realityshifted | 04 - Getting to know you

More of your grains of sand, yes.

The point is I seized the opprtunity as it was presented to me.

Edited 2008-08-01 08:01 (UTC)

How about another opportunity?

[she is visibly intrigued]

The Doctor was searching for whatever the Clockwork men sought. I sincerely doubt this would be a one-sided affair.

[expression is sharp]

What would you be looking for?

Should I restrict myself to one thing?

That, I think, is my answer.

To the question of what you would be seeking. As for the other?

[she finally removed her hand to take another sip of wine]

You were polite enough to ask. How could I be so rude as to decline?

At your leisure, then, may lady.

sets her glass aside

Educated though I may be, I expect you know I cannot initiate the interaction. Before I merely slipped though a door unnoticed.

[which Reinette suspected would not be the case this time]

Then may I?

[he lifts his hands, his weapons, his tools, and places them near her temples]

[she is, immediately, defiantly unguarded]

[it is the only place she is]

Thank you.

[what he presents is a neat, organised, clean hall of doors and doors, the distant sound of drumming murmuring through the walls, held back by his his will.

What he seeks? Every emotion, thought, and memory that lies before him. A chance to understand more of Jeanne-Antionette Poisson]

[the distant sound of drumming does not immediately bother her, it is almost musical in sound, compelling and not unlike the restless pace she has always lived her life at and she moves towards it - a dancer with her rhythm, opening doors]

[She rejects the notion of doors fer herself, ever since the Doctor informed her she might have them. Why would she hide what she wished to share, for him to see when he had seen her as child for far too long. She knew lessons and learnings along would never impress it, sensed it at a young age so she gave him everything besides and now? Now her mind is set in its ways, a bold uncensored place. Perhaps because she hopes he might one day see her again, or perhaps because she merely enjoys the way it feels]

[what Reinette wants is duality, and so duality is what she shall get. Though the Master hides those things of his that are weaknesses at the end of a hall that goes on forever, he cannot hide all of who he is.

Nor would he want to. Proud, upright, neat, organised - that is the Master's mind. Behind the first door, a murder made into an art, with his wife the happy audience. Behind the next, genocide, and this time his audience is the Doctor. There is always an audience, there are always people, but the Master always seems to stand apart from them, even in the crowded halls of Atlantis as he negotiates his way into the company of the Queen. Surrounded by people and completely alone.

An interesting logical argument presents itself to Reinette:

One sacrifices what one values more for what one values less.
The Master values power, and the freedom of others, less.
The Master values choice, and the rules set by others, less.
The Master values the Doctor, and his own survival---more, but that last conclusion seems not so clear, as if it cannot be broken down to logic.]

[she has always been a creature that must know fer herself. People and places -- their place, her place -- taste and texture. Even minds are textured, she is discovering. Her fingers delicately trace over hallways doors and handles, applying a subtle pressure. What is roughly made, kept but unexamined? Was it boredom, pain or fear that kept them so?

And what has been done over again and again, every nuance examined until the memory is soft stone, edges worn away by a river of thoughts? Fingertips play.

As disturbing as the images are, she is not completely thrown by them. She is a woman that sat by Louis' side as he planned his wars, received letters from battlefields decorated by the blood of those that would carry them to her. Genocide? Perhaps not. But she has watched all but one of her own child pass, one after the other in succession. His actions are intriguing, and on occasion appalling. Those that watch him? Just the same in turn.

Her own mind in a place of perfectly crafted archways, one after the other. Pictures from her past sit almost like painting in a gallery. There to be viewed.

Her recent separation from Louis. From Charles. From her children.

Reinette is an expert at the art of leaving. Perhaps that is part of what drew -- draws her to the Doctor. Memories of him are there are well.

The logic speaks to her. The confusion as well. Reinette travels further, fingers following.]

Edited 2008-08-02 06:37 (UTC)

[The openness makes him curious, but the resolve behind it makes him almost satisfied, as if it confirms a thought he's had. Each painting is examined carefully, but never quite touched. The gloves he wears are for distance as much as style, and his eyes are enough to appreciate the lady who can walk away.

Behind a door, dusty, but once worn through remembering, lies a memory from when he was much younger, many faces ago, when his mind was less touched with madness and his hearts were less drowned in hate.

The logic that plays as a backdrop to the memory is as follows: One must rule or serve, and the Master does not wish to serve. To rule universally, one must be able to control the universe.

It is simple to control a city. It is easy to control a planet. It is possible to control a system. It is difficult to manage a galaxy, and it is near impossible for one man to rule a universe, for with such a broad domain, first cities, then planets and systems and galaxies will slip from reach.

A priest in a desert city, where the Master has crashed his TARDIS, explains religion to the Master in a way that Universal Cultures hadn't. While he explains, he explains God: the omnipotent, the omniscient, the omnipresent.

The Master declares God illogical. The priest declares that the Master does not understand the universe completely, but God does. If one understood the universe in its entirety, one could hold on to every part of the universe, and not one soul would slip away. In the right hands, of course.

The memory cuts of here, abrupt and unfinished, the start of a thought on the Master's mind taken before she may see it]

[Oh how the textures tease her, playing against her skin and filling her senses. In presence is not s secret here, the door of the moment worn and open. There are keyholes that flash in the corner of her eye. For listening through or locking, Reinette has not decided.

Still, no secrets. If such suggest she recognized the Doctor was of her presence all along, so be it. Surely he recognized the possibility in her very nature, the way she pressed him against the fireplace. The Master is fully aware of where she walks and how she touches and she senses that? As much as anything else.

She can feel the heat of the desert against her skin as her fingers play over the roughly hewn texture of the priest's clothing, someone that obviously eschewed vanity. That it itself is compelling, a far cry from her own experience with church and God. Their exchanged breaths whisper over her skin. She even touches her host's smile, so carefully placed as his offer is declined. Lips are soft, the expression unaffected and yet? Her fingers are pricked, it is sharp.

Reinette and religion have never gotten on well, but she understands its compulsions.

If Reinette does not believe in doors, then she does not believe in clutter either. Her nature is passionate even if her body itself is not always, and each memory is fully realized. Louis sits so close, the center of many current thoughts. Her posture, as she informed him she could no longer fulfill the desires that drove him. Their friendship, which seemed only strengthened somehow. The quieter yearnings as she chose the woman that would replace her.

Is this really what she wishes to share?]

[The emotions are not hidden from the Master, not even those lesser threads that humans hide from themselves. But Reinette does not strike the Master as one who indulges in self-delusion.

He wonders if she is not unlike him, and so he seeks out those strings of thought that mark cruelty and unkindness.

He's lived a long life, and he's died so many times that there are so many faces of him for Reinette to see. There is a man who spends hours in study of a time-space anomaly, and another, narrowly escaping an Axon ship. A misplaced door contains the agony of falling into a black hole, but that is tugged away quickly to hide with the rest of the failures. There is even a memory of dancing with a cold and beautiful woman who might have been loved

Perhaps, in his fascination with what he examines, he is not as cautious as he should be in what he presents.]

[she can feel him, reaching for when she was unkind. Cruel. It is not as if those moments do not exist. And she refuses to hide them from him. If a point is made either way, well. She is hardly going to color her past for him in pastels instead of oils when she refuses to do so for herself. She is the one that must live there.

Charles, the child. Her husband. He wished for nothing of her, was bribe to agree to the contract but of course he had to fall in love. Their daughter in the next room, her future at hand and memories of the Yew Tree Ball lingering? Reinette informed him there time was done. Brought him to her knees without ever leaving her chair.

He had to be bribed.

She never forgets.

She watches him dance for a while, listening to the drumming all the while. So many lives and it is remarkable how much is the same. Her fingers grasp at the handle to the door that contains the black hole, as if she might force it back open. Finish the story. But she stops.

Is that respect?]

I wouldn't, my lady. It was very painful.

[but still, he unlocks the door for her]

You may choose.

I am no stranger to pain.

[she is curious, almost nakedly so. The door is unlocked and waiting and already she can hears the prelude to the rustle her skirts will make when she enters]

It can wait. [does it suggest a longer acquaintance] You can tell me of it some time.

I know you are not. But very well.

[he gives her this: standing alone before the leader of his species; the feeling of the TARDIS link being ripped from his mind; the agony of Daleks executing him; the force of will that kept him living, seeking out another chance.]

[she reels from it, images ice and heat in rapid succession as they both burn her skin]

[a breath]

[the screaming of her mind as the Clockwork men scan it, blood seeping from her wrists, elsewhere with miscarriage after miscarriage, a father banished to Germany, beginning anew]

[he catches hold of the memories and slows them, so he may better remove himself from the pain.]

[a planet, young, and lush and green, and the feel of the morphogenetic field of it, still untouched and vulnerable.

Daleks left to die across the planet; Sontaran and Rutan, crashed there and trapped in combat; a prison ship left there, criminals banding together and forming a space craft to set them free. And with each memory, the feel of the morphogenetic field twists.

Then, millions of years later, a civillisation built, a war-hungry, hate-mongering, ambitious population, with an empire stretching through the galaxy]

[for a moment she resists him, she is more than accustomed to her own memories, to the size and shape and scope of them and the emotions they bring -- but watching them with someone else, at the pace they chose? Makes the pain especially fresh and she reacts in turn]

[not her features of course, she is too practiced for that]

[some of the features of the creatures are familiar, and others are not. Those that are echo the dreams that followed the Doctor's departure, places and things that were beyond her own scope of knowledge, yet lingered all the same. Like a flat painting by a fledgling artist, they were ideas not fully realized. These images now add fresh dimension, and she all but devours them]

[he pauses, then reshuffles the door, trying to keep his habitual fear away from any place where she could sense it as he presents himself, the same face as the one that battled Axons, negotiated war between the Draconian and Earth empires - and, most importantly, showing her the Daleks he had allied himself with, the practices of the species which he had observed in his time with them.]

[the rooms are changing, that much she senses -- but hers never do, and has no knowledge of what they were before to sort out precisely what is different.

These Daleks seem so different from the ones within the Doctor's mind, and the endless fire that followed. The shells and shapes and capabilities are they same, so surely it is the beholder is what is altered. She touches one, still pressing to know, to understand.

There is a city that all but despises her, a country that thinks their king should want for something more common than herself. Slurs are made, witty twists and turns of her given name, and a carriage often assaulted. Objects thrown at it from the street.

But then she is standing on the stage she herself created, withing the kings most private chambers. The nobility battle themselves for invitations to her theatrical seasons, the intimate dinners with Louis that follow. They do not like her, but they need her. And she stands before them in breeches, to play the role of Prince Charming. Louis appears on stage then, kisses her, declares her the most delicious woman in all of France. Triumph sings in her veins.]

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