Doctor Who: "Left Behind" (Reinette, Lucy Saxon, Worksafe)

Title: Left Behind
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters/Pairings: Reinette & Lucy Saxon; mentions of Reinette/Ten and Lucy/Master
Rating: Pretty much completely Worksafe (assuming you can read Dr. Who fic at work, of course)
Summary: The women behind the Time Lords, annunciationless.

For babydraco.

Left Behind

Reinette kneels in front of the crucifix in the palace chapel, unsure of who to pray to. God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, St. Denis? Or some Gallifreyan deity? She wants to pray to Him, her love, her lonely angel, but she knows the Doctor can no longer hear her. If He could, He would have come back to her. He would have had to come back, she knows, if He could hear her, to set right what He had set awry. Since He has not, He cannot.

She tries to tell herself that she doesn't know the child growing in her is His. It could be Louis's, after all. But she knows from His mind that she is to have no more children; even if her unborn child is Louis', history has been changed. "Pourquoi?" she whispers, hoping some merciful god (or alien, or whatever) will hear her even if He cannot. "Comment?"

It's not supposed to work like this. He didn't know that He hadn't when He went with her to her bed, and that is supposed to be enough. There was the chance that His seed would not come to grow inside her. No, not a chance, the certainty--because He already knew what would happen. The timeline was supposed to preserve itself, so long as He made no deliberate effort to change it. This wasn't supposed to happen.

And it is His child, not Louis's. She knows this with all her being, can feel the mind of her unborn child just as she once felt the mind of the Doctor. Her child, half-human and half-Time Lord, a child who should not exist, whose very being is infused with paradox. She glances up at the icon of an angel beside the altar and thinks, not for the first time: where are the vortisaurs, the chronovores, the reapers ready to consume time itself? The palace is not all that old to be able to protect her, and besides, she has been outside its walls since she has discovered her pregnancy and still they do not come. It would be a relief, in a way, to let them tear time apart and devour it.

But something is preventing time from collapsing in upon itself under the weight of the contradiction, holding off paradox. Somewhere, somewhen, someone has built a paradox machine.

Which means there is only one thing left for her to do.

. . .

She walks across her bedroom and stands in front of her fireplace. She remembers the last time He passed through it. He was supposed to come back for her, to let her travel through the stars with Him. Even that should have left the timeline intact, so long as He returned Her not too longer after He took her. But He has not come to her, and the timeline has been altered even without it, so she must go to Him.

She unfastens a broach on her dress. It is a sonic broach, fashioned to test the diagrams she saw in His mind. It seems to work for little things--no door in the palace is locked to her, now--but she has never before tested it in such a way as this. She holds it up to the fireplace and reconfigures it, breaking the link with the clockwork androids' ship. Reconnecting it with the paradox machine is no difficulty at all; the machine remakes all of time in relation to itself and its signal is thus easy to catch onto.

Having inserted the new coordinates into the fireplace, she ducks down and passes through it, into the unknown.

. . .

It is His TARDIS, she recognizes, converted by a malicious hand into a bringer of destruction. Never would He Himself be able to hurt her (the TARDIS, that is, she who owns His heart in a way no human or Time Lord could rival) in this way. And Reinette cannot undo the damage; the things she saw in His mind may be good for little things like building sonic jewelry and reconfiguring fireplace portals, but not nearly clear enough to risk working on the TARDIS herself.

So she exits the TARDIS, makes her way through what seems to be some sort of airship. Not like the R101, held up with hydrogen, but something more sophisticated. Much more sophisticated--in general, she would estimate maybe early 21st century, but she knows that deep within the bowels of the ship there must exist innovations which should not exist in that time.

A UNIT crest can be seen on the wall.

Not knowing where she is or where she is going, Reinette turns and enters a room. Inside a woman in a red dress kneels in front of a bed, her head lying upon it, crying.

"Pourquoi pleurez-vous, madame?" Reinette asks.

The woman looks up and blinks. "Je . . . Je . . ." she begins, then breaks off and switches to English, which is clearly her native language. "I don't know," she says, still crying, then adds, "I don't want this anymore."

He would not know how to deal with this situation. But here is a situation where Reinette has access to skills He would not have. She walks across the room, sits down on the bed, rests a hand on the woman's shoulder. "There, there," she says, comfortingly. "Tell me about it."

The woman looks up at Reinette, searching for something. "Who are you?"

Reinette has no answer but the truth. "Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Duchesse de Pompadour."

The woman says nothing for a moment, but the tears seem to have stopped for the moment. Then she gives a wry laugh. "You just might be at that," she admits.

"Et vous?"

The woman starts as if disbelieving Reinette doesn't know who she is, then gives another mirthless laugh. "Lucy," she answers. "Lucy Saxon." She spits out her surname as if it is a curse.

"Well, Lucy," Reinette says, giving Lucy's shoulder a squeeze, "tell me your story."

Lucy does.

. . .

In ancient Persia, Manichean priests taught there were two worlds, one of light and one of darkness. The forces of Light sent forth Nāšā Qaḏmāyā, the first man, as its representative, while the forces of Darkness sent forth a demon, Greed. It occurs to Reinette that the story of the Doctor and the Master isn't all that different. She's seen His memories of the Master, their long history together, knows as no one else in the multiverse does the bond which at once binds and repels them. Their battles are epic, their feats legendary.

Less epic, not quite so legendary, but nonetheless tragic and powerful even if they are not remembered, are the stories of the women they've left behind.