Old Habits Die Hard

Oswin

It was raining on Eslilia. The green sky was buried beneath black storm clouds, and Oswin could see the glistening, jade leaves bouncing in the bad weather, blanketing out below the crashed spaceship in the treetops of Skybound, the Spore Remnant colony.

"Have you learnt to appreciate nature yet, Oswin?" asked Flek Phisj's familiar but cool voice behind her. Oswin had arrived without announcing she was coming, on a whim, and somebody had been sent to drag Flek away from whatever she had been doing. Tending to Squidzilla, presumably. That was, if the thing wasn't dead. Oswin wasn't inclined to ask. Oswin herself was supposed to be sleeping, resting, but she hadn't been.

"If nature made us, then isn't everything we make natural, too?" Oswin challenged, still looking out of the small porthole in the shipwreck's bridge, then she turned around to smile somewhat meekly at Flek to indicate she was kidding. She had not, in fact, come there to argue philosophy with her ex. She had come waving a white flag of surrender, wanting the Desdemona incident to be laid to rest finally. How long had it been? Nearly three weeks, she thought. Though, she had never been very good at keeping time. "Hi…"

"Hi?" Flek questioned, "You remember that the last things you said to me were that I'm stupid, that you hate me, and that you never want me to call you again?" Oswin looked away, gripping a cane tightly in her right hand, leaning most of her weight on it for support.

"I was angry. I'd been eaten by a squid that day, and nearly drowned the day before," she defended herself a little, "I'm sorry. It's none of my business and I shan't mention it." The genuineness of that apology was something Oswin couldn't verify. Apologising was just something she had to do to get Flek to actually speak to her, and she cared so little for that squid that she didn't even think her integrity was called into question if she said sorry for the whole thing.

"You're right. It isn't any of your business what I'm doing with my life. What do you want?"

Oswin awkwardly deliberated for a few seconds before finally confessing, "To talk to you." She had been spiralling a bit more than usual without Flek to talk to, considering they did used to message a fair amount before their latest big fight. Seeing that Oswin came in peace and wasn't looking to argue – and considering Flek wasn't usually the arguing type at all – she stepped in and let the door close behind her, sealing them off from the sound of the rainstorm. Oswin wondered if it was dangerous for the ship, but supposed it must have weathered dozens of storms in Eslilia's treetops. "How's Ressy? And how's the wedding planning going?"

"She's good," Flek answered, "She's not here right now."

"Obviously – if she was here she wouldn't let me speak to you," Oswin said, "Have you set a date yet? Clara's dying to know and Eyeball usually ignores her." Things were going fine, Oswin assumed. Flek still had her engagement ring on, at any rate (it was made of very thin branches woven together like twine, exactly the sort of thing she'd expect from a bunch of space hippies.)

"Not yet," then she paused and continued, "To be honest, she's not very excited about planning anything. It's more of a gesture."

"An engagement is more than a gesture," Oswin told her, leaning back on the wall to take some of the weight off her cane and her leg.

"Says you – I never saw you proposing to me," Flek remarked, and Oswin jokingly pretended to be offended.

"There was a war on!" she exclaimed, and Flek smiled. "Anyway. This is me we're talking about. As if I could ever marry somebody. I'm a mess." And she was, as well, because there she was, faintly green from the light outside, dressed all in black, her usual sunken eyes and perpetual haggard air.

"I'm sure you'll find someone one day," Flek said, and Oswin frowned for a few seconds until Flek realised, "Wait – don't you have that boyfriend?"

"I do indeed have 'that boyfriend.' Adam Mitchell. You know his name," Oswin reminded her. God only knew what Adam Mitchell saw in her recently.

"I've never spoken to him," Flek shrugged, "I think he avoids me."

"He does – he's jealous."

"Is he?" Flek asked disapprovingly, and Oswin stammered her following defence of him.

"Well – no – it's just – he's insecure. He's very insecure. He worries I'm going to leave him and go back to you. I keep telling him there's not a chance in hell that'll ever happen. In fact, I actually came here to talk to you about him-"

"Oh, no, Os, I'm not giving you any relationship advice," Flek declared, looking alarmed, and Oswin stopped dead.

"Um… I wasn't going to ask you for any relationship advice… I'm pretty good at relationships, if you cared to remember. I was only going to ask you if you might make me some schematics for an ankle brace for him. He's got a bad foot after this plant stung his ankle, ages ago, and it won't heal because of the cryostasis," Oswin explained, "I've been meaning to ask for your help with it."

"Oh. Right. Sure. I'll do that. How is your, um, relationship, though?" Flek asked awkwardly. She was asking out of courtesy. Funnily enough, she had never been the biggest fan of boyfriends.

"It's great, thanks. Well, he's great. He's scared of Fyn." Flek laughed.

"Really?"

"Fyn is six-foot-three, to be fair. Adam's only five-nine. He can't tell when Fyn's joking," Oswin exclaimed, then changed the subject away from Adam Mitchell, "Is Zalur still living here? How's he doing?"

"Maybe a little better than usual? You should go see him while you're here."

"Better?" she asked, then she laughed a little sharply, "Funny. That's funny. He's doing better, of course he is… do you think it's genetic? Martha thinks it's genetic…" Oswin shifted her weight about, leaning on the cane again, thinking.

"Wait…" Flek began, puzzled, "Didn't you…? How many times have we seen each other? Since you… you know…" Died, was what she meant, Oswin assumed. Flek's eyes were on the cane now.

"Four. Excluding Quadrant Twelve. This is the fifth."

"You didn't… Oswin," she said her name very seriously now, because Flek was not stupid. Far from it. A medical doctor, a genius in her own right. "You didn't have your cane those times." Oswin shrugged. She used to have a cane. Before the Asylum.

"I suppose not."

"Have you hurt yourself? What have you done?" Flek asked her.

"I blew myself up, don't you remember?" Oswin snapped, "Maybe that's too long ago for you to manage , living your-" Pain shot through her right leg and she winced and fell into the wall, Flek automatically coming to try and help her. "Don't touch me, I'm fine…"

"You're not fine, you're an idiot," Flek told her, not listening and taking her arm to steady her anyway, "Don't think I've ever met someone so stupid and pig-headed in my entire life, you know. Come and sit down."

"I don't need to sit-"

"Be quiet, Oswin, yes you do," Flek ordered her.

"When did you get so bossy?" Oswin, submitting and letting Flek drag her over to the shoddy, skeletal chair in the corner, muttered. It did feel better to sit, though. But she didn't want it to feel better. That was the point.

"I've been in charge of the Spore Remnants for thirteen years, and I'm a doctor. At some point everyone has to learn how to tell other people what to do," she explained, "Show me your leg. Show me what you've done."

"It's nothing," Oswin said. She wouldn't show Flek anything, "You've seen it hundreds of times before. It looks just the way you remember." Flek met her eyes for a moment, frowned slightly, and then realised what that meant. If one of Oswin's legs had healed upon digital resurrection, then the other one will have done. Flek crossed her arms now.

"Why give yourself your injuries back?"

"Why should I pretend I don't have them? Do those people who died on Horizon get to pretend they're not dead? No. And there's me – why am I more 'valuable' than any of them, Flek?" Oswin questioned her, "I shouldn't be able to act like nothing happened to me. I shouldn't have that privilege."

"None of us from the Dust War have that privilege, Oswin," Flek said, touching her cheek for a moment, "Visible scars aren't the only ones that count, you have to look after yourself. Don't you talk to people on the ship? What's triggered this? Are you having one of your bad times?" Flek moved her hand and remained crouched on the floor in front of her.

"I'm broken, aren't I?"

"You're not broken," Flek said softly.

"Of course I am. I'm a wreck," she complained, "Don't look at me like you pity me."

"I'm worried, Os, why wouldn't I be? You're…" she stopped.

"I'm what?"

"I don't know – how about my best friend? We're not together anymore but that doesn't mean we're not close," Flek said. Oswin sighed. "You ought to talk to Clara, you know. Isn't she the one who helps you now? Can't you talk to Fyn? Adam?"

"I didn't come here about me," Oswin said.

"Then why did you? You said to speak to me-"

"Yeah, about Clara. You got sidetracked. You're obsessed with me." Flek clenched her jaw in an attempt not to laugh. She finally got up from where she was crouched on the floor and went to sit on the bed opposite. The whole bridge living-space was very small and compact, and it didn't look like Flek and Eyeball ate there. Thinking about it, she was sure they didn't – Flek Phisj would eat with the rest of the Spores. "I've got this-" she glanced around but didn't spy the bag she had brought next to her. For a moment she was frightened she had forgotten to bring it, the real reason for her visit to Flek, but she saw it slumped against the wall where she'd been stood earlier. Flek followed her gaze. "Let me just-" she made to get up.

"You stay right there," Flek said, standing herself to go fetch Oswin's things. God. It was like when they were dating again. Before her prosthesis had been built, but after the explosion that had outright torn off one leg and splintered apart the other.

"I can walk," Oswin mumbled.

"Barely! Make your mind up – do you or do you not want the damage on your other leg, too? It barely holds your weight," Flek argued. True enough.

"You were the one who saved it," Oswin reminded her. The doctors who had worked on her had all been Spores back then, back when the legitimate hospital was overrun and decaying with the other casualties of the Dust War. Flek had refused to let them amputate the other, instead Oswin's right leg had been 'repaired,' rather horrifically with haphazard plates of metal to replace the shattered bones. The thing was mangled to look at now. Just like it should be, she thought. Martha Jones would not be happy with her for doing this…

Flek brought the bag over and handed it to Oswin, reprising her old role of girlfriend-slash-carer. She wondered if Flek had been glad of her leaving, dying, so that she didn't have to look after her anymore. She even thought Fyn may have been growing weary of it eventually… but she wasn't speaking to Fyn right now. They had had a falling out about this quest of his to locate their father's ghost on Venus. Oswin took the bag, an old leather thing she had just found lying around somewhere she assumed the TARDIS had conjured for when it sensed her need, and opened it to pull something out.

"What's that?" Flek asked, intrigued. It was a kind of orb, big shards of mirror uncurling themselves from behind it, the spherical segment set in a curved basin to make it easier to hold. It had been tricky to get the centre of balance correct, though, to make the thing stand on its own without falling over from the weight of the mirrors.

"It's for Clara," Oswin began, showing it to Flek (but she didn't let her touch it.) Cogs and bolts and wheels ticked around within its glass casing, "It's her birthday in two days. She probably thinks I don't know, but I do. I remember everything. I thought I should get her something – or, build her something."

"But what is it? What does it do?" Flek continued to ask.

"I'll show you," Oswin said wryly. She offered Flek this demonstration because she had heard in the last few moments the sound of somebody climbing the rungs of the wooden ladders outside. And through the thin, psychic web that kept she and all of the other Clechoes (and Clara herself) so ethereally interlinked, she knew exactly which of her 'sisters' was approaching. Flek was confused when Oswin paused to wait, and stayed quite confused throughout everything that happened in the next thirty seconds or so, a series of events leaving Oswin nursing her cheek after being struck around the face.

For it was Eyeball, of course, Claressa, who came in through that door.

"Flek? Who are you…" Eyeball saw Oswin, and Oswin just beamed in that annoying way she was so proud of.

"Hi, Ressy!" she exclaimed, then her smile disappeared in an instant, "I've got some grave news; Flek's decided she's going to leave you for me. We're eloping. I'm sorry she has to break your heart like this." Flek was aghast, as was Claressa, her cybernetic eye going haywire. Oswin wasn't paying attention to either of them, though, as Eyeball marched towards her; no, she was looking at the device cradled in her hand, because the mirrors had all unfurled themselves automatically and the lights within were flashing bright red. "It works!" she declared, overjoyed. And then Eyeball slapped her, hard, around the side of her face, and she nearly dropped it.

"She's lying! You didn't have to hit her," Flek scolded her fiancée. Oswin rubbed her cheek.

"I deserved it," she admitted. She did, too. "Sorry. Should've seen the look on your face – reminded me of myself." Eyeball scowled. "That look does, too. I wonder what it is about you that's so familiar?"

"Os, be quiet," Flek told her.

"It's just a thing designed to be sensitive to Clecho mood swings, but much more significantly sensitive than Clara is herself," Oswin said. She didn't need the machine there to tell her that Eyeball was seething. The issue was that the empathy bond Clara shared with her Echoes was largely based on proximity. This thing she was building would hopefully surpass that gap, so that it could detect emotional changes in every Echo, not just the ones Clara had met and spent time with. Let her act out her guardian angel complex more efficiently. "She's been weird about it lately, almost got herself killed over them. Us. Well, she did, actually. Now she has a huge electrical burn down her arm and she won't let me heal it, kept saying she has to 'suffer' so that she can 'remember her responsibilities.'" She caught Flek looking at her. "What?"

"I wonder who that reminds me of," she commented, looking at Oswin very disapprovingly. Oswin didn't say a word now that she had been made aware of her own hypocrisy. She cleared her throat and went to put her device back in the back she had brought it in.

"Anyway. I suppose I'd best be off now your trophy wife has showed up…"

"You're not even going to tell Zalur you were here?"

"No. Why should I? He hasn't tried to speak to me for months," Oswin said, hobbling to her feet with her cane in hand, "I'm glad to hear he's happy, though. Suppose he's not the only one who feels some sort of relief with the shadow of mother's death looming over-" She was abruptly cut off by the feeling that she had just been slugged around the side of her head and a shrill descant ringing in her ears. She fell right back down into the chair and wondered briefly if Eyeball might have hit her again. When she saw Eyeball clutching her head in a similar but albeit less severe manner, Flek going to see if she was already rather than Oswin, she knew that couldn't be right.

"What's happened?" Flek asked either of them.

"Something's wrong with Clara," Oswin said shortly, feeling a sense of fear and desperation which did not belong to her. And it took a lot to make Clara Oswald so scared when she died on a semi-daily basis. "Just give me a…" Oswin didn't finish her sentence, she slipped out of that reality partway through and found herself elsewhere.

Oftentimes the astral projection ability the mind-patch enabled between she and Clara wasn't utilised, only in dire situations. When she saw what was going on in what appeared to be a very large and practically ancient (by Fifty-Second Century standards) aircraft hangar, the back hanging open to reveal a blue sky and a bluer sea behind them, she knew this situation was definitely dire. Clara was lying on the floor, a mess of other people scurrying about around her. Oswin took a moment to see exactly what was going on, but it looked to be some kind of skirmish between about fifteen people. Even weirder was that five of the fifteen were the exact same unfamiliar man.

"What did you do to them, Klein!?" somebody, Clyde Langer, yelled, dodging a punch from one of these duplicates.

"Clara!" Oswin exclaimed, sounding muffled. The entire scene to her was distorted, like she was looking at them through a bubble. Clara was the only clear thing in her field of vision, because she was the one Oswin was connected to. Clara looked up, blood on the side of her face from where someone must have clouted her, and met Oswin's gaze.

"You're not getting away from me so easily," Rose Tyler said angrily. Oswin thought Rose was talking to Klein – whose name she recalled as being attached to the enigmatic persona in charge of the Hazard Control Corps, this elusive 'Dr Klein' nobody had ever seen – and was stunned when Rose grabbed Clara by her ankle. At least Clara manged to phase through it, though.

"You wanted to know what Project Crystal was," Klein's voice said six times over, all of his doppelgangers speaking at the same time.

"God, and here I thought you were the only one with a thing for cloning yourself, Clars," Oswin remarked, wishing she could help Clara to her feet. She couldn't though. She tried. Her hands went seamlessly through her sister's arms, rendering her a ghost, numb to her perceived surroundings.

"It's the next step," Klein explained, the Klein-in-charge who wasn't in the scrum in the centre of the hangar. His clones were slipping away, too, leaving Oswin perplexed as to who was fighting who – because there were an awful lot of fists flying here and there, not just from Rose. These clones were also carrying guns, but not firearms, they were jet injectors, just like the one that had been used to neutralise Liam Kent that very morning. "A chemical that makes your type frenzy, attack anyone and everyone. It's all a question of supply and demand…"

Oh. That was what had happened. Ten allies of theirs in the room (Adam, Amy, Clara, Donna, Mickey, Rory, Rose, Clyde, Rani and Esther Drummond of all people), and five Kleins with injectors. That meant five of them must have received these potent shots. Obviously Rose was one of them, going by the tenacity with which she was trying to murder Clara.

"Stop trying to freeze me!" Clyde shouted, dodging blasts of ice from-

"Adam?" Oswin asked hollowly, even though her boyfriend could not hear her.

"Klein got him," Clara answered her, going to her side like she would offer some protection against Rose, who was advancing, "He got Rose, too."

"I can see that, honey," Oswin remarked. She did not have her injuries in this spectral state. Good. No need to bother Clara with trivial things like old shrapnel wounds…

"Technically I was only joking about being the fastest woman alive," Esther was saying (again – why the hell was Esther there? How much had she missed by being made to stay behind that morning?) "I'm not even alive! I'm the fastest woman dead!" Oswin would have disagreed and made a quip were she legitimately present. Esther was backing away nervously from an advancing Rani Chandra, holding her arms up in defence.

"I finally know what I have to do to get you to finally shut up," Rose said darkly to Clara, her eyes glowing with all the golden fury of the Bad Wolf.

"I didn't say anything!" Clara protested, looking at Oswin like she could help.

"It's a drug," Oswin said quickly, very quickly, listening to Rory hurl undue abuse at his wife nearby, "It'll wear off, like any other intoxicant. This stuff's not complicated – the complicated part is getting it to only affect Manifests. Uh. Aircraft carrier. That's what this is, isn't it? Isn't it. It'll be gas distributed to the masses, weed them out – but it'll wear off. With time."

"Oswin says the affects will wear off with time!" Clara shouted.

"Where's Oswin!?" Esther exclaimed.

"Tell Esther I said hi and that she looks good in those boots," Oswin said. Clara glared at her.

"Then I suppose I haven't go long to kill you," Rose said to Clara.

"Just keep them busy, or something. Distracted, I don't know. Exhaust them," Oswin was saying to Clara, who quickly relayed all this information back to the others.

"Exhaust them?" Esther asked, then she turned to Rani, "Hey. Betcha can't beat me in a race, Fastest Woman Alive." Oswin glimpsed Esther wink at Rani (it was totally hot), and then she glimpsed something far more shocking when Esther shot off out of the back of the hanger in a storm of blue lightning, like a thunderbolt itself, ripping away in the space of a second. And Rani, roaring with anger, followed suit, zipping off, a reddish blur, making waves in the grey sea outside in hot pursuit.

"That was literally the sexiest thing I've ever seen in my life," Oswin commented, staring at where Esther had just been. When did she learn how to do that? God, she was hot. And so, so unattainable. "Why is she here, again?" Clara was about to tell Oswin what the deal with Esther Drummond was, when Rose finally got sick of all the lollygagging.

"You're going to die tonight, Clara Oswald, and I bet the Doctor won't even miss you," Rose said, and then she lunged for Clara, and Clara had been distracted by Oswin, and Rose grabbed her by her shoulders and took her off her feet until the both of them were wrapped in golden, atomic sparks and they disappeared out of time and space. With that, Oswin, too, was disconnected from the scene in the hangar and the fighting, 'awakening' with the green sky of Eslilia peering through the windows at her. Flek was shaking her shoulders. Oswin's head was pounding now. Where had Rose just taken Clara? And what the hell was happening with the rest of them? And why did Esther Drummond continue to be so damn persistently attractive?