DAY 139

Biohazard

Ravenwood

Was it bad of Clara that she had grown to rely on her girlfriend as a kind of living alarm clock? Jenny hardly ever slept. But she was very good at waking Clara up on a morning gently, the way a bleeping noise of hatred in her ear never did (especially with her ever-so-sensitive bat-hearing.) Except, that morning, or late afternoon as it actually was, Jenny didn't wake Clara up. She woke up after hearing a bang, which turned out to be her phone falling off her mattress onto the floor after vibrating itself out from under her pillow. It fell against the wooden leg of the bedside table and was much louder there than on the soft furnishings, and startled her awake. She rolled over, away from Jenny, who was fast asleep, and saw it was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon and she had five missed calls from Dylan Danvers, presumably asking her where in the hell she was because she was meant to be at work. Immediately, she swore, and nearly fell out of the bed scrabbling to retrieve the device.

"Shit, shit, shit…" she muttered to herself, fumbling with her phone, trying to answer it, but she wasn't quick enough and it rang out. She wouldn't call him back right away, she would just hurry up and get dressed as soon as she could. Maybe she would skip out on showering. She was sure she stank of booze, it was evident she'd been on a bender, but she could slip to Sally and Esther's in the early evening and steal their shower for twenty minutes, she was sure. "Why didn't you wake me up?" she asked grumpily, nearly tripping over as she peeled her dirty pyjamas off and tried to find clean clothes in the gloomy mess of her cellar. Jenny didn't answer. "Jen?" Nothing. "Jenny?" Clara frowned and dropped the skirt she had scrounged back onto the floor. "Are you awake?" she went over to the left side of the bed. She'd been awake not five hours ago, both of them had. She crouched down. "Hey?" she shook Jenny's shoulder. And then she was worried. Two nights ago Jenny had slept, she shouldn't be asleep now, it didn't make biological sense. And her heart rate, when Clara listened carefully enough, it was through the roof. She shook her shoulder again, quite aggressively, and felt her hand nearly burning against Jenny's skin when she took it away. Sure, Time Lords were hot, but not that hot.

Panicking, Clara dashed up the stairs with that sort of speed only the undead were capable of and ransacked her own cupboards (the contents of which she knew nothing of herself) until she found a jug, which she filled at the sink with cold water. She didn't know why Jenny wouldn't wake up. She wasn't dead, she was far from dead… or maybe she wasn't far from it. Maybe she was very, very close to it, and that thought made Clara even more frightened, and not without reason. So took her water in her jug back into the cellar and trickled it onto Jenny's head. At least she didn't have to throw the whole thing over her before she finally awoke, with a groan.

"Are you okay!?" Clara asked, a little more urgently than she meant to. Jenny looked like she was sweating, too, which was also bad because Clara rarely saw her sweat (and, not to be too blue, the pair of them did engage quite frequently together in some pretty exhaustive physical activities.) She wished she had a thermometer somewhere in the house so that she could take Jenny's temperature properly, it had to be obscene. She couldn't have been intending to fall asleep. If she had been, she wouldn't have promised Clara eggs.

Distantly, Clara was aware of her phone still buzzing, Dylan still trying to reach her, but she ignored it. She could get fired, she didn't care, all she cared about was Jenny Harkness.

"I don't feel well," Jenny mumbled.

"You don't look it, either," Clara said, brushing a bit of Jenny's now-wet hair out of her face.

"I'm too hot."

"Yeah, I know, have a drink," Clara offered the jug, and Jenny leant over, had her head hanging over the jug like she was about to try and take a sip. Then, out of nowhere, she heaved and was sick into the water. Clara's disgust was outweighed by the knowledge that Jenny was ill, and her other knowledge that Time Lords did not get ill. So what was going on?

Martha

Martha wished she had a job some days. There were the days on the TARDIS that were the most exciting days in the world, ones she wouldn't trade anything for. Then there were the days where nobody offered to go anywhere, and she didn't have a clue where to go herself, and so she and Mickey ended up drolly watching daytime television in their room. Except that day was even worse, because she didn't even have Mickey for company, because he was elsewhere with Rory on one of their boys' days they had to fight back against Donna and Amy's spa days. So it was just Martha, bored, mindlessly watching Four in a Bed and craving a fry up, thinking she might just be unhealthy and make herself one for dinner.

It really was a welcome disturbance when her phone rang, even if she was perplexed to see it was Clara Ravenwood calling her. Clara hadn't had her number until recently, when Martha had been trying to get a hold of Jenny to ask prying questions about the state of that mangled thumb of hers. Though she assumed it was a pocket dial, she answered anyway, absently saying, "Hello?" But in response she was treated to fervent hysterics.

"Oh, Martha, thank god you picked up," Clara said, proceeding to babble very quickly a whole lot of words which Martha couldn't discern.

"Slow down, Clara," Martha said, but Clara didn't, "Clar – Clara!" Clara shut up. "What's going on? Speak slowly, I can't understand you."

"Something's wrong with Jenny."

Martha frowned. "Wrong? What do you mean, wrong?"

"Can Time Lords get sick? Do you know? Because I was with the Doctor for a long time, and I never heard anything about him or any other Time Lord getting ill."

"Jenny's sick? How do you know? What symptoms has she got?" Martha had never heard anything about them getting sick, either. But Jenny, being borne of a progenation machine, might work differently. She regenerated differently, after all.

"I don't know – raised temperature? Higher than usual, definitely. Weird heart rate. Also weirder than usual, because I listen to her hearts a lot, you know, and I have very good hearing these days. Then she was literally sick in a jug, she wouldn't wake up until I poured cold water on her, and she's definitely sweating. And Jenny never sweats. Plus, she smells… off," Clara said. Yeah, Martha thought, that definitely did sound like Jenny was sick.

"When was the last time you spoke to her?" Martha inquired.

"Ten o'clock, less than five hours ago."

"Did she seem fine then?"

"Yeah. Nothing wrong, nothing at all, and now she's hardly conscious."

"Alright," Martha said, standing up, "You stay calm, and keep a close eye on her, try and keep her awake. Call me straight away if anything changes. I'm going to go talk to the Doctor." It took a few minutes of Clara panicking to get her off the phone so that Martha could leave, but she did in the end. She had only seen Jenny last night, nothing had seemed out of the ordinary. What illness was this that could wipe through her immune system so quickly?

Ten might have always been her Doctor, but he was not the closest one and not the one Jenny liked best. Of course the one Jenny liked best was off in the future, so Martha would have to make do with Eleven and desperately hope that he was in. At least he was only two doors down, after Amy and Rory. She knocked loudly, but didn't get an answer. And she kept knocking and knocking and knocking with no response at all, going as far as to shout. She gave up and tried to open the door, but found that it was locked. Maybe he was in Adam and Oswin's room? Or maybe Clara was there, and she could tell Martha where her husband had got to? So she turned around and walked opposite the hall and knocked on their room next, and was relieved when Clara opened it (she knew it was Clara because, in typical, shameless-Clara fashion, she wasn't wearing any actual trousers, and she could see very clearly that there was no fake leg.)

"Where's your husband?" Martha asked immediately.

"Is he not in there?" Clara asked, nodding at her room behind Martha.

"I don't know, nobody answered the door when I knocked."

"Well he was in there when I came over here this morning to nick some of their cereal," Clara said, and now Oswin had made her way over to eavesdrop on the conversation. At least Oswin knew to wear more than just knickers on her bottom half, unlike her lazy sister. "Hasn't been to tell me he's going anywhere, and he usually does."

"What's the matter? You look freaked out," Oswin added.

"Clara – Ravenwood, I mean – just calls me out of the blue five minutes ago saying Jenny's sick," Martha explained, "And she's never heard of Time Lords getting sick, and I've never heard of Time Lords getting sick, so I thought I would find one of the Doctors and ask them. Do either of you know anything? And why is your door locked if he's in there – did you lock him in?" she questioned Clara.

"Oh, no, I don't know who locked it. I just phase through it normally. Probably him, yesterday," Clara shrugged, "And, um, he mentioned once this weird thing with the Ponds, where Amy was ageing and time was moving differently… I really don't know, I wasn't listening. He definitely said something about there being a disease that only affected creatures with two hearts, though, and he had to stay on the TARDIS so that he didn't catch it. But I think that was only on that one planet."

"What symptoms does Jenny have?" Oswin asked, Clara walking past the two of them to get to her bedroom door, saying she would get the key and unlock it from the other side. Martha listed what she knew of Jenny's symptoms back to Oswin. "A temperature? And a weird heart rate? She always has a temperature and a weird heart rate."

"Well I assume that her vampire girlfriend with super-senses will be able to tell when something to do with her is a bit out of the ordinary," Martha said coolly, "And she did vomit, too. And can hardly regain consciousness." Clara's bedroom door slid open from the other side, and Clara, all of a sudden, looked just as harrowed as Martha.

"Honey, what's wrong?" Oswin asked urgently. Clara beckoned them in, not saying a word, and switched the light on as they did. What they found was Eleven curled up in bed with the sheets kicked off and a very obvious pool of sweat staining the sheets around him, skin practically grey. "Well this isn't good."

"Stay with him, here," Martha ordered Clara, "See if you can wake him up. I'm going to find Ten."

And find Ten they did, Ten minus Rose, who was out tagging along on the earlier mentioned spa day, in the exact same condition. And then they moved from Ten to Nine in the room at the end of the hall and found that River was tending to him. Martha had forgotten about River. Well, not forgotten about her, but forgotten that she wasn't a human, she was a Time Lord as well. Or, she had been, once. But the three Doctors and their daughter were all, clearly, ill. Grey, sweating, sneezing, puking, dizziness – the whole works. In a human, this would just be a sign that someone needed to be kept in a dark room with a cold flannel on their head and some hefty painkillers weighing them down for the better part of a week. But in an alien? Martha didn't have a clue what to do. And River didn't know, either. Fat lot of good she was. Fat lot of good any of them were, including Martha, the only doctor, and including Oswin, the genius. They were all at a loss.

"Well, where was the last place all four of them went together?" Martha asked, addressing whoever deigned to answer her question first.

"They never go out anywhere together," River said, "They don't really like each other."

"Then what kind of disease is this that's that contagious?" Martha wondered.

"Amy was out yesterday, with Jenny and my brother-in-law," Oswin began, "Adam was saying, because he was making himself breakfast in Nerve Centre because we ran out of bacon ourselves, and he overheard her talking about some weird monsters and he said it reminded him of some video game… you know what, you go get Helix to do a scan, and I'll go ask Adam what Amy said."

"Alright." It really was just a lot of desperate actions by people who didn't have a clue what was going on. Though, something had obviously come over Oswin all of a sudden, because her distress had suddenly melted into a demeanour which might even resemble something so calm as curiosity. Martha didn't have time to question her, though. She had to go get the Helix handset.

AN: It's a hilarious story, because, you know, I JUST updated saying I didn't know if I was gonna take a break, and just the other day I did that whole poll about whether to do superheroes or space pirates, and now I finish space pirates and I go to university in a week and I've changed my mind again (which is my prerogative, as the writer) so I'm not doing superheroes. I will have to do it, obviously, at some point, to resolve the Manifest arc, just like I'll have to resolve the synths arc and Oswin's father and whatever else, but for now, I'm gonna do this. And then next week I'm going on break again, and I'm gonna focus on writing Spook Watch through October for Halloween. Then in November(ish) I should come back. But expect double updates all this week, and FYI, the last chapter has practically been finished for two days, and the chapter after this is already written.