amberfocus | Forgotten (2/5)

A/N: Recognizable dialogue is from the episode The Girl in the Fireplace.

Chapter Two: Accidental

As the grown up version of the child Reinette lurches at him he is unsure at first if she’s being overpowered by the enormous twenty pound dress she’s wearing and has tripped or if she means to be coming at him so quickly as he’s pushed back hard into the fireplace and she just keeps coming. He notes with mild curiosity that the woman seems to have fallen on his lips. When she grabs his head he wonders what the hell she is doing until her soft lips deepen the accidental meeting and he forgets for a moment where he is and what he’s doing.

He forgets that it isn’t Rose in his arms, that the woman before him offering herself so familiarly this way isn’t the woman that he actually wants this from. She is not the woman carrying his child and waiting for him back on the space ship. He forgets as his mouth responds to hers and his hands seek out her waist to pull her closer until it slowly registers on him that the rough fabric beneath his hands is nothing like the smooth cotton of Rose’s t-shirt that had been under his hands just an hour ago.

Just as he’s coming back to himself it’s over and she runs out and he is left there stunned not only by her actions but by his own response to them. His ridiculous response to a woman that in no way can compare to what he is, was, just on the cusp of getting back. What is wrong with him? She’s pretty, she’s well put together, but she’s not Rose. What the hell is he doing?

As her manservant comes into the room while he’s putting two and two together, figuring out that she will one day be Madame de Pompadour, he can’t help but get a little stupid. She’s famous, she’s beautiful and she wants him. It shouldn’t matter but he can’t help feeling a bit puffed up, a bit too ridiculously proud of the fact that a historical celebrity thinks he’s all that, and that he’d just been snogged within an inch of his life.

And after it is over, he acts like a fool. It’s worse than he’d behaved with Charles Dickens when he finds out who this woman really is. He crows about the fact that he’s just snogged Madame de Pompadour as he spins out of her world and back into his own. He doesn't think that his voice might carry through the fireplace; that he might return to a stricken Rose and an angry Mickey. He looks around for someone to brag to about his accomplishment and then it hits him like a load of bricks what he’s just done. He’s just risked everything he has with Rose. He’s kissed another woman and then shouted it aloud.

No. It started as an accident and then Reinette kissed me, he reminds himself firmly. It hadn’t been the other way around. She had kissed him. He hadn’t asked for it, hadn’t wanted it. But you didn’t pull away, either, did you? The quiet little voice inside his head seems to carry a harsh Northern accent. You didn’t push her away. You let yourself respond and you liked it. You never would have done that before you changed. Rose was right all along. You’re not the same man if you could do this to her. Kisser or kissed, you enjoyed the attention and you were gloating about it when you found out who she was. You were…you were…you were being a fanboy! The disgust in his own mind tone matches the disgust he has with himself.

He is entirely more grateful than he should be that Rose has chosen not to listen to him and has wandered off with Mickey, especially considering she might have put herself in danger to do it. Rose might wither and die in the next sixty years but those are sixty years he wants to spend with her. And he has just risked every single one of those years. He’s risked allowing her spirit to wither and die and he knows it very well could have done if she’d overheard his boast. He needs to get himself under control. This has to stop. If he sees the woman again in solving whatever mess is going on with the clockwork droids, he must not let her do anything again that might interfere with his relationship with Rose.

Shaking his head to clear it and trying to figure out what made him not push that woman away, what made him act like a man who didn’t belong to another, he heads off into the ship in search of the woman he’s tied his life to.

It’s not as easy as he thinks it should be. Rose seems to sense that something is wrong but she doesn’t question him, only looks at him as if he’s a riddle that she’s trying to solve. When they encounter Reinette again and he sends Rose and Mickey off to deal with the drones the look she gives him twists something painfully in his hearts. She goes though, her trust in him never faltering and he hates it that maybe she’s misplaced that trust. And as he walks through Reinette’s mind a few moments later and sees the designs the woman has on him, he is afraid he won’t find a way to resist her.

When Reinette strolls into his own mind he recoils in shock. He’s never had a human do something so intimate before, not even Rose. He didn’t realize it was possible and he wonders if that means that he has a chance of initiating a bonding link with Rose. He’s never tried because he didn’t think he could but if this woman who is a stranger to him can enter his mind, then maybe, just maybe he and Rose who share a real and true intimacy can find that deeper bond.

But all thoughts of Rose flee as the woman in front of him rummages around inside his brain and finds his thoughts about dancing, specifically dancing with Rose, and her ire rises that he’s standing there with her but not thinking about her. He feels her back go up, feels a strong feminine jealousy swinging firmly into place as he releases her and backs away. Reinette thinks that he belongs to her, that he’s her fireplace man and no one else’s.

“Dance with me,” Reinette orders him and he knows that her meaning has nothing to do with minuets and everything to do with sex.

“I can’t,” he says firmly. There is no question in his mind that whatever she wants to happen this night with him, it won’t.

“Dance with me,” she insists. It is clear she has become a woman unused to taking no for an answer.

“This is the night you dance with the king,” the Doctor says playing to the woman’s status seeking desire. A desire he had seen clearly in her mind, one that he hopes will overweigh the desire for him he had also seen there.

“Then first I shall make him jealous.”

“I can’t.” He means that he won’t.

She tries another tack. “Doctor. Doctor who? It’s more than just a secret, isn’t it?” she asks.

“What did you see?” he demands still shaken.

“That there comes a time, Time Lord, when every lonely little boy must learn how to dance.” She has given up, for now, on the idea of seducing him and simply leads him away to a different type of dance.

It has taken him nearly an hour to escape her clutches and make his way back to the ship and only just in time. His hearts are in his throat as he sees Rose and Mickey confined to the beds and at the mercy of the droids, hears Rose’s bravado as she tries to bluff her way out of the situation. He is terrified but he’s pretty sure he can out bluff even Rose. He rummages around in his pockets, finds a bottle of anti-oil and sticks it into the wine glass he’d still been holding when he’d slipped through the time window and back onto the ship.

He makes an entrance singing at the top of his lungs and pretending to be drunk and it’s all he can do not to blanch at the look Rose gives him as he dances around the space ship's infirmary. She’s scared and hurt and fed up, looking at him like she really thinks that he’s drunk, that the tie on his head is a fashion statement. As if he’d ever really wear sunglasses like that even if he was three sheets to the wind. He’s almost offended at her lack of faith in him. When she yells at him he accuses her of sounding just like her mother and the expression on her face tells him that he’s gone a step too far.

Despite this he continues his performance, tries not to watch as Rose’s face falls and the scent of her fear fills the chamber. Mickey isn’t looking nearly as frightened but then no one has said his brain is compatible with anything. Once he’s close enough he pours the anti-oil into the lead droid's clockwork brain and manages to bring everything screeching to a halt long enough to release Rose and Mickey from their manacles.

He pauses long enough to hug Rose desperately to him and when the time comes to warn Reinette, it’s Rose he sends because he’s afraid to allow himself back into the sights of a woman who wants him so desperately. It doesn’t occur to him that this might be an even bigger mistake than going himself.

Ch. 3: http://amberfocus.livejournal.com/212811.html

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Forgotten (2/5)

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