DAY 139

Plague Ship

Oswin

Remembering something, Oswin disengaged herself from Martha's company as Martha went off to retrieve Helix's handset. She slipped back into her rooms, now free of Clara, and immediately went to steal her boyfriend's attention away from his computer in the corner. When she shook his shoulder he jumped out of his skin and his headphones fell off which – despite their arguably grave circumstances – caused her to laugh.

"Oh my god, what are you doing?" he asked her, still trying to work off his fear.

"I should scare you more often, I didn't know how adorable it is," she joked, and he scowled. He didn't like being scared. That was why he hardly ever watched horror films (not that she was a big fan of them, either.)

"Is that all you want?"

"No, there was something I actually wanted you for…" she said, her thoughts going out of her head after seeing him be cute. Then she remembered again. "Oh, right: look at this." She pushed his chair so that it moved on its wheels and she could project her vivid, green holoscreen out in front of the computer monitor, which she leant over and switched off so that he could better see what she was showing him.

"Hey!" he protested.

"Shush, babe, this is important, alright?" she said, and he sighed and didn't bother to argue with her or switch it back on. Well, she thought, it was important, incredibly important. She brought up a transcript she had made of Thirteen's farewell letter to show him a specific part of it; the original copy they had burned after copying as a precaution, to stop Jenny, Clara, Eleven or anybody else finding it and getting hints about the future that only they had been entrusted with. "The Time Lords are sick."

"Do Time Lords get sick?" he asked.

"Not as far as we know," Oswin said, "So, don't you think that something like all the Time Lords getting sick would be something she might leave a cryptic clue about?" She didn't wait for him to answer, just interrupted him again when he started talking to point out the snippet of letter she had been looking for*. Thirteen's second point on her five-point list of 'general assurances' they were to give to 'other members of the crew' when the 'time is right.' "It says, 'It's the flu. Just give them ordinary medicine and tell them to get over themselves.' Assuming these are in chronological order-"

"Chronological order is always a tough thing for a Time Lord to manage, though," he pointed out, "Ironically enough."

"Yeah, I know, they're useless. But if you assume that it is chronological, then the dancing one already went, and the one about Jack giving somebody a ring definitely hasn't happened. What are the symptoms of flu?" Oswin asked him, and he paused to think.

"Nausea, fever, sore throat, headaches, tiredness – that sort of stuff. How do you not know the symptoms of the flu?"

"I've never had it, have I?"

"Haven't you?"

"No."

"Never?"

"What part of, I lived in a space terrarium for my entire life and was allowed minimal contact with other people do you not understand?" she reiterated the finer aspects of her tragic existence to him again.

"Yeah, but, it's the flu."

"Well fifty years before you were born everybody got tuberculosis, but I bet people don't always ask you about how shocking it is you've never had TB," Oswin pointed out.

"Your immune system must be terrible."

"Mitchell, I don't know how you keep forgetting this, but I'm already dead. I can't exactly catch the flu," she told him dryly.

"When you were alive, I mean."

"What are you saying, you're less into me now you find out that I used to have a weak immune system?" she questioned, "Even though I'm already dead?"

"Obviously not. What symptoms do the Time Lords have, anyway?"

"All the ones you said were for the flu. Well, no, I don't know if they have headaches or sore throats. As far as I've heard they're not very up for talking. But, if Time Lords don't get sick, then when they do get sick, they'd be pathetic about it, wouldn't they?" Oswin theorised, "And Thirteen's letter fits with this, don't you think?"

"It obviously can't be fatal if Thirteen even exists. And Jenny, in the future Jenny's definitely still around. So yeah, like always, you're probably right. You're pretty clever," he joked.

"Do you think? I hadn't noticed. Come on," she said, tugging on his arm to get him out of his chair.

"Come on where?"

"To find Martha and tell her it's just the flu!"

"But we can't tell her that," Adam Mitchell argued, "She'll ask how we know. We can't tell her that Thirteen wrote us a mysterious letter full of hidden clues, she'd ask to see it, and it has stuff about her in it." That was true, point number five was, 'Make sure Martha knows everything will be fine. More than fine, amazing. She doesn't need to worry about anything at all, tell her I promise.' No doubt Martha would be very interested to hear that, but being as Oswin didn't have a clue what it was about and she wasn't supposed to tell people anything unless she was sure, Adam was right.

"Then what do we say?" she asked him.

"We don't have to say anything."

"But everyone's worrying about them – if they're going to be fine, someone should say something. It was like… when you first froze. When you mutated, right after Thirteen got here, and I thought you might die. Clara knew you would be okay, because the Doctor told her so, and I wish she would've told me."

"It doesn't matter, she did what she had to, for the sake of… the timeline, or continuity, or something like that. They'll get better if this is what Thirteen means, and if it isn't what Thirteen means, then everybody relaxing and thinking they'll be fine is probably the worst thing anybody could do," he said. Now Oswin saw the real reason Thirteen had given her permission to tell her boyfriend about that letter. Because he was the one of them who was sensible, and who thought things like that through, and stopped her from being reckless.

"Alright, well, Martha's got the Helix handset," she said, closing the green holoscreen, missing its dull glow somewhat when it vanished, "So we should at least go see what Helix says about them and their disease." Adam followed her out of the room, probably to make sure she didn't say anything she shouldn't say about the future, as she went straight across the hall to her sister's room, the door of which was still open.

There was Martha, Eleven curled up in the sheets covered in sweat, and Clara sitting in a chair next to him. Martha was holding up the handset and scanning the Doctor with it to see what she could glean, and Oswin, not wanting to accidentally let anything dangerous slip, just observed, absently taking Adam's hand. Adam was more curious than anything else.

"What are you doing with that?" Clara asked Martha.

"I'm having Helix run a simulation of the germs in his system, speed up the process virtually and see what the outcome will be," Martha explained. Certainly a lot faster than painstakingly analysing blood samples, Oswin thought bitterly. She was only bitter about that, though, because she had been spending the last few days with her head buried in Liam Kent's deranged DNA, in a vain attempt to learn something new about the mutant gene that caused Manifesthood. That was neither here nor there, though. "That's weird…"

"What? What is it?" Clara asked urgently.

"It shows the virus subsiding, being killed by his immune system," Martha said.

"Told you," Adam whispered, "Immune systems; useful." She squeezed his hand, in order to make him shut up. Her brother-in-law was dying (not) for god's sake.

"So… he's going to get better?" Clara asked.

"Maybe it's the flu?" Oswin suggested. She heard Adam make a noise of annoyance.

"It does look like that," Martha said thoughtfully, "How could Time Lords catch the flu?"

"It can't just be the flu, look at him, he's barely awake," Clara said.

"Didn't you ever hear Jack's stories about the Miracle?" Adam spoke up, "When he had arsenic poisoning?"

"You think the Doctor's got arsenic poisoning!?" Clara exclaimed.

"No, no, I mean, he thought he just got sick initially, because he was the only mortal person. This is what Esther told me, anyhow. He thought he had a cold, or something, and he never built up any immunity against it, and Gwen thought he was being melodramatic. So… maybe they're being melodramatic?"

"Helix," Martha began, "Run a simulation on the same bacteria in a human body."

"Affirmative, Dr Jones," Helix said smoothly.

"So this is like man flu, or something?" Clara said, "But… Time Lord flu? Where they whine and pretend they're worse off than they actually are?"

"Oh, don't get me started on man flu," Martha grumbled, "The amount of times I have to tell my husband, I'm a doctor, there is no such thing as 'man flu,' you're just being a baby…he's stopped trying it on now."

"Error," Helix interrupted, "One-hundred percent fatality rate in the human genetic simulation."

"Oh my god…" Martha said, looking at the screen, then she brought it over to show Adam and Oswin. It was a view of a virus infecting a human body on a cellular level, something taking over all of the cells and mutating them, practically killing the host.

"That sounds like what Amy was talking about happened yesterday," Adam said.

"Amy's out today," Martha said.

"I'll ring her." Oswin dropped Adam's hand and got her phone out, dialling Amy quickly and putting it on speaker before she could even pick up, so the four of them listened to it beeping as it rang. Well, technically five of them, but Eleven didn't really look like he was up to an awful lot of anything. He kept shivering. Again, Oswin was reminded of when Adam's cryokinesis had overcome him, nearly two months ago now, and he had been a wreck and for days she hadn't known whether he would live or die.

"Is this important? I'm at the spa," Amy said.

"Yes, it's important," Martha spoke rather than Oswin, "What happened yesterday? With this disease?"

"Why?"

"Because all of the Time Lords are now sick with some illness that Helix says has a one-hundred percent fatality rate in humans, so what is it?" Oswin pressed her.

"Wait – they're going to die!?"

"No, it doesn't look like it," Martha assured her, "But it would still be useful if you could tell us what you know. None of them are really talking. Adam thinks they're being melodramatic."

"There was a doctor on the ship, Kolway, who was studying it before he killed himself, called it the 'Anobine Infection.' And Jenny's crazy ex-girlfriend-"

"Jenny's what?" Oswin asked.

"Ask her yourself. Anyway, she said it only affected humans, but it turned out she was lying, she didn't know if it did or not. But they believed her and had their helmets off in the space suits, it must be that. It was very contagious, breathing any of the air would cause you to be infected," Amy explained, shedding some light on the bleak situation.

"Helix, can the virus affecting the Time Lords spread cross-species?" Martha asked.

"Negative, Dr Jones. The 'Anobine Infection,' as Mrs Williams calls it, has mutated into a new strain within the advanced Gallifreyan physiology. Cross-species infection is near-impossible," Helix informed them.

"Can't you tell that thing to call me Amy?" Amy said.

"Affirmative, Amy," Helix, who could respond to requests directly and didn't need to be told what to do by Oswin, corrected itself.

"Are they going to die?"

"No, they're not going to die. Nobody's going to die."

"You can't say that. Somebody could die at any moment," Oswin pointed out.

"Yes, but not everybody likes to think about death 24/7."

"If nobody's going to die, can I go? I'm supposed to be in a mud bath right now," Amy said, and Oswin just hung up on her. She didn't care what Amy was doing. Besides, she didn't understand spas. Or mud baths. Mud was disgusting, why would anyone voluntarily drench themselves in it? God, she missed the future, even if she had had as much of the future as she could stomach the day before, dropping Fyn and Atoc off on Venus Zeta and enlisting Adam in helping them move everything in (he had been very tired last night, the poor boy, especially with his bad ankle.)

"I was right, then," Adam said, "They are just being pathetic. Probably never had a cold before."

"And you'd know all about colds, Mitchell, wouldn't you?" Oswin remarked, and he smiled.

*chapter 965