My Melancholy Baby

Jenny

Viola got what she wanted from Eduardo Mancini. The fact that Jenny DeLacey, her second-in-command, had almost single-handedly saved the life of his wife after she had been shot through her liver and one of her kidneys, made him spill every bit of information he had on Salvatore Scarpelli's fronts. However, the catching of the murderer, a murderer who had done wrong by both the Scarpellis and the O'Haras by mistakenly killing Carlito Scarpa and Kitty Winthrop, had rendered the feud at a stalemate. When Jenny called on a payphone (she didn't want Viola getting hold of her mobile number or Clara's mobile number, lest she get rung to do 'odd jobs' non-stop), Viola said she was going to send Seamus Mahoney as an emissary. Seamus Mahoney, being young, being a cop, and being both rather soft yet valuable as the son of her best enforcer, was the ideal emissary. The Scarpellis couldn't kill a cop, but using such a character was a show of good faith when it came to negotiating peace between the Italians and the Irish again.

Speaking of shows of good faith, all Jenny's deals with Viola had been straightened out. Viola didn't care about having the hot Porsche 356, it being too flashy for her criminal enterprises, and considering she only stole it from Big Sal in the first place to get back at him for accusing her of ordering a mysterious hit on his consigliere. It was all, Jenny was assured, going to be taken care of, as thanks for 'dealing with' their foreign murderer so quickly and efficiently – the 'efficient' part coming from how the whatever-it-was had been eaten by the alligator, thus disposing of the evidence without the need for something more time consuming, like an acid bath or a car crusher.

"It's all going to be taken care of," Jenny repeated Viola's words to Clara Ravenwood when Clara finally began to question her about what she had been doing over the phone for nearly fifteen minutes, and after she had driven them to a darkened tailor's in their battered old Porsche watching the punters file out of it. This tailor's was O'Hara's, and O'Hara's had a speakeasy in the cellar, and one of the best chefs in New Orleans, because O'Hara's was Viola's pride and joy. The venue that had kick-started her in the world of organised crime syndicates and law-breaking.

"That sounds… suspicious," Clara said carefully. Jenny murmured a noise of agreement, the last of the people from the basement trickling out. Clara didn't really know where they were, though, or why they were there. But when about a minute went by when nobody else left, she motioned to Clara to follow her, and lead her through a 'coat storage room' to an expensively decorated staircase. "That was basically a wardrobe – are you taking me to Narnia?" she joked.

"What's Narnia?"

"It's, um, from this book series… never mind…" Clara's remark fell flat on Jenny's ears, and Jenny felt bad about it, and made a note to ask her later on when things were not so melancholy. Downstairs was warm, the air swam with traces of cigarette smoke and the smell of liquor clung to the burgundy leather of the chairs and barstools, which went well with the mahogany wood of the bar and the trimmings, and the golden caps on all the bottles and the taps and the lighters and lamps in the centres of the tables. The modest stage where Jenny remembered playing the fiddle so many times was nearby, and rather a fancy gramophone, out of which the soft tones of Ella Fitzgerald swam from whatever vinyl Lucie had playing. "Is this a speakeasy?"

"Of course it's a speakeasy," Jenny answered.

"But – isn't prohibition over…?"

"Yeah, but this place is still illegal. She sells smuggled alcohol down here so that she doesn't have to pay taxes on it. I told her she ought to pay taxes – that's what they got Al Capone on – but she doesn't listen," Jenny shrugged, "As long as it doesn't get raided before we leave, I can't say I care…"

"And, why are we in a speakeasy…?"

"Viola's sorting some things – I'll explain, just, what do you want to eat? We haven't had dinner. I'm starving. My meal is hours late by now. Viola's had the place cleared out for me. Us. Only Lucie Cousteau is here, le meilleur chef en Louisiane," Jenny said smoothly, indicating a woman who looked to be roughly thirty standing at the door to the kitchen.

"Uh, I don't really… you're always so good at dinner. You pick something."

"Have you ever tried oysters?" Jenny asked, and Clara shook her head. She smiled a little, and then called to Lucie Cousteau - whom she knew because she had been the one to bring Lucie's culinary genius to Viola's attention – in French, "A bucket of the most delicious oysters you have left in the kitchen, please. By which I mean – all the oysters you have in the kitchen. But don't put any garlic on them, not even near them, alright?" Lucie smiled and vanished. Clara was staring at Jenny. "What?"

"Was that French?"

"She's French. Well, she speaks English, but she came to America when she was a teenager and her parents mostly spoke French to her," Jenny shrugged.

"And earlier you were speaking Italian? And you speak German, too?" Clara asked. Jenny shrugged, nodded. "How many languages do you speak?"

"Every language, more or less," she said, "It's just… this thing that I can do. It's like the translation matrix, only it's part of me. I assimilate immediately. It used to be hard to do it at will, I normally just end up speaking the same language back as whoever speaks to me initially." While she spoke, she led Clara to a booth, because after getting shot at when they had been sitting at an ordinary table earlier, she fancied a more secluded spot in Viola's basement speakeasy.

"It's pretty hot," Clara said, sitting down in the booth opposite her, "So, um, is this a date?"

"Uh… I didn't think of it like that. I thought of it like neither of us have had dinner yet and I want you alone," Jenny said, thinking, "Does that make it a date? Or do I have to ask you? I don't know, this seems like a big commitment, should I ask you?"

"No, what you should do is stop worrying about something that's not important and explain to me this stuff about Viola 'taking care' of things," Clara said, and Jenny groaned quite exaggeratedly, taking Clara by surprise, "What's the matter?"

"What's the matter is I'm awful and I'm just waiting for you to inevitably break up with me," she grumbled, and Clara looked like she might as well have been slapped as Jenny slouched down in her chair.

"Why would you think I'm on the cusp of breaking up with you?"

"Because you are! You must be! Because I'm a criminal, a mobster, I brew moonshine and don't intervene when my old sociopathic 'friend' takes someone down to the cellar to torture; I carry a gun and get us both shot at!" Jenny complained, "Why would you want to be with someone with deep ties to an Irish crime syndicate? A washed-up army officer stripped of her rank and accused of attempted genocide? Infamous member of an elusive thieves' guild? A smuggler who convinced herself she was doing something righteous by sneaking forged ration slips under the Berlin Wall? Someone so much of a coward that she ran away and joined the circus, and couldn't even stand up for herself when she was forced to kill people in cold-blood!" What are you doing!? she demanded of herself internally. Was she trying to lose Clara Ravenwood forever?

"Calm down, take a deep breath," Clara told her, getting out of her seat and coming to sit next to Jenny, both of them on the same side of the opulent booth, "Why do you hold yourself to these impossible standards of living? Your father is no moral beacon either." Jenny would be annoyed that Clara assumed all of her woes stemmed from something to do with the Doctor, if Clara were not correct. "Jenny, I don't look at you like you're some impossible angel sent down from heaven to show humanity how to be pure and perfect. I worry about you when you torture yourself like this."

"How are you not horrified by me?"

"Why would I be? I know you. Maybe not your history, but your personality I do. Even in your last regeneration, when you were bitter and full of spite towards Jack and the Doctor and whoever else, you were better than lots of humans could ever hope to be, and more long-suffering. Your father, he always used to repeat this old thing about life being piles of good things or bad things. Eleven. Used to say it a lot, actually, about things that weren't all that meaningful, like when I burnt a soufflé once. He told me he thought of it when he was still travelling with Amy and took the opportunity to recycle it… anyway. He says life is a pile of good things and bad things, and that the good things might not erase the bad things from existence, but the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant. And if I had to, I'd say your 'good things' pile is a lot higher than the 'bad things' one," Clara said, speaking softly, holding Jenny's unbroken hand while she did.

"I'm a murderer."

"You said they forced you."

"They branded me, on my foot, I couldn't walk for a week. Tried to turn me into a weapon," Jenny explained somewhat vaguely.

"Who did? Who's 'they'?"

"Assassins, a collective of them… thought my particular skillset would be very useful in their line of work. It was. I killed twelve people for them. If I didn't, they would have killed me, and if they killed me they would find out I regenerate, and they would have hurt me even more than they did to indoctrinate me to begin with," she said, feeling a torrent of information spilling out of her mouth like tears, though she sounded monotonous and disassociated, "I was ninety-nine when I escaped. I thought, I'm not going to turn a hundred years old and be doing this dirty work. It was some anonymous, concrete complex they had me in, locked up in the Alps somewhere. I managed to escape and get to Switzerland. Do you hate me?"

"I love you, I hate the people who did that to you," Clara said. Jenny didn't betray a lot of emotion when she talked about that darkest period of her life; working for Viola was nothing compared to that. She hated even thinking about it, even remembering it, would prefer to burn those bloodstains out of her life forever. "Won't you believe me when I tell you I've never loved anybody as much as you? You said I'm the love of your life earlier, you know."

"Yeah, I… remember…"

"Did you mean it?"

"I didn't think about it. It was just impulsive." Clara's face fell with a look of more sudden sorrow then Jenny had ever seen on it, and she hastened to explain what she meant, "I did mean it, with both my hearts. Lies are the things that take effort; you don't need to think about what's true because it's always on the tip of your tongue."

Clara sighed, "The last time I said to someone I'd never love anyone so much as them, they died. Within seconds."

"Don't jinx it."

"It's disconcerting." Jenny heard noise coming from the kitchen, and when she looked over Lucie Cousteau appeared carrying two buckets; one of them was empty, the other was filled to the brim with oysters. "Oh my stars, that's a lot of oysters…" Jenny gently nudged Clara's leg so that she slid away from her slightly on the bench, since she had been so very close. Jenny thanked Lucie in French again, and Lucie disappeared off.

"I'm hungry, it's fine," Jenny shrugged, "You can have something else if you don't like them; I'm sure I could eat them all, and take home what's left. But, you know, I really think it's almost a crime to go to New Orleans and not taste some of the seafood. I'm gonna get an alligator fillet off of Lucie before we leave. It's so hard to get good quality alligator meat in England…" Talking about food, the sad tone of Jenny's voice nearly dissipated completely. But not quite.

She was cheered up somewhat by having to teach her girlfriend how to eat oysters, though, advising her not to just swallow the thing whole and to chew it. Clara made a remark about how she trusted Jenny too much that she kept letting her feed her 'weird shit.' Jenny thought that was funny, being as oysters weren't unusual in the slightest, and they weren't even from another planet. At least Clara liked them, though. Lucie had brought them colas to drink while they amused themselves like this, being as the oysters were particularly salty.

"If I didn't know you better I'd think you were trying to get me into bed by feeding me oysters," Clara remarked, eating another.

"You mean if you didn't know you better. You're as easy as they come – no need for aphrodisiac shellfish to get you to sleep with somebody," Jenny said, then changed tact again, "You're sure it doesn't bother you that you're in love with a criminal?"

"Well when you put it that way it sounds romantic. Kind of sexy."

"I told you you're easy. You practically seduce yourself, Clara. It's like, you know – batteries included."

"Wow, you make me sound like a dildo. Wind me up and watch me go." Jenny laughed slightly in between oysters and swigs of dark soda. "But, you still haven't explained about Viola taking care of things…"

"Oh. It's not as sinister as it sounds. We're down here having dinner, on the house, of course, while Viola is going to bring that coat and Josephine, and Conor will bring his jukebox, and put them in that Porsche up there, and then we'll leave and I won't come back," Jenny said, "I don't want to be involved in this anymore, in this sort of stuff, you know? I don't like being so shady, but I've never really had much of an honest job."

"What about the Alliance?" Clara asked. Eating another oyster, Jenny mulled this question over.

"Was it honest, though? When the Shadow still hasn't found Cargill, and everyone thinks I'm the one who sent a million people to their deaths? And anyway, who really says if a war is legal or not, or if that's just as illicit as everything else I've ever done?" Clara didn't know what to say, so Jenny sighed and talked about Viola again. "She congratulated me on my efficiency in dealing with Kitty Winthrop." Jenny spoke as though she had a bad taste in her mouth, and resentfully consumed yet another oyster to try and get rid of it. The waste shells they dropped into the second of the two buckets Lucie had provided, that one slowly filling up as the first one slowly emptied.

"What does that mean?"

"It means that because they don't have to do a body dump or stage an accident to cover it up, I get a gold star," she grumbled.

"It's not your fault you got mixed up with this, Jen," Clara said, "You said it yourself, to Kitty. You were an orphan, lost, on a strange planet, in a strange country, didn't know anybody, illegitimate. Naïve. Besides, I'm sure Viola made joining the mob sound very glamorous. I'm sure that, being one of the higher-ups, it was glamorous. More glamour than you, living in a swamp on your own for years, could ever dream of. It's not hard to understand why this all happened, and what kind of superficial harlot would I be if I didn't still love you? That would be like you deciding to leave me because I'm a vampire, because I drink human blood, and even though I don't have much of a choice about that, you can't stand it."

"Oh no," Jenny began sarcastically, "You're going to be eternally young forever, what a tragedy this is for me, somebody else who will remain eternally young forever."

"I can't believe you've taken me out to a have a candlelit dinner at a fancy speakeasy with everything on the house, cooked by an expert French chef, and have served me artisanal oysters, and you fail to see the romance in the situation," Clara said.

"Using my mob connections to get you free seafood isn't what I'd call romantic."

"Then I can't wait to see what you do call romant-"

DAY 18,201

"Okay, okay. This is just flirty chit-chat now," the Alpha Twelfth Doctor interrupted Jenny's story, "I'm not sure how relevant me hearing about a date you and Ravenwood had in 1948 is to the whole thing with the Khaolu. Is it going to come back, or something? Absorb the form of an alligator and go after you?"

"I hope not, I didn't have a conveniently placed roller coaster to drop on it," Jenny remarked.

"Hey! The roller coaster lizard story is a classic anecdote," Thirteen said.

"I know, you tell it all the time. You met Charles II and the first thing you told him was about how you once killed a lizard alien with a roller coaster," Jenny pointed out, which was very true, Thirteen had done just that. They were still in the console room, had been for the last few hours, while Jenny told her raucous story full of mobsters and shootouts and speakeasies and car chases – it was a real thrill-ride of a tale. Thirteen didn't believe half of it had actually happened, but couldn't be bothered questioning her daughter about the legitimacy of these claims she had beaten some made Mafiosos in a car chase, dangling herself out of the car window, leaving the car briefly driver-less, while she shot wildly with that old revolver of hers she had stolen from Chernobyl.

"Charlie thought that anecdote was amazing."

"Charlie didn't have a clue what a 'roller coaster' was," Jenny said, mocking Thirteen for her colloquial way of addressing the restoration king.

"Is that it, though? Are you done?"

"Well, yeah, I suppose. I just got carried away by that memory, it's a nice one, really. It's a shame it's kind of spoiled by the things that happened later on that evening," Jenny sighed, "I told you I didn't kill that Khaolu. I'm sorry about what happened, but I tried to save her. You believe me don't you?"

"Of course I believe you," Thirteen sighed. It was funny, Jenny mused, how she had practically been raised in America and now this next regeneration of the Doctor bore the same accent she had grown up alongside so comfortably (well, not quite the same accent, Thirteen was more generic in her intonations than southern belle.)

"Hopefully no other family members of theirs come after us, else it would be like the Scarpellis and the O'Haras all over again."

"Wait, hang on – what do you mean the memory of you and Ravenwood together in the speakeasy is spoiled by something that happened later on?" Thirteen asked.

"Oh, come on. You remember," Jenny said. Thirteen looked blank, so Jenny sighed, "It was spoiled because that was the night Danny Pink reappeared."