl,” Reinette said. “The one you were with when we met. She loved you. I could see it in her eyes when she spoke of you.”
“She’s gone.” The Doctor set his forehead against her knee. “She isn’t dead, but she might as well be. Rose. My Rose.” She could hear the smile in his voice, and the anguish behind it, cruel and dark and so deeply human. “And Martha,” he said. “I ruined her. I took everything good in her life and stripped it away.” He let out a breath. “Donna.”
“So many women,” Reinette said, light, smiling very slightly. “Were I not a mistress myself, I would take issue.”
The Doctor shook his head, rolling it back and forth along her covered knee. “Donna was different. Donna was--” He took a loud breath, and her fingers carding through his hair stilled. The wet soaking through her skirt was not rainwater, and the shaking of the Doctor’s shoulders was not a trick of the firelight. All pretense thrown aside, she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his shoulders and let him cry into her lap, whispering comfort and kissing his temples, the top of his head. Outside, the storm raged, and thunder rolled and echoed through her chamber, a tormented din.
He gripped her skirt in his fists and let himself lose control, his high, keening sobs muffled by fabric and by her body leaning over his; he let go of everything he had needed to keep from showing: his grief over leaving Rose once more on that unreachable shore, her hand held by someone identical to him but still not him; his uneasy regret watching Jack and Martha and Mickey walking away and toward the lives they had built without him, fiancés and teams and triumphs that they would not share with him. And the absolute devastation over Donna. Donna, who had been his perfect match, the mate he’d needed, who had saved worlds and worlds and worlds and saved him from himself, who had truly, madly loved the life they had. Donna would never know how wonderful she had been. She would never hear the singing. She could never look for him. Donna, with tears in her eyes, begging him to let her stay.
“I think I may have gotten off the lightest,” Reinette said quietly, and the Doctor sat up, looking at her. She smiled, sheepish. “I’m sorry. A door once opened…”
He shook his head. “You’re right,” he said. He sat back, almost embarrassed, but she thought that the Doctor only ever came this close to true embarrassment; he knew himself too well to feel awkwardness. “It’s better that you never came with me at all. Everyone I care about…” He trailed off. He looked as though the statement was too immense, was too true, to actually phrase.
She reached out to take his face in her hands, tilting it up so that he was looking at her. “I told your Rose, once, that you were worth the monsters. I still believe that.” He put his hand over hers on his cheek, but whether in gratitude or for comfort, she could not tell. She rubbed her thumb against his. “It is a kind of augury, the storms we share.” She smiled. “A sign that it was right to come to me.”
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t be here. There are rules, guidelines for traveling the way I do, and messing about with them could cause the universe to collapse. But I needed--” He broke off.
“You needed someone,” she said. She kissed his forehead. “You haven’t lost me.”
He sighed, his entire body relaxed, tension draining out of him. “Thank you.”
She slid off of the chair and onto the floor, to his level, her long dress bunching and gathering around her kneels in a pool of fabric. They were like children, she thought, playing in front of the hearth. Hearts as light as clouds, or very nearly. She put her hand in his and laced their fingers. “If I am granted the same freedom as they are to feel what it is like to be loved by you, then I can tell you from my own experience that they do not regret their time with you.”
He squeezed her hand. “We spent one day together.”
She smiled, shaking her head. “We spent thirty years together, Doctor. I have spent most of my life imagining the things you could be doing. The Fireplace Man, my lonely angel, with all of time and the universe before him.”
The Doctor sat back against the front of the chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Do you wish that I’d stayed with you? The slow path? Puttering around Versailles, annoying your Louis?”
Reinette laughed. “The king would cease his jealousy out of love for me. Or if he wouldn’t, I would end our arrangement.” Her smile slipped, its edges fading like the grey light was through the windows.
The fire was getting brighter before them.
“I do not wish that you had stayed with me,” she said. “I cannot say that it wasn’t difficult - there was a time when I was certain you would return, but it passed, and I was left to find the good in all of it. I found it after searching for a time.” She squeezed his hand. “You are not a man meant to be tied down. If there is one place out there, among all of the infinite stars that you can number and name as easily as though you had made them, where it would be fit for you to settle down, it would not be here, in the court of Versailles. It would be a place so foreign to me, and with people so strange and wondrous as to make me certain that you would never feel the pull of the universe calling you to travel once again.” She looked into his face. “I do not know that this place exists. It is probably just the dream of a foolish girl, a woman who never really left her imaginary friend or the monsters beneath her bed.”
The Doctor smiled. He reached out and tucked a thread of hair behind her ear, cupped her cheek in his hand. “The best of us keep our childhoods forever.”
She closed her eyes, leaning into his touch. “You will not be a lonely little boy forever, Doctor. There will be someone waiting for you, somewhere.”
“I don’t know if I want that to be true.”
She opened her eyes and smiled. “There will be a time when you know. In matters of love, Doctor, I am past master. I am a woman, and French. Both are in my favour.” The Doctor laughed, and she took the moment to lean over and kiss him. He was surprised, at first, the way he was the first time, pressed against her mantle with his image of her still that of a little girl. But it had passed then, as it did now, and he kissed her back, gentle, one hand still on her cheek and the other with its fingers wrapped in her own. When she sat back, he was red, and she smiled. “You don’t often get a chance to do that, do you?”
“The last time I kissed someone, I was poisoned.”
Reinette wrinkled her nose. “It’s a strange life you live, Doctor. But the fire has dried you, and your tears have fled, and you have been kissed by the Marquise de Pompadour.” She looked out of the windows, now dark, with the room around them cast in shadow but for their little spot before the fireplace. “And it appears,” she said, “as though the storm has passed.”
The Doctor sighed. “Sometimes I wish I had been really trapped here. Then everything that happened after I left--”
“Would have found some way to happen whether you were there or not.” She squeezed his hand again. “Terrible things don’t immediately stop occurring once you cannot be there to see them, Doctor. The fact that you have been there to stop them, or to fix them, is a blessing.” She looked him in the eye. “You are an extremely important man, Doctor. The burden is heavy on your heart and your mind, and on the hearts and minds of those you love. But it is a burden that must be carried, and you are the man that can meet that challenge.” She smiled. “The man I love must be worthy of whatever challenge is presented to him.”
The Doctor smiled. He kissed her, once. Then he stood up, and helped her up after him, keeping hold of her hand. “Thank you,” he said.
She shook her head. “There’s no need.” She cast her eyes down, and added, “I suspect this is the last time I will be seeing you.”
He squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I can’t come back. The risk--”
“I understand.” She looked up again, and the edges of her lips tilted up very slightly. “But a very kind man once told me never to listen to reason, and so I will not leave this as our final goodbye. It was good to see you, Doctor. I look forward to our next meeting.”
The Doctor smiled, and it was sad and filled with love and gratitude. “Goodbye, Reinette.”
He let go of her hand and walked out of her chamber.
Reinette watched until his form and his shadow were gone. Then she raised her fingers to her lips, touched them there, and smiled in the dark.