Remix Fic!
The Remix Duello stories are up! And they're not doing an anonymous phase, so I can just go ahead and repost mine here. I said during the writing of this that I felt like the right person could do something really interesting with it, but I was afraid I wasn't the right person... By which I mean that there was no way I felt comfortable enough with the historical characters to emphasize that part, so I latched onto a suggestion in my remixee's "dear remixer" letter, changed Doctors, and went for extra timey-wimeyness, instead. The result is, I think, a very different story from the original. Which I guess it's supposed to be, so, hey.
Title: Time Is Out of Joint (The Not Born to Set It Right Remix)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Eleven, Amy Pond, William Shakespeare, Reinette
Summary: Two brilliant historical figures and an unscheduled trip lead the Doctor to some thoughts about the things time takes from you.
Rating/Warnings: PG. Contains spoilers for various New Who episodes, particularly "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Cold Blood." (It's set sometime after "Vincent and the Doctor.")
Length: ~2,000 words
Author's Notes: Remix of Well Met in Sunlight by XWingAce.
Time Is Out of Joint (The Not Born to Set It Right Remix)
The Doctor couldn't help feeling the situation had got slightly out of his control. Funny, that. Dalek invasions, Sontaran battle fleets, imminent planetary explosions... He could face them all with perfect equanimity, and yet the combination of Amy Pond and William Shakespeare in the same room was somehow overwhelming. He couldn't quite decide, though, if his sense of dissatisfaction was due more to the shameful but deep-seated feeling that if there were going to be that much personality present in his TARDIS console room, it really ought to be his, or whether it was simply that their playful flirting reminded him all too well of what Amy had forgotten.
He let out a polite little cough and rubbed his hands together. "Yes, it's been a lovely visit, but I'm sure we should be going soon..."
They ignored him completely, both busy laughing at some no doubt brilliantly witty joke Shakespeare had just made, and which the Doctor had managed to miss. He sighed and leaned back against a stair railing, trying not to look sullen. It didn't help that being in this particular time and place was giving him an itchy, unsettled feeling, mainly because it reminded him a little too much of a recent period of his life that he'd really rather not dwell on. Not unrelated to this, there was also the matter of a certain queen who, if she caught him, would very likely have him beheaded. He imagined that would be rather difficult to regenerate from.
He should never have mentioned Shakespeare, no matter how natural it had seemed, after Van Gogh, to rattle on to Amy about the other geniuses he had known. It should have occurred to him that after hearing him refer to the man as "just about the greatest genius ever!" and "a really terrific bloke!", she would naturally insist on meeting him. And Amy tended to get what Amy insisted on. Somehow.
"Amy..." he tried again, but Shakespeare was still talking.
"Amazing! Truly amazing! Even I cannot find the words to do it justice. Though if I could, my listeners would surely think me addled." He finally turned his attention back to the Doctor, and his bright smile and twinkling eyes made it difficult for the Time Lord to remember how annoyed he was. "A man who not only travels through time as easily as I might walk the streets of London, but who can change bodies as an actor changes costume! And this remarkable contrivance..."
Shakespeare reached out to caress the TARDIS console respectfully, which the Doctor couldn't help smiling at, until he realized precisely where the Bard was about to put his hand.
"No! Don't touch--!" But even as he sprang forward to slap the man's hand away, he knew it was too late. They were dematerializing.
"You forgot to put the brake on again, didn't you?" said Amy casually, then stuck out her tongue when he glared at her, unable to deny the accusation.
"Are we travelling?" asked Shakespeare eagerly. "Where shall we go?"
"Oh, no," the Doctor said. "No." He wagged his finger under Shakespeare's nose. "We are not going anywhere. We are going to land wherever you've sent us, and then you are going right back home. If anything happened to you, history would never forgive me."
"That's very flattering, Doctor but--" Shakespeare reached towards the console again, as if he expected to be able to figure out how to keep them from returning by the time his hand met the controls. Which, while unlikely, was a possibility the Doctor wasn't quite ready to dismiss. He reached out to smack the playwright's hand away, but Amy got there first, leaving him flailing at nothing.
And at that moment, they landed. The Doctor glanced at the coordinates, his mind instantly translating the numbers into place and time, and he felt his left heart suddenly skip and stutter.
Shakespeare had activated the TARDIS's memory function, meaning that their destination had to be either very near somewhere the Doctor had been in the last few relative years, or, even more likely, near some cataloged source of recent time displacement. Which made this only a medium-large coincidence, the sort that happened to them all the time. And yet... The Doctor liked to believe that the universe was not an inherently cruel place, but sometimes events made that just a little difficult.
Mechanically, he activated the scanner control, revealing... Yes. There it was. Versailles.
He was dimly aware of Shakespeare asking where they were and marveling again at the TARDIS's technology, of Amy offering some guess or explanation. But he couldn't take his eyes from the image.
A woman walked into the scanner's field of view. She was reading from a book, aloud, it seemed, for the benefit of several friends trailing in her wake. Reinette. She looked much as he had last seen her. A few years older, perhaps. It was hard to say. Humans aged so fast.
"Does this magic window convey sound as well?" Shakespeare asked. "Or visions only?"
Amy responded by turning up the volume control. The Doctor almost moved to stop her, but couldn't quite bring himself to do it.
"But this is fantastic!" exclaimed Shakespeare. "To my ears, it sounds as if they are speaking French, but to my mind..." He raised a hand to his temple. "English, clear and perfect."
"TARDIS translation circuits," the Doctor said, barely glancing at him. "Not many people can perceive it on both levels at once. Congratulations."
"Peace," said Reinette, on the screen, reading from her book. "Count the clock." She had not seen them. The TARDIS must be hidden from her view.
"My words!" cried Shakespeare. "Doctor, those are my words! That's Julius Caesar!" He smiled in a delighted, self-satisfied fashion. "To think, that my plays will be read by beautiful women in the year-- What year is it?"
"1760," said the Doctor. "But you got it wrong, you know. There were no mechanical clocks in ancient Rome. You really shouldn't be quite so careless about history."
He thought he'd kept his voice light, casual. Nothing to see here. Nothing wrong. He'd got rather good at concealing his thoughts over the years, he believed; there were times when it came in handy. But he'd forgotten whom he was dealing with. Amy Pond, who had known him since she was seven. And William Shakespeare, possibly the greatest observer of human nature who'd ever lived. Both of them were looking at him now as if they'd heard something in his voice, or seen something in his face, and had a very definite idea of what it was.
"Right," said Amy. "Who is she, then?"
He sighed. "Madame du Pompadour," he said. "You may have heard of her."
Amy looked thoughtful, as if trying to remember where she'd heard a familiar name before. He tried not to feel disappointed. "She was an amazing woman," he said. He was about to launch into a list of her accomplishments when Amy cut him off.
"I see," she said, "So you two had a thing, then, did you?"
"It wasn't a thing," he protested.
Amy and Shakespeare exchanged a look.
"Anyway, it was a long time ago," the Doctor said. "Another life." He looked back at the woman on the scanner screen, laughing at something one of her companions had just done or said, and carefully examined his own feelings on the subject. The sharp, piercing regret he remembered had faded, perhaps, into a dull soft ache. Regeneration was good for that sort of thing. This past regeneration, especially. There were some experiences that needed to belong to the past.
He could handle this. Of course he could.
"What happened?" said Amy. "Dumped you, did she?"
"No," he said, quietly and simply. "She died."
"Oh." Amy's voice softened. "I'm sorry." She touched his hand. He managed to smile at her.
"Is this a ghost, then?" asked Shakespeare, gesturing towards the screen. He seemed quite ready to accept that explanation.
"No," said Amy, understanding slowly registering on her face. "Because this is a time machine..."
"Funny thing about time travel," said the Doctor. "Everyone you've ever lost is still there, somewhere, in time. Well, except for the ones that aren't. But from your perspective, they can still be gone. A book of history, closed." Amy's face wavered out of focus in his vision, and he blinked her back in. "I really should not be here. Can't. Can't be here. What's done is done."
"Doctor," said Amy, "That doesn't make any sense. I mean, from my point of view, Shakespeare has been dead for centuries--" She ignored a Shakespearian cry of protest and continued, "-- but you don't have a problem with us popping in and out of his life. Do you?"
"Not quite the same thing, I'm afraid. If it were a fact -- a fixed, established fact -- that Shakespeare had never seen me again, then me re-crossing his timeline would be out of the question."
Something about Amy's expression made him wonder, for a terrible, hopeful moment, whether she was remembering the paradox of two people waving and was about to object. But, no, she was only skeptical of his words. He couldn't really blame her. Concepts that were easy to explain in Gallifreyan never seemed to a make nearly as much sense when translated into human languages. He was just glad she hadn't asked him about River Song. He didn't understand the temporal mechanics of that relationship well enough yet to explain it in any tongue.
"Is that, like, one of those Rules of Time?" Amy said.
"Laws of Time," he muttered, but she paid no attention.
"Because, I don't know, I think that if time takes away someone you care about, the thing to do is to say screw the rules and... and punch at it until it gives them back!" She punctuated this sentiment with a little motion of her fist through the air.
The Doctor, in his own estimation, did an extremely good job of not flinching at this. "It isn't quite that simple," he said. "Altering fixed points in history... Well, trust me. It's a bad idea. Even with the best of intentions, it's a very, very bad idea."
Amy was thinking. He recognized that dangerous look on her face. "So," she said slowly. "You know she didn't meet you again before she died, so you can't meet her again now, right?"
"Yes," said the Doctor, drawing out the syllable, wondering where this might be going.
"Did she ever say anything about not meeting Amy Pond and William Shakespeare?"
He stared at her for a moment.
"I will take that as a no. Right, then. We'll just pop out and say hello. Anything you want us to say to her?"
"Don't mention my name," he said, not intending to say anything to encourage her until the words were already out of his mouth. But seeing as they were... "You can't tell her anything about me."
"That's going to make it a little hard to explain turning up with William Shakespeare."
"She knows about time travel," the Doctor said. "Just... be vague."
"What shall we tell her?" asked Shakespeare. The Doctor could tell he didn't simply mean about where they came from.
"Tell her..." Slowly, he smiled. "Tell her she will have a brilliant life." Surely there would be little danger to the timelines in that. "Tell her... she'll be remembered."
Shakespeare nodded and clasped the Doctor on the shoulder. "It is good to be remembered," he said quietly, smiling. Then he looked again at the scanner, at the beautiful, vibrant woman reading the words he had written. He seemed rather smitten, the Doctor thought. Understandably.
The Doctor, too, watched the scanner. In a moment, Amy and Shakespeare appeared in its field of view, Shakespeare gallantly kissing Reinette's hand, Amy doing a charmingly ridiculous miniskirted curtsey. The surprised and interested look in Reinette's eyes made him smile, just a little. He was sure she'd enjoy meeting Shakespeare, as much as Shakespeare would enjoy meeting her.
He turned up the sound again, and Reinette's laughter filled the console room. It was... comforting. There was a good lesson here, the Doctor thought, one he really ought to have learned by now. Nothing, good or bad, fixed or changeable, is ever completely lost.
He found it a very hopeful thought.
Title: Time Is Out of Joint (The Not Born to Set It Right Remix)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Eleven, Amy Pond, William Shakespeare, Reinette
Summary: Two brilliant historical figures and an unscheduled trip lead the Doctor to some thoughts about the things time takes from you.
Rating/Warnings: PG. Contains spoilers for various New Who episodes, particularly "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Cold Blood." (It's set sometime after "Vincent and the Doctor.")
Length: ~2,000 words
Author's Notes: Remix of Well Met in Sunlight by XWingAce.
Time Is Out of Joint (The Not Born to Set It Right Remix)
The Doctor couldn't help feeling the situation had got slightly out of his control. Funny, that. Dalek invasions, Sontaran battle fleets, imminent planetary explosions... He could face them all with perfect equanimity, and yet the combination of Amy Pond and William Shakespeare in the same room was somehow overwhelming. He couldn't quite decide, though, if his sense of dissatisfaction was due more to the shameful but deep-seated feeling that if there were going to be that much personality present in his TARDIS console room, it really ought to be his, or whether it was simply that their playful flirting reminded him all too well of what Amy had forgotten.
He let out a polite little cough and rubbed his hands together. "Yes, it's been a lovely visit, but I'm sure we should be going soon..."
They ignored him completely, both busy laughing at some no doubt brilliantly witty joke Shakespeare had just made, and which the Doctor had managed to miss. He sighed and leaned back against a stair railing, trying not to look sullen. It didn't help that being in this particular time and place was giving him an itchy, unsettled feeling, mainly because it reminded him a little too much of a recent period of his life that he'd really rather not dwell on. Not unrelated to this, there was also the matter of a certain queen who, if she caught him, would very likely have him beheaded. He imagined that would be rather difficult to regenerate from.
He should never have mentioned Shakespeare, no matter how natural it had seemed, after Van Gogh, to rattle on to Amy about the other geniuses he had known. It should have occurred to him that after hearing him refer to the man as "just about the greatest genius ever!" and "a really terrific bloke!", she would naturally insist on meeting him. And Amy tended to get what Amy insisted on. Somehow.
"Amy..." he tried again, but Shakespeare was still talking.
"Amazing! Truly amazing! Even I cannot find the words to do it justice. Though if I could, my listeners would surely think me addled." He finally turned his attention back to the Doctor, and his bright smile and twinkling eyes made it difficult for the Time Lord to remember how annoyed he was. "A man who not only travels through time as easily as I might walk the streets of London, but who can change bodies as an actor changes costume! And this remarkable contrivance..."
Shakespeare reached out to caress the TARDIS console respectfully, which the Doctor couldn't help smiling at, until he realized precisely where the Bard was about to put his hand.
"No! Don't touch--!" But even as he sprang forward to slap the man's hand away, he knew it was too late. They were dematerializing.
"You forgot to put the brake on again, didn't you?" said Amy casually, then stuck out her tongue when he glared at her, unable to deny the accusation.
"Are we travelling?" asked Shakespeare eagerly. "Where shall we go?"
"Oh, no," the Doctor said. "No." He wagged his finger under Shakespeare's nose. "We are not going anywhere. We are going to land wherever you've sent us, and then you are going right back home. If anything happened to you, history would never forgive me."
"That's very flattering, Doctor but--" Shakespeare reached towards the console again, as if he expected to be able to figure out how to keep them from returning by the time his hand met the controls. Which, while unlikely, was a possibility the Doctor wasn't quite ready to dismiss. He reached out to smack the playwright's hand away, but Amy got there first, leaving him flailing at nothing.
And at that moment, they landed. The Doctor glanced at the coordinates, his mind instantly translating the numbers into place and time, and he felt his left heart suddenly skip and stutter.
Shakespeare had activated the TARDIS's memory function, meaning that their destination had to be either very near somewhere the Doctor had been in the last few relative years, or, even more likely, near some cataloged source of recent time displacement. Which made this only a medium-large coincidence, the sort that happened to them all the time. And yet... The Doctor liked to believe that the universe was not an inherently cruel place, but sometimes events made that just a little difficult.
Mechanically, he activated the scanner control, revealing... Yes. There it was. Versailles.
He was dimly aware of Shakespeare asking where they were and marveling again at the TARDIS's technology, of Amy offering some guess or explanation. But he couldn't take his eyes from the image.
A woman walked into the scanner's field of view. She was reading from a book, aloud, it seemed, for the benefit of several friends trailing in her wake. Reinette. She looked much as he had last seen her. A few years older, perhaps. It was hard to say. Humans aged so fast.
"Does this magic window convey sound as well?" Shakespeare asked. "Or visions only?"
Amy responded by turning up the volume control. The Doctor almost moved to stop her, but couldn't quite bring himself to do it.
"But this is fantastic!" exclaimed Shakespeare. "To my ears, it sounds as if they are speaking French, but to my mind..." He raised a hand to his temple. "English, clear and perfect."
"TARDIS translation circuits," the Doctor said, barely glancing at him. "Not many people can perceive it on both levels at once. Congratulations."
"Peace," said Reinette, on the screen, reading from her book. "Count the clock." She had not seen them. The TARDIS must be hidden from her view.
"My words!" cried Shakespeare. "Doctor, those are my words! That's Julius Caesar!" He smiled in a delighted, self-satisfied fashion. "To think, that my plays will be read by beautiful women in the year-- What year is it?"
"1760," said the Doctor. "But you got it wrong, you know. There were no mechanical clocks in ancient Rome. You really shouldn't be quite so careless about history."
He thought he'd kept his voice light, casual. Nothing to see here. Nothing wrong. He'd got rather good at concealing his thoughts over the years, he believed; there were times when it came in handy. But he'd forgotten whom he was dealing with. Amy Pond, who had known him since she was seven. And William Shakespeare, possibly the greatest observer of human nature who'd ever lived. Both of them were looking at him now as if they'd heard something in his voice, or seen something in his face, and had a very definite idea of what it was.
"Right," said Amy. "Who is she, then?"
He sighed. "Madame du Pompadour," he said. "You may have heard of her."
Amy looked thoughtful, as if trying to remember where she'd heard a familiar name before. He tried not to feel disappointed. "She was an amazing woman," he said. He was about to launch into a list of her accomplishments when Amy cut him off.
"I see," she said, "So you two had a thing, then, did you?"
"It wasn't a thing," he protested.
Amy and Shakespeare exchanged a look.
"Anyway, it was a long time ago," the Doctor said. "Another life." He looked back at the woman on the scanner screen, laughing at something one of her companions had just done or said, and carefully examined his own feelings on the subject. The sharp, piercing regret he remembered had faded, perhaps, into a dull soft ache. Regeneration was good for that sort of thing. This past regeneration, especially. There were some experiences that needed to belong to the past.
He could handle this. Of course he could.
"What happened?" said Amy. "Dumped you, did she?"
"No," he said, quietly and simply. "She died."
"Oh." Amy's voice softened. "I'm sorry." She touched his hand. He managed to smile at her.
"Is this a ghost, then?" asked Shakespeare, gesturing towards the screen. He seemed quite ready to accept that explanation.
"No," said Amy, understanding slowly registering on her face. "Because this is a time machine..."
"Funny thing about time travel," said the Doctor. "Everyone you've ever lost is still there, somewhere, in time. Well, except for the ones that aren't. But from your perspective, they can still be gone. A book of history, closed." Amy's face wavered out of focus in his vision, and he blinked her back in. "I really should not be here. Can't. Can't be here. What's done is done."
"Doctor," said Amy, "That doesn't make any sense. I mean, from my point of view, Shakespeare has been dead for centuries--" She ignored a Shakespearian cry of protest and continued, "-- but you don't have a problem with us popping in and out of his life. Do you?"
"Not quite the same thing, I'm afraid. If it were a fact -- a fixed, established fact -- that Shakespeare had never seen me again, then me re-crossing his timeline would be out of the question."
Something about Amy's expression made him wonder, for a terrible, hopeful moment, whether she was remembering the paradox of two people waving and was about to object. But, no, she was only skeptical of his words. He couldn't really blame her. Concepts that were easy to explain in Gallifreyan never seemed to a make nearly as much sense when translated into human languages. He was just glad she hadn't asked him about River Song. He didn't understand the temporal mechanics of that relationship well enough yet to explain it in any tongue.
"Is that, like, one of those Rules of Time?" Amy said.
"Laws of Time," he muttered, but she paid no attention.
"Because, I don't know, I think that if time takes away someone you care about, the thing to do is to say screw the rules and... and punch at it until it gives them back!" She punctuated this sentiment with a little motion of her fist through the air.
The Doctor, in his own estimation, did an extremely good job of not flinching at this. "It isn't quite that simple," he said. "Altering fixed points in history... Well, trust me. It's a bad idea. Even with the best of intentions, it's a very, very bad idea."
Amy was thinking. He recognized that dangerous look on her face. "So," she said slowly. "You know she didn't meet you again before she died, so you can't meet her again now, right?"
"Yes," said the Doctor, drawing out the syllable, wondering where this might be going.
"Did she ever say anything about not meeting Amy Pond and William Shakespeare?"
He stared at her for a moment.
"I will take that as a no. Right, then. We'll just pop out and say hello. Anything you want us to say to her?"
"Don't mention my name," he said, not intending to say anything to encourage her until the words were already out of his mouth. But seeing as they were... "You can't tell her anything about me."
"That's going to make it a little hard to explain turning up with William Shakespeare."
"She knows about time travel," the Doctor said. "Just... be vague."
"What shall we tell her?" asked Shakespeare. The Doctor could tell he didn't simply mean about where they came from.
"Tell her..." Slowly, he smiled. "Tell her she will have a brilliant life." Surely there would be little danger to the timelines in that. "Tell her... she'll be remembered."
Shakespeare nodded and clasped the Doctor on the shoulder. "It is good to be remembered," he said quietly, smiling. Then he looked again at the scanner, at the beautiful, vibrant woman reading the words he had written. He seemed rather smitten, the Doctor thought. Understandably.
The Doctor, too, watched the scanner. In a moment, Amy and Shakespeare appeared in its field of view, Shakespeare gallantly kissing Reinette's hand, Amy doing a charmingly ridiculous miniskirted curtsey. The surprised and interested look in Reinette's eyes made him smile, just a little. He was sure she'd enjoy meeting Shakespeare, as much as Shakespeare would enjoy meeting her.
He turned up the sound again, and Reinette's laughter filled the console room. It was... comforting. There was a good lesson here, the Doctor thought, one he really ought to have learned by now. Nothing, good or bad, fixed or changeable, is ever completely lost.
He found it a very hopeful thought.