Broken Clocks (3/8)
Title: Broken Clocks (3/8)
Author: stormwolf10
Rating: Teen
Characters: Ten, Rose, Mickey, Madame de Pompadour
Word Count: 2001
Summary: A fairly routine first trip for a new companion turns into a hard lesson for the Doctor about love.
Spoilers: Through The Girl in the Fireplace
Authors Notes: Written for the Time In Flux fic-a-thon. I have to admit, when I suggested that this might be a challenge for me, I honestly had no idea just how much of a challenge it would be. When I opened my e-mail and read that I had been assigned The Girl in the Fireplace as my episode to re-write, I was absolutely terrified. It took me a long time to even start. Hell, I was even too afraid to re-watch the episode, I was that nervous! How do you re-write an episode to get the Doctor and Rose together as a couple in an episode where the Doctor falls in love with someone else?
Well, I have to say, this challenge has been worth it. Now that I've finished, I have to say I'm pretty damn proud of it. I decided to take the hard route in re-writing the entire episode, with the exception of a scene here and there removed to keep the story flowing in the right direction. Other than that, the entire episode is in there, plus a whole lot more added in to fulfill the requirements of the challenge.
Many, many, many thanks go to the brilliant, patient, and wonderfully kind edgeofworld for being my beta. I've never had a beta before, and I was slightly afraid of the prospect of getting one, but she has been incredibly encouraging and helpful in this daunting task I set up for myself. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Also, this has no relation to my current fic, Life Less Ordinary. That will start up again soon, once my brain has returned to a semi-solid state. ;)
The Doctor should have been furious with Rose for wandering off and leading Mickey into God knows what danger, but, truth be told, he felt too guilty to be angry with her. He knew that she cared for him. Well, he had a thought that she might love him, and he'd dashed off, left her in a dangerous ship and snogged a woman he'd just met. He comforted himself with the thought that Rose could handle herself. Perhaps that would assuage his guilt, if only for a moment.
"Rose? Mickey!" he yelled in exasperation, wandering off down a corridor to find them, "Every time, every time, it's rule one. Don’t wander off! I tell them, I do, rule one! There could be anything on this ship!"
Anything, including a horse. The Doctor stared at it a moment in disbelief, then shook his head to clear it and looked up again. The horse was still there. “Right, so…you must have wandered in from another portal to France. I should probably, you know, find that door. First, I’m going to find my friends, all right?”
The horse nickered and lifted its head, nipping at his hair.
“Oi! Knock that off!” The Doctor yelped, lightly shoving the horse’s large muzzle away and turned to walk down another corridor.
===========================
Rose and Mickey wandered slowly down another corridor, still a bit shaken by what they had seen. Human body parts, namely an eye and a heart, had been wired into the ship. Something had gone very wrong here.
“Maybe it wasn’t a real heart,” Mickey stammered with false bravado.
Rose sighed. “Of course it was a real heart.”
“Is this like a normal day for you?” he asked, “Is this an average day?”
“Life with the Doctor, Mickey. No more average days.”
A large window loomed around the corner and they approached it carefully, peering in. “It’s France again!” Mickey said in surprise, “We can see France.”
“I think we’re looking through a mirror.”
Through the slightly distorted image, they could see a man stride into the room, followed by two servants who bustled around him, fussing over his clothing.
“Blimey,” Mickey snorted, “Look at him. Who does he think he is?”
“King of France,” the Doctor interjected, appearing behind the two of them.
Rose grinned. “Oh, here’s trouble,” she teased, “What’ve you been up to?”
“Oh, this and that,” he replied casually, “Became the imaginary friend of a future French aristocrat, picked a fight with a clockwork man.” In the distance, a horse whinnied. “Oh, and I met a horse.”
“What’s a horse doing on a spaceship?” Mickey asked skeptically.
“Mickey, what’s pre-Revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get a little perspective.” The Doctor pointed at window, “See these? They’re all over the spaceship. On every deck. Gateways to history. And not just any history…” he put his finger to the glass as Reinette stepped into the room and curtsied to the King, “Hers. Time windows, deliberately arranged along the life of one particular woman. A spaceship from the fifty-first century, stalking a woman from the eighteenth. Why?”
“Who is she?” Rose asked.
“Jean-Antoinette Poisson, known to her friends as Reinette. One of the most accomplished women who ever lived.”
“So, she has plans of being the Queen, then?”
“No, he’s already got a Queen,” the Doctor corrected her.
Rose paused a moment, then smirked. “Oh, I get it. Camilla.”
The Doctor found himself again held by the sight of Reinette, and didn’t join Mickey and Rose in their laughter at the irony. “I think this is the night they met; the night of the Yew Tree Ball. In no time flat, she'll get herself established as his official mistress, with her own rooms at the palace, even her own title, Madame de Pompadour.”
When Reinette approached the glass to check herself in the mirror, Rose glanced up and found the Doctor staring at the woman, a wistful smile on his face, and felt the color drain from her own face. He was in love. She could tell by how he looked at the woman on the other side of the glass. Rose recognized that look, because it had been fixed solely on her in the past. Then again, she'd met Sarah Jane; she knew how easy the Doctor could love, maybe her time was over.
She bit back her tears and looked back at the woman. “The Queen must have loved her,” she remarked, unable to hide the hint of jealousy in her tone, but as usual, the Doctor was oblivious.
Or so she thought. The Doctor knew, but wanted to avoid that argument at all costs. So, he pretended not to notice. “Oh, she did. They got on very well.”
Mickey gave the Doctor a disbelieving look. “The King’s wife and the King’s girlfriend?”
“France,” the Doctor replied casually, “It’s a different planet.” He continued to gaze at the woman through the glass. Madame de Pompadour, in all her finery, ready to take Paris, and the King, by storm. A Queen in all but name.
As Reinette turned to address a woman standing in the corner, the Doctor caught sight of the clock on the other side of the room, and clenched his fists at his sides. The face had been smashed in, just like the clock on the mantelpiece in Reinette’s bedroom.
“Doctor, the clock,” Rose hissed.
The Doctor grabbed the fire extinguisher in Mickey’s hands as the clockwork droid spun to face Reinette. “Yeah, I see it. C’mon!” He gave the glass window a hard shove and sent it spinning, blasting the droid full in the face with a cloud of ice. “Hello, Reinette. Hasn't time flown?”
“Fireplace man!” Reinette gasped in surprise, glancing between him and the two people who had barreled in after him.
Tossing the fire extinguisher back to Mickey, the Doctor watched the droid as it feebly whirred and ticked, its masked head twitching to the side.
“What’s it doing?” Mickey asked hesitantly, his hands tightening around the fire extinguisher.
The Doctor’s eyes narrowed at the creature as it continued to whirr. “Switching itself back on, melting the ice,” he said, ever so slightly adjusting his weight onto the balls of his feet, knowing it would be only a moment before it was fully thawed.
“And then what?”
“Then it kills everyone in the room,” he answered, leaping back deftly as the droid’s arm shot out, just missing his throat by mere inches, “Focuses the mind, doesn’t it?”
The Doctor scowled, anger rising. No more time for playing about. These droids were after Reinette, and it was time he found out why, and stop them. “Who are you? Identify yourself!” he commanded, but the droid only cocked it’s head at him and remained silent except for the ticking of clockwork.
“Order it to answer me,” he sighed, looking to Reinette.
Reinette blinked. “Why should it listen to me?”
“I don’t know, it did when you were a child,” he replied, stepping close to her to murmur intimately in her ear, “Let’s see if you still got it.”
Reinette looked to the Doctor with uncertainty, meeting his eyes for a brief moment. His look of faith was all she needed to gather up her courage, and she stepped forward, lifting her chin as she spoke to the droid with as much command as she could muster. “Answer his question,” she demanded, “Answer any and all questions put to you.”
“I am Repair Droid Seven,” the clockwork creature answered, letting its hand drop to its side.
“So what happened to the ship, then?” the Doctor asked, “There was a lot of damage.”
“Ion storm. Eighty two percent systems failure.”
“That ship hasn’t moved in over a year. What’s taken so long?”
“We did not have the parts.”
Mickey snickered. “Always comes down to that, doesn’t it? The parts.” Nobody seemed quite keen on sharing the joke, and they simply stared at him a moment before looking back to the repair droid as the Doctor continued his questioning.
“What happened to the crew, where are they?” he asked.
“We did not have the parts.”
“There should be over fifty people on your ship. Where did they go?”
“We did not have the parts,” the droid repeated.
The Doctor gritted his teeth in frustration. It was such a pain in the arse to try to have a discussion with a robot. “Fifty people don’t just disappear!” he shouted, “Where-“ And then, realization dawned. Oh, this isn’t good. This is very much not good. “Ah…you didn’t have the parts, so you used the crew.”
“The crew?” Mickey asked, oblivious.
Rose, on the other hand, was old hat at the strange and bizarre world of travelling with the Doctor. “We found a camera with an eye in it,” she told the Doctor, “and there was a heart…wired into the machinery.”
“It was just what it was programmed to. Repairing the ship any way it can, with whatever it could find. No one told it the crew weren't on the menu. What did you say the flight deck smelt of?”
Rose shuddered slightly in disgust. “Someone cooking.”
“Flesh plus heat…barbecue.” The Doctor eyed the droid again, stepping closer to it as it stared blankly at him. “But what are you doing here? You've opened up time windows, that takes colossal energy. Why come here, you could have gone to your repair yard. Instead you come to eighteenth century France? Why?”
“One more part is required,” it intoned, its head snapping to look directly at Reinette, who glanced to the Doctor with a terrified look.
The Doctor gave Reinette a solemn, but reassuring glance before turning back to the droid. “Then why haven’t you taken it?” he asked.
“She is incomplete.”
“What, so, that's the plan then? Just keep opening up more and more time windows, scanning her brain, checking to see if she's 'done yet'?”
“Why her?” Rose asked, unable to hold the question back. It was as much a directed to the Doctor as it was to the repair droid. She briefly met the Doctor’s eyes and held them as he stared at her in surprise, then wrenched her gaze away to look at the droid and continue her questioning. “You’ve got all of history to choose from. Why, specifically, her?”
“We are the same,” the droid answered mechanically.
Reinette advanced on it, incensed. “We are not the same,” she shouted, “We are in no sense the same!”
“We are the same.”
“Get out of here! Get out of here this instant!”
The Doctor grabbed her arm, trying to stop her. “Reinette, no!” he warned, but it was too late. The repair droid jabbed its fingertips into its other wrist and disappeared in a shower of metal, teleporting away as she commanded. “It’s back on the ship. Rose, take Mickey and Arthur, get after it. Follow it, don’t approach it, just watch what it does.”
“Arthur?”
“Good name for a horse.”
Rose rolled her eyes in exasperation. “No, you’re not keeping the horse!”
“I let you keep Mickey,” the Doctor snapped, “Now, go, go, go!” He shoved his two companions on the other side of the mirror and back onto the ship before Rose could argue.
“But, what about y-“ Rose called to him, but the mirror slammed in her face, cutting her off. She stared in at the two of them for a moment and watched as the Doctor gently slid his fingertips over Reinette’s temples. Rose suddenly felt like she was intruding on an intimate moment. Fighting back tears, she turned to Mickey and forced her expression into one of pure, business-like determination. “All right, you heard the Doctor. Let’s go find these repair droids and see what they’re up to.”
Mickey looked dubious. “Does he really want us to take the horse with us?”
“Not really,” she replied and marched back down the corridor, determined to leave the sight of the Doctor with Reinette far behind her.
Part Four