(DW) FIC: 'That I lost my center'; Ten/Reinette; PG-13
Title: That I lost my center
Pairing: Reinette/Ten
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1500
Summary: He's searching for something in her life and Reinette knows that it's not her. She is merely an accident.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who does not belong to me. And Reinette doesn't belong to the BBC so I think we're even, or something.
Author's Note: Meh. I wasn't going to write emo!fic about The Girl in the Fireplace. And I resisted for a while, but what can I say. The angst, it pwns me. aegflota, forgiveness plz? Srsly. Also, every fanfic writer has a secret dream of getting away with phrases like "my lonely angel" without being mocked in public. Bless.
That I lost my center
Fighting the world
The dreams clash
and are shattered-
and that I tried to make a paradiso terrestre
--- Ezra Pound, The Cantos; Canto CXVII
one
Reinette has known him her entire life.
She doesn't know how it's possible, has no one to ask, and therefore decides when she's very young that it's not important to have knowledge of everything that takes place between heaven and earth.
She considers herself blessed enough to have been saved from her fear.
For a long while, she thinks of him as a god. Her god. Thinks heretic thoughts in shame and secrecy - but makes him a god nonetheless. He holds the time in his hands.
And Reinette, in turn, holds the thought of him in hers during the long slow nights of her youth when she is not yet allowed to dance and drink with the others. She sinks to her knees on the bed, eyes closed and he's there, in her mind, in her blood that heats between her legs, the tip of her thumb and the back of her throat and she knows him.
She waits for him in the dawn, but he never comes.
------
"You always look the same," she says to him in the corridors of Versailles. She's nineteen years old, and about to stand bride. Should have come sooner, she thinks. Should have come for me but she is not one to grasp at illusions and fairy tales.
"Oh, I really don't," he replies, smiling. "Quite pleased with this appearance, though - you could say I'm on an up-and-up."
It doesn't matter to her that he speaks with an accent she did not know existed, or that his words are unfamiliar and oddly harsh to her ears. She can see into his eyes as they sit down in the privacy of her room; read new secrets in them every brief moment he gives her. That is enough. She never demands the truth about him, only asks for the mission he has in Paris.
"Why this place?" she asks. "Why Versailles?"
"Because this is a place where the impossible happens," he says, but unconvincingly. "And I'm afraid I can't stay long."
He's searching for something in her life and Reinette knows that it's not her. She is merely an accident.
--------
Sometimes he pushes through her longing and desire, breaks it with his weight as he arrives in a stolen moment already out of time and place. Reinette doesn't know how he manages it, but she is grateful beyond words.
"Come on," he says and reaches for her hand.
"No," she says, touching the warm curve of his neck where his skin is sunburnt and freckled and warm beneath her lips. Inside she can touch an eternity of anxious, fluttering time - a life of departures and exiles and almost not a single return, he's always running, she thinks, his thoughts and dreams already memories. She closes her eyes and kisses him again. "Please, wait. Wait with me."
"I can't. I'm sorry, Reinette, but I can't do that."
You cannot outrun me forever, she thinks as he leaves. The unaccomplished shall always remain.
--------
And so they dance.
She reveals her mind's truths without blinking, without hesitation, and she knows she might regret it later but not now. The Doctor - such a cold, earthly name for a man of his kind - does not allow regrets. In his mind she reads things she think she'll need a lifetime to be surprised about. In her arms, he is not that complicated after all.
"Come with me," she whispers through the noise of the others.
He smiles.
two
In her bedroom, she knows him.
She knows him through her mind and heart, knows him through her fingertips over his bare chest and she can see in his eyes that this frightens him. A world that does not know that they even exist and then someone like her, who sees all of them, every single fear, naked and breathing in her helpless palms. And he is something different altogether from what she thought. He's an old city, a monument; all parts of him full of scratches and bruises, inscriptions and cracks, as though he's lived through a destruction. The rhythm of his pulse like a clock that hunts the seconds, tries to conquer them.
Reinette brushes her lips over his face, buries her new knowledge in his body.
"I don't pity the dead, but those who survive," she says and kisses the line of his collarbones. "Oh. My love."
He's not a god. He's not an angel. He's not a human being.
She has never loved him more.
-------
"The shadows have eyes," he warns, before he leaves. She can never tell if he is jesting or being serious.
"But the shadows," she protests, "Could they possibly have time to think of us as we flutter through days and nights, into a darkness that brushes even our contours to dust?"
"Well, we can ask them."
And perhaps they do.
------
She walks through the windows, sometimes. To him, threads her way over to his side. It's not beautiful there; the air is cool and different to breathe, the people are strange, and not all of them are human, but he takes her hand and leads her through it, offering explanations for the smallest things so that she doesn't have to wonder.
He takes her to cities and countries that the world has forgotten. She asks for the name of everything, knowing he doesn't want names to have meanings, but it happens that he reveals one or two if he feels generous.
Names are for memories.
And afterwards, when she returns from an adventure and lies in her bed or stands by the closed window, she can never find words to describe what she has seen. She decides that this is what makes them dreams.
Her strange, wondrous, impossible dreams.
-------
One of them in a Paris that looks nothing like the Paris she knows in her heart. The Doctor says it's year 3406 and that they are celebrating a joyous period of peace and prosperity. It makes her happy to know that there's hope.
"Oh, you're timeless," he says and puts an arm around her waist. "Life will out. It's fantastic, isn't it?"
"The strange things you know, my angel," she says and laughs.
He's happy then, back then. She wonders, because they slip in and out of time so often, if he sometimes forgets that he will lose her, too.
-------
One of them in a world that is made of ice and makes Reinette breathless for several seconds. It's the most beautiful thing she could possibly imagine, a childhood story before her, and the Doctor runs up a hill with her hand in his to give her a better view.
"I do love you," she says to him there. She does not recall anyone ever looking so sad at those words.
------
So many dreams in so many places, it's almost as if she has truly lived to see it all. She tells him, one night in August, as Versailles is resplendent with a last protest against autumn. He gives her apples - from Astrakhan, the best sort on the planet - and blackberries, she slams him against the ground and kisses the breath out of them both.
"My Doctor," she says and rolls her tongue around a seed from the apple, lets it into his mouth and takes it back again, a melodious wave of strange intimacy. "This is not a dream, is it?"
Time bends and breaks in his body when he's resting beside her afterwards, she can feel it, follow it, but he doesn't notice. His lips are parted in a completely different scenario, one where she can't be. Reinette drags stained fingers along his sides and it looks like wounds or marks stating ownership; he smiles distantly as they kiss.
I need a language that remembers you, she thinks. I have so little time.
------
As the years rush forward and the lines in her face grow deeper, she starts to forget. Not all of it, not nearly all of it - but the dreams fade and the world changes around her. There are no windows anymore, no windows that lead to secret places and nobody to blame for that.
Perhaps it is a good thing.
She leads a busy life, a crowded one full of characters and ambitions. She's too diligent to remember that she's weaker, too concentrated on the work still ahead to realise that she's lonely. When the public opinions turn against her she clenches her fists in her lap and continues to make plans.
She sometimes catches the sight of a star a little too long, and her mind begins to reconcile, but she quickly recovers. There is a time and place for everything. And that time is not anymore.
When the doctors tell her the truth about her condition she merely nods and begins to write letters. There are not many people left to whisper secrets to, but she writes them down and burns them in the fireplace. Names are for memories. It's a quiet victory.
Her King never leaves her side, and to him she can whisper, he has no choice.
"He'll come for me," she says. "One day he'll have to come for me. The Time Lord."
Two days later, the King sends Astrakhan apples to her bedroom and Reinette closes her eyes and remembers.
-------
And she speaks his name when she is dying - says it to the walls, to the ugly shadows hunched around her bed, carves it in her bedside table, reveals it to her poor frightened servants. His secret, forbidden name.
Reinette has known him her entire life and he has rewritten her.
That price is hers to pay.
Pairing: Reinette/Ten
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1500
Summary: He's searching for something in her life and Reinette knows that it's not her. She is merely an accident.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who does not belong to me. And Reinette doesn't belong to the BBC so I think we're even, or something.
Author's Note: Meh. I wasn't going to write emo!fic about The Girl in the Fireplace. And I resisted for a while, but what can I say. The angst, it pwns me. aegflota, forgiveness plz? Srsly. Also, every fanfic writer has a secret dream of getting away with phrases like "my lonely angel" without being mocked in public. Bless.
That I lost my center
Fighting the world
The dreams clash
and are shattered-
and that I tried to make a paradiso terrestre
--- Ezra Pound, The Cantos; Canto CXVII
one
Reinette has known him her entire life.
She doesn't know how it's possible, has no one to ask, and therefore decides when she's very young that it's not important to have knowledge of everything that takes place between heaven and earth.
She considers herself blessed enough to have been saved from her fear.
For a long while, she thinks of him as a god. Her god. Thinks heretic thoughts in shame and secrecy - but makes him a god nonetheless. He holds the time in his hands.
And Reinette, in turn, holds the thought of him in hers during the long slow nights of her youth when she is not yet allowed to dance and drink with the others. She sinks to her knees on the bed, eyes closed and he's there, in her mind, in her blood that heats between her legs, the tip of her thumb and the back of her throat and she knows him.
She waits for him in the dawn, but he never comes.
------
"You always look the same," she says to him in the corridors of Versailles. She's nineteen years old, and about to stand bride. Should have come sooner, she thinks. Should have come for me but she is not one to grasp at illusions and fairy tales.
"Oh, I really don't," he replies, smiling. "Quite pleased with this appearance, though - you could say I'm on an up-and-up."
It doesn't matter to her that he speaks with an accent she did not know existed, or that his words are unfamiliar and oddly harsh to her ears. She can see into his eyes as they sit down in the privacy of her room; read new secrets in them every brief moment he gives her. That is enough. She never demands the truth about him, only asks for the mission he has in Paris.
"Why this place?" she asks. "Why Versailles?"
"Because this is a place where the impossible happens," he says, but unconvincingly. "And I'm afraid I can't stay long."
He's searching for something in her life and Reinette knows that it's not her. She is merely an accident.
--------
Sometimes he pushes through her longing and desire, breaks it with his weight as he arrives in a stolen moment already out of time and place. Reinette doesn't know how he manages it, but she is grateful beyond words.
"Come on," he says and reaches for her hand.
"No," she says, touching the warm curve of his neck where his skin is sunburnt and freckled and warm beneath her lips. Inside she can touch an eternity of anxious, fluttering time - a life of departures and exiles and almost not a single return, he's always running, she thinks, his thoughts and dreams already memories. She closes her eyes and kisses him again. "Please, wait. Wait with me."
"I can't. I'm sorry, Reinette, but I can't do that."
You cannot outrun me forever, she thinks as he leaves. The unaccomplished shall always remain.
--------
And so they dance.
She reveals her mind's truths without blinking, without hesitation, and she knows she might regret it later but not now. The Doctor - such a cold, earthly name for a man of his kind - does not allow regrets. In his mind she reads things she think she'll need a lifetime to be surprised about. In her arms, he is not that complicated after all.
"Come with me," she whispers through the noise of the others.
He smiles.
two
In her bedroom, she knows him.
She knows him through her mind and heart, knows him through her fingertips over his bare chest and she can see in his eyes that this frightens him. A world that does not know that they even exist and then someone like her, who sees all of them, every single fear, naked and breathing in her helpless palms. And he is something different altogether from what she thought. He's an old city, a monument; all parts of him full of scratches and bruises, inscriptions and cracks, as though he's lived through a destruction. The rhythm of his pulse like a clock that hunts the seconds, tries to conquer them.
Reinette brushes her lips over his face, buries her new knowledge in his body.
"I don't pity the dead, but those who survive," she says and kisses the line of his collarbones. "Oh. My love."
He's not a god. He's not an angel. He's not a human being.
She has never loved him more.
-------
"The shadows have eyes," he warns, before he leaves. She can never tell if he is jesting or being serious.
"But the shadows," she protests, "Could they possibly have time to think of us as we flutter through days and nights, into a darkness that brushes even our contours to dust?"
"Well, we can ask them."
And perhaps they do.
------
She walks through the windows, sometimes. To him, threads her way over to his side. It's not beautiful there; the air is cool and different to breathe, the people are strange, and not all of them are human, but he takes her hand and leads her through it, offering explanations for the smallest things so that she doesn't have to wonder.
He takes her to cities and countries that the world has forgotten. She asks for the name of everything, knowing he doesn't want names to have meanings, but it happens that he reveals one or two if he feels generous.
Names are for memories.
And afterwards, when she returns from an adventure and lies in her bed or stands by the closed window, she can never find words to describe what she has seen. She decides that this is what makes them dreams.
Her strange, wondrous, impossible dreams.
-------
One of them in a Paris that looks nothing like the Paris she knows in her heart. The Doctor says it's year 3406 and that they are celebrating a joyous period of peace and prosperity. It makes her happy to know that there's hope.
"Oh, you're timeless," he says and puts an arm around her waist. "Life will out. It's fantastic, isn't it?"
"The strange things you know, my angel," she says and laughs.
He's happy then, back then. She wonders, because they slip in and out of time so often, if he sometimes forgets that he will lose her, too.
-------
One of them in a world that is made of ice and makes Reinette breathless for several seconds. It's the most beautiful thing she could possibly imagine, a childhood story before her, and the Doctor runs up a hill with her hand in his to give her a better view.
"I do love you," she says to him there. She does not recall anyone ever looking so sad at those words.
------
So many dreams in so many places, it's almost as if she has truly lived to see it all. She tells him, one night in August, as Versailles is resplendent with a last protest against autumn. He gives her apples - from Astrakhan, the best sort on the planet - and blackberries, she slams him against the ground and kisses the breath out of them both.
"My Doctor," she says and rolls her tongue around a seed from the apple, lets it into his mouth and takes it back again, a melodious wave of strange intimacy. "This is not a dream, is it?"
Time bends and breaks in his body when he's resting beside her afterwards, she can feel it, follow it, but he doesn't notice. His lips are parted in a completely different scenario, one where she can't be. Reinette drags stained fingers along his sides and it looks like wounds or marks stating ownership; he smiles distantly as they kiss.
I need a language that remembers you, she thinks. I have so little time.
------
As the years rush forward and the lines in her face grow deeper, she starts to forget. Not all of it, not nearly all of it - but the dreams fade and the world changes around her. There are no windows anymore, no windows that lead to secret places and nobody to blame for that.
Perhaps it is a good thing.
She leads a busy life, a crowded one full of characters and ambitions. She's too diligent to remember that she's weaker, too concentrated on the work still ahead to realise that she's lonely. When the public opinions turn against her she clenches her fists in her lap and continues to make plans.
She sometimes catches the sight of a star a little too long, and her mind begins to reconcile, but she quickly recovers. There is a time and place for everything. And that time is not anymore.
When the doctors tell her the truth about her condition she merely nods and begins to write letters. There are not many people left to whisper secrets to, but she writes them down and burns them in the fireplace. Names are for memories. It's a quiet victory.
Her King never leaves her side, and to him she can whisper, he has no choice.
"He'll come for me," she says. "One day he'll have to come for me. The Time Lord."
Two days later, the King sends Astrakhan apples to her bedroom and Reinette closes her eyes and remembers.
-------
And she speaks his name when she is dying - says it to the walls, to the ugly shadows hunched around her bed, carves it in her bedside table, reveals it to her poor frightened servants. His secret, forbidden name.
Reinette has known him her entire life and he has rewritten her.
That price is hers to pay.