New Perspective

Eleven

If the Anobine Cartax of legend existed, the containment device they had found was not it. It would not be sought after with the same obsessive tenacities. People would still come looking for something, they would still lose themselves in the Fowl Pocket, but with the right precautions, the device could stay hidden aboard the Comet and would never harm anybody again. Destroying the atmospheric generators on the exterior had sucked all the air out of the entire ship, which was quite the rust bucket and not correctly sealed. It had also killed, like Iveanne, all the foul creatures hiding like rats in the ship's crevices and cracks. In the zero gravity, bits of them floated around in the dark, knocking against the Doctor's arms and legs in a slowed down barrage of unpleasantness and gore.

They passed, again, through the airlock into the captain's cabin, carrying the fake Cartax with them, infecting the only air left on the ship. They were going to leave it there, lock it in, leave a warning behind, if the corpses drifting around weren't enough of one. They would all be safe, though. This plague wasn't affecting the Time Lords yet, and Amy had been sealed away in her suit for hours already without a sign of infection. At least, in the captain's cabin, they could switch off the mango-boots and walk freely. It was a tiny microcosm of atmosphere in there, full life support, electricity, zero gravity, the works. No doubt it was all plumbed in, too. He wouldn't be surprised to find a gas stove hidden away in a corner. He carried the Cartax, leaving Jenny alone to her thoughts, and went and dumped it on the table covered in the late Iveanne's refuse.

"We should leave a message," Jenny declared, standing in front of it, crossing her arms, still armed with both of her guns, head sealed away in a fishbowl that now had flecks of muck and blood across its front.

"On the outside of the room, though. Otherwise it'll be useless," he said. He would have suggested evacuating this room of air, too, but that thing had been floating around in space for millennia already. Just sucking out the air wouldn't kill the bacteria before they found a host. He doubted that anything would kill them at this stage.

"Oi, Time Lords, come and look at this," Amy called, voice buzzing in the suits' speakers. Eleven glanced over his shoulder, but saw nothing. "There's a whole room back here full of junk."

"Junk?" Jenny asked, following Amy's vague directions and her own memory. She did used to live in this cabin, after all, very recently. Only eight months' back. Eleven, curious, trailed after the pair of them as well, and marvelled at the room which Amy had discovered. It was full of junk, and Jenny gasped with pleasure and smiled when she saw it all. It was ram-packed, it looked like the houses of hoarders he saw when he allowed his wife to talk him into watching reality television with her in the evenings. "This is my stuff!" Jenny exclaimed, "I thought this all got burned! She must have been obsessed with me…"

"Maybe she was going to sell it," Amy suggested.

"Sell it?" Jenny frowned, picking something wooden up from on top of a stack of old boxes that didn't look like they fit the century at all, "This stuff?" What she was holding was a battered fiddle, beaming at it like it was an old friend. "Viola used to make me play this in her speakeasy back in the Thirties to draw in the crowds." Jenny only drew the bow across its neck once, realising it was far from being in tune, and winced when it sounded horrible.

"That's the second time you've mentioned somebody called Viola," the Doctor pointed out. Jenny was too excited by the sight of all this stuff, putting the fiddle back down and searching around for more, to lie to him and hide things. In her happiness, she was no longer so enigmatic, so intent on keeping everything buried, "She's not another ex-girlfriend?"

"Viola? God, no," Jenny was appalled at the thought, "She was horrible. Is horrible. I met her when she was nineteen, I think. Ten years later she was the head of a crime family in New Orleans, took advantage of prohibition. She was definitely a sociopath."

"But you were friends with her?"

"She let me live in her house in exchange for brewing moonshine and protecting her from the imaginary assassins she dreamt up in her paranoia," Jenny explained.

"You brewed moonshine? For the mafia?" he asked.

"Yeah. Why? Do you want me to make some?"

"Yes," said Amy.

"No," said the Doctor. Amy glared at him, and he tried to ignore her, staring around at everything else that was stuffed into the comparably tiny bedroom in the opulent captain's quarters. "God forbid anybody on the TARDIS gets drunk. It never goes well." Amy was distracted, though, picking something else up from within a box, looking at it with borderline disgust and holding it arm's length. Eleven couldn't quite distinguish what it was in the shadowy room.

"Jenny…" she began, "Is this an urn…?" Jenny glanced over.

"Oh my god!" she exclaimed, "Emmett!" she walked over and took the urn – for it most definitely was an urn – right out of Amy's hands.

"I thought Emmett was the gun…?" the Doctor said slowly.

"The gun is named after him, he died, a long time ago. He was a time agent, rescued me from Tungtrun and told me about Time Lords, then… he got shot… I had to save his body from a crocodile, built the pyre myself…" she said, "The time agency said he didn't have any family for his remains to go to, so I… kept them. I thought he would want to see the universe with me, or something…" It was odd, he supposed, but it was sweet of her. But how long ago was 'a long time,' he wondered? "I need to take this all back onto the TARDIS."

"Well, yes, of course, if you like. I could build you a whole, huge room to keep your things in, if you want. You could have your own mansion, or… a castle, even, on board, if you like," he told her, and she looked at him, a little confused.

"I think you're trying too hard, father. I don't need a castle. There's not that much. It's mostly guns," she said, placing Emmett's ashes down carefully. Amy still poked around and found all manner of funny gizmos she couldn't determine the uses of, and Jenny continued to search. As for him? He didn't touch a single thing. Didn't think it was his place to go rooting around through her personals. He wanted to know more about her time on Tungtrun, that desolate arctic wasteland, when she picked up a metal tin and rattled it. He watched her open it and lift something out.

"What's that?" he asked, and she held it out to him between the fingers of her encased hand.

"It's a medal of valour for First Lieutenant Young, that's what led me to be promoted to Major in the Homeworld Alliance. There's a whole bunch of them. I have a badge of outstanding service to the RAF, too, I think. All sorts of decorations," she said, holding out the tin to him. It really was full to the brim with medals, medals for dedicated service, bravery, she even had a Victoria Cross and he thought he was dying to know what she did to get that. Very much he would like her to sit down and talk him through every last one of those awards for heroism and morale boosting, tell him what some of the funny tokens buried at the bottom were. This room and everything in it was Jenny's life, everything that had happened to her that wasn't recorded on her physiology like wrinkles were on humans. "Oh, here's Viola." Jenny was holding a leather-bound volume in her hand.

"Is that a photo album?"

"Yeah," she pulled something aged and yellow out of it, a frankly ancient photograph of her standing outside of a very fancy mansion with a woman who looked very young but very stern. If he had to, he would say she didn't know what a sense of humour was. He turned it over and read the writing on the back: J. DeLacey & V. O'Hara, July 24th, 1934.

"July 24th? Isn't that your birthday?"

"Yeah, that's why she made me get the picture taken. I turned eleven," she said. "I can't believe you remember my birthday."

"Eleven? You were brewing moonshine when you were just eleven?" Amy questioned. Jenny nodded and took the picture back off the Doctor. "God, you weren't even old enough to legally drink the moonshine…"

"Of course I remember it," he said, not telling her that he had had spent a few hours sifting through eons of the TARDIS's records to discover the date of his initial visit to Messaline. That wasn't important. He definitely wasn't going to forget it again. "Why does it say 'J. DeLacey' on the back?"

"That was the name I was using at the time, the first surname I ever had, that I stole from Emmett when he died," she explained, "I had to call myself something. It's not like you ever gave me a surname."

He pulled a funny-looking medallion out of Jenny's medal tin with some sort of sigil on it, squinting to try and deduce what it was. It was black and slightly translucent.

"What's this?" he asked her, showing her it.

"Uh, it's a… membership… loyalty… thingy… for the Blacklight Society," she said.

"What's that?"

"A thieves' guild," she answered, "They give you one of those when you pass the initiation."

"Stealing must run in the family," Amy commented. The Doctor giving anybody a lecture on the immorality of stealing would render him the universe's most abominable hypocrite for sure. The very ship he lived in had been stolen, and the clothes on his back. "You even steal people."

"I do not," he argued.

"You stole me on my wedding night."

"I didn't steal you, Amelia, you came very willingly and tried to cheat on Rory with me, so I am hardly in the wrong," he grumbled. Amy was amusing herself trying to irritate him. "So you've done a lot of work that isn't strictly legal?"

"Thievery and smuggling are my bread and butter, father," she said, then she pulled another photo out if the album she was flicking through, "This one's good, do you know who that is?" It was a black and white picture of her and a tall man standing in front of a Spitfire, smiling. He turned it over and read: Captain J. Harkness & J. DeLacey, 1940. In the background he could see the White Cliffs of Dover.

"Harkness?" he questioned.

"Yeah, that's the original Captain Jack Harkness, the real one, the one who our Captain Jack Harkness stole the name from," she said, "He died a few months after that, in January, 1941. It was supposed to be a routine training exercise until the Messerschmitts showed up." Hearing that, Amy came over and snatched the ancient picture out of Jenny's hand.

"He's hot," she declared.

"And dead and gay. I can't wait to show some of these to Clara…" she added the last part to herself, "All these memories… I'd love to salvage the Comet, it was my dream for ages to be a pirate queen." The Doctor glanced around and spied something paper sticking out of a nearby box. Opening the cardboard flaps he saw that the entire box was full of ration cards, German ration cards, with various dates through the 1960s printed on them. They were for such luxuries as cigarettes and alcohol.

"Why do you have these?"

"I've told you before, I was a smuggler in Berlin. I was called Kitzler. Used to go through tunnels underneath the wall and take contraband into the East," she explained. He wondered why she had kept them, instead of perhaps being charitable and dishing them out to people when she left.

"…I'll go get the TARDIS," the Doctor declared after thinking, "Bring it through here. Plague won't get through the doors. For you to bring your stuff on board. If you want."

"Well I can't really put it anywhere else," she said, "Clara would kill me if I took at this stuff to her house."

"Then I'll go fetch it. I'll be right back, in just a few seconds."

"First it seems like you've been fretting for days about the state of my thumb, but when I come back to the TARDIS you come at me with a saw blade?" Jenny questioned Martha Jones, who had just forcibly dragged her all the way from the console room to the medibay by her elbow, the Doctor feeling out of place but still trailing along after them. They had been spending the best part of two hours lugging boxes and trinkets back and forth, Amy giving up halfway through because she fancied a coffee and a shower, and had just finished when Martha got word of Jenny's 'return.' Whether she was returning for good or not, the Doctor didn't know, but Martha was just about dying to get a look at her hand.

"And you've been out – what? Sword fighting? Tightrope walking?" Martha challenged, looking at Jenny sternly so that she would put her hand down on the table flat.

"I didn't use this hand for any of those! I've been good!" Jenny protested.

"Really? You haven't suffered any more injuries? At all?" Jenny faltered and briefly glanced at the Doctor for some reason. "Jenny…" Martha warned.

"I mean, Clara rolled on it once while she was asleep, by accident," Jenny finally said, "But that's it. I've barely done a thing for five days."

"It had better be," Martha said, switching the saw on. Jenny pouted and looked at the saw like she was frightened of it. Perhaps she was. The Doctor would certainly be scared if someone was brandishing a saw at him, even if it was Martha and she was removing a fibreglass cast. He should be the one with the cast and the broken thumb. It had been his fault they got captured in Chernobyl, not hers. Maybe he should break his own thumb? As a show of solidarity? Of fatherly support? He was sure that if he asked Ravenwood nicely she would indulge him.

"Why were you asking me about where I was in October in 1941?" Jenny asked him, surprising him.

"Oh, I was just… I was there, you see, yesterday. On an ocean liner. And after what you said about the war, World War Two, I remembered you were there, at the same time, and I wondered what you were doing."

"I was definitely in Plymouth, I'm sure. I was eighteen."

"I could have gone and got you," he said, listening to the saw crunch down on the cast to cut Jenny's hand free, "I said so to Oswin. She said you would hate me if I did that, though, and I told her you hate me already so it would hardly make a jot of difference."

"I don't hate you," Jenny said, meeting his eyes in between her worrisome glances at Martha and her electric saw, "You're trying."

"…And then I ran into the Shadow, and it mentioned you," he remembered.

"I think the Shadow goes by 'he.'"

"Yes, well… he mentioned you."

"What did he say? Did he say anything about Cargill? He's not getting the diamond until I get that… fiend arrested," she said coldly.

"Diamond? Cargill? Which Cargill? Both of them?"

"Austin."

"What did he do to you?"

Jenny sighed. "Did you ever hear of the Polaris Death Charge?"

"On Deftan?"

"Yeah. That. Cargill ordered that. Major Cargill, at the time," she said his name like she was spitting it, "Except a certain other Major disagreed, and a certain other Major commandeered an Alliance shuttle and flew right into the Nomatee Base and rescued a few thousand soldiers and then defected, and said certain other Major was then promptly used as a convenient scapegoat," she said.

"You mean you? Cargill framed you for the massacre of a million people?"

"Yeah. According to the Alliance, I'm a war criminal." Martha was still sawing. "I was looking into it the other week and coincidentally ran into the Shadow while he was trying to hunt down and arrest some ex-partner of Jack's on Zeniph Nega, and we accidentally got involved in a bar shootout and acquired an Arcadian diamond off one of the bodies. I didn't kill anybody. The Shadow is finding Cargill for me, in exchange for the diamond."

"But… but why did he frame you to begin with?"

"The exact same reason he sent someone who fought on Deftan that day to Hollowmire to stake Clara," she said, but she did not elaborate.

"What reason?"

"I can't tell you," she said, "Can't tell you a single thing about why the Cargills hate the both of us."

"Why not?"

"It's in your future, and my past, my very recent past, just before mum left." Again with her being so… colloquial about Thirteen. 'Mum.' Was it immature of him to be irked by such a casual name?

"Oh."

"Yeah. Sorry. You know how it is."

"Yes…"

"All done," Martha declared. The saw switched off and the Doctor walked over to get a look at Jenny's thumb as Martha pulled the cast apart, but he wished he hadn't. It was very foul-looking, terribly bruised with stitches running down the knuckle. He was even more guilty seeing that mangled mess than he had been before. It twitched a little, too, like the tendons weren't working properly.

"What's the prognosis, Dr Jones?" Jenny asked Martha jokingly, "Is it broken?" Martha clearly wasn't in a mood for jokes, though, going by the glare she gave Jenny. Jenny just smiled. "Are you gonna put another cast on it? Because if you are I want to take a photo first to show to Clara."

"It needs a wash. It smells." Jenny leant down and sniffed her hand, then flinched.

"Eurgh," she said, then she glanced at her father, "Do you want to smell it? It's gross." She held her hand towards him.

"Don't smell it," Martha ordered him when he was about to say yes.

"Of course I won't smell it. What do you take me for?"

"Can the stitches come out yet?" Jenny inquired.

"I think so," Martha answered, "You do heal very quickly. I'll take the stitches out and… cobble together a brace out of… something."

"The TARDIS will make a brace," the Doctor said.

"Well, go get one, then," Martha told him, then she added pointedly to Jenny, "You're still not allowed to go exerting yourself. If you want my medical advice, you'll go back to the village and stay there for a few more days so that Clara keeps you out of trouble."

"Clara's in the pub right now getting drunk with Sally Sparrow, so I doubt she'll do all that good of a job, to be honest," Jenny shrugged.

"No adventures through time and space for you, alright? Just look at what happened today."

"Fine," Jenny, irritated, agreed, rolling her eyes, "For the record, I was actually at Clara's house the last time I regenerated, so who knows how safe it is?"

"Just be sensible," Martha said, then she turned her gaze on the Doctor, "And you? Don't go dragging her out to dangerous places. I don't care how much you want to bond, or whatever."

"Yes, yes," he waved her away.

"Honestly, I'm wasting my breath on both of you…" she grumbled.

Eleven didn't think it was possible for Martha to become more annoyed with the pair of them, but when Jenny beamed and asked, "Can I keep the dirty cast?" that was the last straw.

"You aliens are so bloody weird…"