Great Responsibility

Adam

"So, would you rather have toes for fingers or fingers for toes?" Amy Pond read the question from her phone screen just as Adam Mitchell entered Nerve Centre that morning, everyone huddled around her at one of the tables, listening intently. And 'everyone' consisted of eight entire people, nine now he had arrived, all of them eating breakfast in various stages.

"Fingers for toes," Clara said immediately, through a mouthful of Coco Pops. She didn't even have to think about it. "You can never have too many fingers." Unanimous groans from everyone else, except Nios, who almost found that funny. Could it really be that of all the people Nios the Killer Synth would choose to be fond of, Clara Oswald was one of them? Maybe Clara really just didn't mesh that well with humans. Synths and aliens, perhaps, were her sort of people. She was the one he was looking for, anyway, to ask if she had seen her sister about that morning, because Oswin was not in their rooms and had left her phone behind.

"Would the big toe be a thumb?" Rose inquired, "Or would they all be fingers?" There were no Time Lords in the room at that point, and there was no River or Jack, either. God knew what Jack was doing, but he assumed River was with Nine and that Nine, like Ten, Eleven and Jenny, was still sick with their 'deathly disease' (flu.)

"God, imagine what you could do with four thumbs…" Clara said wistfully.

"I'd hate to know what you're imagining," Rory muttered, but Clara was too lost in her own fantasises to defend herself to him. She snapped out of it when Adam, radiating cold, sat down next to her in an empty seat.

"What about you?" Donna asked him right away, while he had been about to address Clara and see if she would talk to him elsewhere, out of earshot of the group. She went back to her cereal, everyone else now listening to hear Adam's answer.

"Huh? Well, I… what can you really do with toes for fingers?"

"Fingers for toes would look so creepy though," Mickey pointed out. That was true, they really would.

"Do you think it would be harder to walk?" Donna mused, "Like walking on your hands?"

"No, it's all to do with body strength," Rory said.

"Yeah, Jenny can walk on her hands," Clara pointed out.

"Can I talk to you?" Adam interrupted to address Clara, before somebody there brought up Jenny in conversation with her. No doubt somebody (probably Rose) was about to imply something unsavoury about Alpha Clara and Jenny Harkness, and he couldn't be bothered having to hear it.

"Sure," Clara said, munching more of her chocolate cereal.

"Here's a good one," Amy spoke to the group again, still reading from her phone, a mischievous look in her eye now, "Would you rather have the ability to rewind to a previous time in your life, or the ability to fast forward to a future time in your life?"

Adam was about to ask Clara about Oswin when she turned around and was, again, the first to answer, "Future," very shortly, and he rolled his eyes. Of course she would say the future. The future was where Thirteen was. He didn't know what he might do, perhaps go back and prevent himself from getting kicked off the TARDIS the first time? He wasn't all that interested in his future. As long as Oswin was still in it, that was all that mattered. And thinking about her reminded him that he had to speak to Clara, rather than just listening to Rory and Amy mutually agreeing that they would go and stop themselves getting captured by Weeping Angels and sent back to the 1930s to live out their days. Not that they were living out their days in the 1930s.

"Whatever – have you seen Oswin this morning?" Adam asked Clara.

She frowned and asked, "Oswin?" not looking at him but rather looking at Donna, who was, aloud, wondering about the ramifications of if she stopped herself becoming the Doctor-Donna.

"Clara," Adam said firmly, and she glanced at him, and realised he was actually wanting something out of her.

"Oh, Oswin?" she asked again, like she hadn't heard the first time, "Right. Um, no. Are you saying she's not with you?"

"Obviously. Why?"

"She's been in a funny mood," Clara answered, "But I thought she was with you, and you'd be talking to her, so I didn't ask her about it…"

"Wait, what do you mean 'funny mood?'"

Mickey, in the background, was saying how he would like to go to the future to see how he and Martha were doing, which was fair enough, Adam thought. Not all of them had the liberty of receiving a letter from everyone's favourite female Time Lord about what they would be up to in forty-nine years' time. Clara didn't answer Adam right away, she was mulling something over, holding a spoonful of milky cereal in front of her face.

"Hard to explain," Clara answered. She was being cryptic on purpose.

"Are you trying not to worry me?" he asked quietly. Donna was now listening in, because she was just nosey like that, but Amy was in the middle of asking the group if they would rather be fed to a Rancor or a Sarlacc. Then asking what a Rancor and a Sarlacc was. "It's Star Wars," he just had to answer immediately, "You know, in Return of the Jedi? The Rancor is the big lizard he keeps in the basement, the Sarlacc is the one in the pit with the tentacles that eats Boba Fett."

"Definitely the Sarlacc," Mickey answered.

"I would kill them both," Nios said flatly.

"That's not the point of the question," Amy said.

"Then I'll kill you as well." In response, Amy just shook her head.

"I'm sure she's fine," Clara, speaking about Oswin, said to him, bringing his attention away from the game again. Why was he suddenly involved in this? And why were they even playing it, and over breakfast? Wasn't it better suited to a drinking game? Then again, in a time machine, the phrase it's always five o'clock somewhere simultaneously had even more meaning and no meaning at all. Every hour could be happy hour if they wanted it to be.

"You're only 'sure'?"

"She said she's fine," Clara said, "She's with Martha." So when she had zoned out a moment ago she had been speaking to Oswin telepathically, with that damn mind path of theirs that caused so much grief at odd hours of the night when Clara was 'up to things' with the Doctor. But Mickey overheard what Clara had just said; he hadn't been paying attention, but perked up when Martha's name was mentioned.

"What was that about Martha?" he asked, and the collective conversation of the group about Star Wars monsters ended. Like Clara and Jenny, Clara and Martha was an equally loaded topic within certain groups of people – this group, incidentally, being one of them. Rose got a look on her face like she might be watching a spectator sport, and even Nios' usual disinterested expression slipped away to one of intrigue.

"She's with my sister," Clara answered him.

"Why?" he asked.

Clara paused, looked into the middle distance, then answered, "She won't tell me."

"Text her," Amy said, and Clara scrunched her face up at the suggestion of texting Oswin, looking at Amy like she was some kind of heathen for even entertaining the idea.

"I don't need to text her, I have a direct line to her in my brain," Clara said, pointing to her head when she did so to enforce this.

"So – what? She went wandering off in the middle of the night and took Martha with her?" Rose asked, "Sounds like a kidnapping."

"Oswin has not kidnapped Martha," Clara argued. Rose shrugged.

"Who knows what she's liable to do?" Was Rose trying to agitate Clara on purpose? Well, to be completely honest, Adam wouldn't put it past her. It was certainly working. Clara would let them make fun of her – her and her bedroom habits, narcissism, and shamelessness – but Oswin was crossing a line. Of course, it crossed a line with him, too, but in that moment it was nearly as though the rest of them had forgotten he was actually fond of his girlfriend. Or that he even had a girlfriend.

It surprised all of them that it was actually Nios who came to Oswin's defence.

"She isn't liable to do anything," Nios said coolly, meeting Rose's eyes dead-on to stare her down. It was half-true. Oswin wasn't liable to do anything to anyone except herself – she was her own worst enemy, as much as that pained Adam Mitchell to admit. Martha would be fine regardless.

"Speak of the devil," Rory muttered, to ensuing silence. It took a while for them to figure out what he meant by that, but when Oswin Oswald came crashing into the room (though, how she managed to crash through automatic doors, he didn't know, but it was a rather dramatic entrance nonetheless) it made perfect sense. She had the elusive Dr Jones in tow, as well, and plonked a big, silver box holding an assortment of glass bottles filled with some sort of viscous, clear liquid down on the table between the lot of them. Amy, distracted by her phone again, jumped when she did so.

"Look at this," Oswin declared proudly, indicating her bottles. She looked deliriously happy, almost, in a slightly unnerving way. Martha, behind her, was quite dishevelled. They were both still in pyjamas; so they really had just wandered off somewhere in the middle of the night?

"What?" Oswin was asked by a few different people. She pointed. Martha sighed.

"It's-" Martha was apparently about to explain, but Oswin aggressively shushed her.

"It's the answer," Oswin said, "The cure."

"The cure for what?" Clara asked her carefully.

"Didn't you already make cure-all Miracle Medicine?" Rory frowned.

"Are you okay, sweetheart?" Clara continued. Clara cared more about Oswin herself than Oswin's latest, translucent creation.

"I've been trying to fix it, ever since Kent," Oswin began, Adam watching her carefully, "I've been in my lab for days, but I've cracked it, finally! And I had to, really, because the whole thing is my fault! Because I figured it out and I released them from UNIT and caused the crisis, months and months ago-"

"Hang on, what crisis?" Donna interrupted, and Oswin looked at her like she was shocked Donna didn't immediately know what she was talking about. She had that issue a lot, though, like she forgot that the whole world wasn't privy to her faster-than-light thinking process, that she actually had to explain herself properly sometimes rather than just speaking in hyper-intelligent tongues (even if he did find Oswin Oswald's hyper-intelligent tongue to be very appealing.)

"The Manifest Crisis," she answered. Blank faces surrounded her, aside from Adam, who had actually had to listen to her go on for days about how she was busy burying herself in analyses of Liam Kent's stolen blood samples. "Did you all forget that was a thing? Silverstorm? You were all incarcerated in – for god's sake, it's – you know – it's still there! Right there! Haven't stopped anything, we just… learnt things. But now? With this?" she motioned to the bottles on the table again.

"Hold on – that stuff can cure superpowers? It can get rid of them?" Rory, who hated his superpowers more than most, asked urgently.

"No. Well, yes. Well, no. Depends. It would cure a, uh, pure Manifest. Doesn't work on the mutated strain," Oswin said, running a hand through her hair and leaving it a (hot) mess. He might be staring at her.

"Who has the mutated strain?" Rory pressed.

"You do. All of you lot do."

"'Mutated' doesn't make it sound very nice," Donna complained.

"Alright, how's 'corrupted' sound?" There was more objection to 'corrupted' than 'mutated,' but Oswin didn't care (he kind of thought it was cool.) It didn't bothered Adam, because it wasn't like he wanted a cure to his cryostasis; the longer he was alive, the longer he could be with Oswin. "It cured Kent. That's where Martha and I went, to Undercoll."

"You wouldn't guess who they have working for them," Martha began, like she was about to bestow some great piece of gossip onto them. No doubt she was. Everyone picked up on this tone and a few of the nosier girls leant in so as to listen better. "Jenny's not here, is she?"

"She's still with Ravenwood," Adam said. No doubt if Jenny was back, Oswin would be the first to know, and she would promptly tell him as soon as possible because she would be that excited.

"Who works for them?" Rose implored.

"Christina," Martha answered, "Christina de Souza. And you should see their leader – calls herself Admiral and wears a funny hat."

"Seriously?"

"Yes, seriously," Oswin interrupted, "But you can go visit Undercoll on your own time, alright? You have to help me with this, all of you. It was an injectable, but I've reformulated it so that now it's an ingestible. Meaning if the water supply in Silverstorm were to be contaminated with it, it would slowly cure all of them. We have to go to 2029, and finally stop this. And I know exactly the people to help us."

AN: Do you want a summary of the entirety of the Manifest lore at the beginning of the next chapter? Because I think I'm changing some of it and this storyline has been going on for nearly three full years (seriously, the original one started late December 2013.)