Ground Control to Major Jenny

Jenny

Yes. It was the TARDIS alright. A blue police box from back in the Sixties, standing on the slanted hill on the outskirts of Clara's front garden. They all spied it out of the window when Jenny took it upon herself to pull the curtains back a smidge, dousing the living room in harsh moonlight. Yes, it was the TARDIS. But it wasn't the Alpha TARDIS. That would have been too good to be true.

The last time Jenny had seen 'Old Twelvey' had been when he had caught her hiding in Clara's wardrobe, before they were officially a 'thing.' He had wandered around her flat making deductions about all sorts of stray clues – the two toothbrushes, the peach yoghurts Clara didn't like, sturdy boots she wouldn't be seen dead in, two sets of crockery left out on the draining board. Traces of somebody who could actually cook having been in the kitchen. Then Clara had managed to spin the lie, which he somehow believed, that Jenny was, in fact, a spy, that she perhaps had someone else over – Courtney Woods from a few floors down, maybe, showing up where she wasn't wanted. Jenny had been chased out of the flat. That was the last time she saw Clara before she died, and it made her angry now that their time had been cut short like that, that Clara had sunk into her melancholy undead-ness with a job that left her unsatisfied and none of her old contacts, even if they were a couple now. Would they even be a couple for much longer, though, with Danny Pink, and Ashildr, all in the same room causing this kerfuffle?

In the instant she saw the Beta Twelfth Doctor all of these thoughts ran through her head, and an irrational fury that Eleven had changed into this wispy old man instead of her young, kind mother rose within her. By her silence and her cold expression, they all deduced what she saw.

"Is that my boyfriend showing up when he's not invited?" Missy called, "He just can't get enough of me." Ashildr almost seemed liable to hit the Master in a moment, and Jenny thought that she might not do anything to stop her if she tried. Jenny felt differently about Ashildr now that she had been defending her to Danny, and felt that, even including Clara, Ashildr may be her only ally in the room. Funny considering the only other time they had met she had run her through with a samurai sword.

"How did he find me?" Clara asked, knowing who it was, then she turned to Missy, "And how did you find me?"

"That man you have unconscious on your stairs told me," she shrugged. Jenny cast a glare at Austin Cargill's sleeping body, and hoped his wife wouldn't show up to try and rescue him any time soon. The Shadow was more than a match for Ashley Cargill, though.

"He and his wife have been leaving all sorts of people clues about your whereabouts, Clara," Ashildr reminded her, "He was the one who told me to come to Hollowmire to slay a dangerous vampire."

"A what!?" Danny exclaimed, but nobody answered him.

"I am sorry about killing you, by the way," Ashildr said to Jenny again, "But you did sort of steal my girlfriend. So it evens out. Considering she's pretty great, really."

"Well I'll find out exactly who he's been talking to and what he's been saying when he wakes up," Jenny said quietly, looking at Cargill with a great amount of darkness, which she knew Danny noticed and probably didn't cast her in a very good light.

"I think finding out what the Doctor wants is the more immediate issue, Major." Ashildr and Clara were both looking at her as though she was the one in charge.

"What?" she asked.

"Do something," Clara said, sounding desperate. Jenny let the curtain drop back down.

"Me do something? Like what? I can't go out there, he'll recognise me," Jenny said.

"He's your father," Danny said.

"He isn't my father, I'm from a different universe," she snapped, then said to Clara, "If anything, you should be the one to speak to him."

"She's right," Ashildr said, "He'll know me. And obviously he knows Eva Braun over there."

Missy scoffed at this, "Eva Braun was a hussy. But she can't go out there either, he'll kill her as soon as he figures out what she is. I'd kill her if she wasn't so cute."

"…Thanks…" Clara mumbled, while Danny Pink asked something about what Clara supposedly was which, again, did not get answered, "Why can't the Shadow go speak to him?"

"She's not paying me enough to do that," the Shadow said, arms still crossed, still watching, still waiting for his Arcadian Diamond.

"We could ring Esther. Get her to come up?" Clara suggested, "He'd recognise Sally."

"Why are you avoiding the Doctor? Why would he kill you?" Danny persisted.

"Esther's just as undead and unnatural as you are, she can't come," Jenny said, "Can you hear him?"

"Not from here," Clara answered after a pause, "I'm not Rory. I can't hear that well." In the background of this conversation Danny kept asking incessant questions, questions about Clara's hearing, Clara's alleged death-sentence if she were to leave the house, the word 'vampire,' the claim of her being 'undead and unnatural.'

"Oh, be quiet Rupert, the grown-ups are talking," the Shadow told him coldly. Jenny didn't understand why the Shadow called him 'Rupert,' but Danny was stunned to silence by it. The Shadow knew all sorts of things about their little sect. It was a bit creepy. Jenny opened the curtains again and peered down the street, seeing Twelve wandering around with some device in his hand that was flashing and aimed in the vague direction of Clara's lonely house. He was clearly looking for something, but what? Or who?

"…Maybe we should get Sally?" Clara suggested.

"Just because you fancy her is no reason to go waking her up at four in the morning," Jenny said.

"She's always awake at four in the morning. And so what if he recognises her? She can just tell him the truth – that her fiancé left her so she moved away from London to come to Yorkshire," Clara said. But it didn't matter, because that was when Jenny got an idea, and looked at Clara for a long few moments. Under her scrutiny, Clara shifted a little uncomfortably, "…What?"

"Maybe there is a way you can go out there," Jenny said, "Just as long as you don't walk out there. If you flew out there, out of the back door-"

"No," Clara said immediately, while Danny piped up again asking how the hell Clara would be able to fly.

"Oh, come on, Clara, it'll be easy, he wouldn't even see you, you could stay way above him, and it's a foggy out," Jenny said. The storm that had been raging when they had left Hollowmire that evening had, in their absence, died down, a heavy fog settling over the moors outside.

"No!" Clara continued.

"Just fly out and eavesdrop – he's talking to himself, after all," Jenny said, "You'll be safe. I wouldn't let him hurt you if he tried, regardless of him recognising me."

"Unless that machine he has is some sort of Dracula-detector," Clara said.

"Dracula-detector!?" Danny exclaimed.

"Then just stay high above him, he won't have anything to catch you with, he doesn't think that far ahead," Jenny said.

"Are you implying about her what I think you're implying…?" Ashildr asked carefully, "The last time I saw you, you said you couldn't turn into a-" There was a loud, funny noise outside and a flash, and Jenny looked back out of the window to see that Twelve had tried to come into the garden and had been rebuffed by the fancy security system Oswin and her boyfriend had installed a while ago*.

"Please, Clara, for me?" Jenny pleaded. In their company, and Clara's current crisis of conscience, Jenny didn't expect begging Clara to turn into a bat for her would actually work. What shocked Jenny was that it did. Clara didn't even register that Danny Pink was asking her questions, all of them questions, when she finally said fine, and Jenny went to open one of the kitchen windows; there was no way Twelve would remain unaware if he saw a huge bat flying out of the front door.

Clara's transformation into a bat was practically instantaneous. You could blink and miss it. Danny Pink saw enough of it to scream, though, which Jenny thought was nearly amusing. A seasoned soldier, war veteran, screaming at the sight of a bat? Despite all of her recent practicing, though, Clara still wasn't all that great at being a bat. She flew right into the side of the window first and toppled, and Jenny had to hold out her hands to catch her.

"Be careful," she said quietly, the Bat crawling over the backs of her hands. She held her arm with her bad thumb out of the window, like she was releasing a stray moth, and Clara flew out into the night. Typical vampire.

"She's not very good at that, is she?" Missy commented. Jenny scowled at her and returned to the living room, where Danny Pink might as well be having a heart attack if it wasn't for the fact he was already a hologram. "He's lost his breath a bit, hasn't he? Do you have a set of bellows? Pump him back up again?"

"What the hell was that!?" Danny demanded, "What just happened!? Who is that pretending to be my girlfriend!?"

"If I promise not to run away can I take these handcuffs off?" Ashildr asked, a question Jenny was more inclined to answer than anything Danny was saying.

"What? What do you mean can you take them off?" Jenny frowned, and Ashildr did some fancy movement with her hands and the handcuffs just slipped off. She held them up for Jenny to see, and Jenny snatched them. "How did you do that?"

"I'm trained in escapology," she shrugged. Jenny sighed and then tossed the handcuffs back to the Shadow, who caught them easily.

"Fine, but don't run away or the Shadow will come and get you again. No Arcadian Diamond if you escape," she said, but she looked at the Shadow while she spoke.

"I'd never run away from you, Major," Ashildr said sultrily, which Jenny was unnerved by.

"…What's your rank?" Jenny asked. She had never asked Ashildr that, all she knew is Ashildr had been part of the Homeworld Alliance Ground Force in the Polaris Death Charge.

"Lieutenant," she answered.

"Oh my god!" Danny Pink yelled, "Will somebody tell me what the f…" He was about to swear, but couldn't manage it, "What's going on?"

"It isn't that complicated, only that after you died Clara became friends with benefits with Jenny and then at one point Clara died because she took a chronolock from somebody else when she wasn't supposed to, which I couldn't remove, so she got herself killed. It was her own fault, being reckless and trying to act more like the Doctor. After that he brought her back frozen in time, but we erased all of his memories of her and travelled together in a stolen TARDIS for nearly ten years, until she had to go back to the Time Lords and accept her death," Ashildr explained, vaguely filling in the gaps of Clara's memories. "Then her parallel universe doppelgänger, Jenny's stepmother, found out about it and decided to use the smartest girl in the universe to resurrect her. And then they went to Whitby in the 1880s and she got bitten by a vampire and has been living here in hiding from the Doctor ever since."

"Did you say vampire!?"

"Amazing, that's the only part of the story he picks up on," Missy shook her head.

"You were with Clara for ten years?" Jenny asked in disbelief.

"I wouldn't say I was… with her," Ashildr began, not looking at anybody in particular into space, her eyes a little unfocused, "She was sort of, somewhere else a lot of the time. Since you broke her heart."

Missy fake gasped and then sat forward with her chin on her hands eagerly, "Lesbian drama!"

"I never broke her heart!" Jenny argued, "I wouldn't hurt Clara, not ever."

"But you'd hurt other people, I'm sure," Danny said, "And what about her? Is she a killer now? Does she drink blood?"

"It was after I told her you were responsible for the massacre on Deftan," Ashildr said, ignoring Danny. Again. Everybody was ignoring Danny, "That was why she never called you in those ten years to tell you what had happened to her. Clara was never really with me; she's always been with you. Even if you didn't know it." Muttering the word 'vampire' to himself, Danny Pink lapsed into silence, and Jenny did the same thing, though her quietening was the result of this revelation about Clara's feelings for her, one Clara herself was no longer aware of. She had been hung up on her for all the time she had been with Ashildr?

"Then why are you not more angry at me? If you're so in love with Clara?"

"It was a long time ago," Ashildr said cryptically, "And anyway, I already stabbed you through the heart once. I could always stab the other one to match, Major?" Jenny grimaced. She would rather not get stabbed again, even if getting stabbed did mean her fresh bullet wound and her broken thumb would heal instantly.

But she remembered something else, spawning from Missy's earlier comment about playing draughts with Thirteen, and turned to speak to the Master, instead.

"Have you ever heard of Laophis?" Jenny changed the subject completely.

"What-phis?"

"Laophis. The planet." Missy shrugged. Jenny narrowed her eyes.

"Why do you ask, child?"

"I'm not a child," she said coolly.

"No, the years in your eyes attests to that," Missy said, holding her gaze, but that comment made Jenny self-conscious and she looked away for a second.

"What about Fiovis Ichors?" she asked now, and the Master went sour.

"Where have you found a Fiovis Ichor?"

"On Laophis. Mum destroyed it. Cargill and his wife have been using it for years to keep eternally young, that's why they look so similar – because it changes your appearance," Jenny explained**, "You were playing Connect 4 with her that morning and you dropped the hint, told her to go to Laophis and investigate something to do with geology."

"Well. I think that what's happened here is we've met in the wrong order – but I'll be sure to pass the message along the next time your mother and I are entangled," she said wryly. There was a moment of nothing before Jenny realised what this meant, and she almost staggered, like she had literally been punched in the face.

"It was my fault…" she said hollowly, then raised her eyes to Ashildr, "The Polaris Death Charge. I told Missy about the Fiovis Ichor, she told mum, the Doctor and I went to Laophis and destroyed it and that was what made the Cargills come after us for revenge. The reason Cargill infiltrated the Alliance to destroy my reputation…"

"You can't blame yourself for butterfly effects, Young," the Shadow advised.

"Cargill killed them, Major. Not you."

"Why do you keep calling me Major?" Jenny questioned abruptly.

"I'm being optimistic about your inevitable rank-reinstatement after you finally turn that sorry excuse for a man over to the Homeworld Alliance," Ashildr said, "You're not really a major, not anymore, Major."

"He sent a million people to their deaths while I was distracted fixing the stupid sanitation system," she complained, clenching and unclenching her left fist with the desire to hit something very hard. But she couldn't break her other hand as well.

"Pssht. You're as bad as your father," Missy said dismissively, leaning back in the chair again, "Get over yourself."

"I'd kick his teeth in right now if I wasn't a pacifist," Jenny grumbled, looking at Cargill on the stairs. Danny laughed coldly, nervously, the hallmarks of some kind of breakdown.

"A pacifist? With that gun?" he pointed at the rifle lying down comfortably on the sofa.

"That's only Josephine," she said again, "Josephine is my alligator rifle." Then she remembered something and her eyes widened, and she muttered a watered-down swear word that could never really be an actual swear word, since Jenny Harkness no longer swore, following Esther Drummond's shining example. She fetched the transdimensional bag from where it lay in the hall, thrown off earlier while she and Clara had been… busying themselves. She reached into it all the way to her shoulder and found a paper bag, something cold inside it covered in more paper wrappings, and this enormous parcel she pulled out.

"What is that?" Danny asked, watching her take it through into the kitchen.

"An alligator fillet," Jenny said, "I was going to marinate it but I got… distracted… have to put it in the fridge." And she did put it in the fridge, too, rammed it in there on one of Clara's many, empty shelves, because Clara never really stocked an awful lot of food.

"You hunt alligators!?"

"Oh, alright, Mr Morality, why don't you try living in a swamp for five years without hunting any animals, hmm?" she countered, "They're not an endangered species, and they make good meatballs."

"Did you really ask Clara to choose between you and Jenny before she left?" Ashildr asked, "The ridiculousness of that question is only just hitting me now."

"It's not ridiculous. She knows who she'll choose. Just because I'm a hologram and she's a… thing, doesn't mean it can't work." Ashildr laughed harshly.

"Sorry – you think-? You genuinely think that anyone – including Clara – would choose you over Jenny? Have you met Jenny? Have you looked at Jenny for more than five seconds? You don't stand a chance if you pit yourself against her," Ashildr said scathingly.

"And maybe don't call her a 'thing' if you want to be with her so badly," Jenny said.

"She's a creature."

"She's my girlfriend. Not yours. Not anymore. And she can make her own decisions without you trying to control her, and not accepting her for what she is." Clara was often worried that her vampirism may turn Jenny away from her, may make her re-evaluate her commitment and her feelings, and here was Danny Pink making all of those fears a reality.

"You want to be with her again, but you're repulsed by the fact she's a vampire? Honestly, I think Clara joining the hordes of the undead is only an improvement – her bone structure gets more intense by the day, something to do with her transformation, I assume. Her jawline alone, and I barely even noticed those collarbones of hers before," then Ashildr laughed briefly, "I'm kidding, though. Of course I noticed them. I've licked them." Jenny turned her nose up at the thought. "Anyway, what was my original point? Oh, yeah. Jenny's amazing."

"You've met me once and you stabbed me."

"And then I did some research," Ashildr said, "It's harder to find things out about you than the Doctor, since you change your name a lot. I'm a big fan of your smuggling operation in Berlin. Kitzler, wasn't it?"

"Mmm," Jenny confirmed, but she didn't say much more than that.

"She has pretty good reflexes, as well," Ashildr spoke to Danny, Missy and the Shadow watching again, "Always a sign that someone is good in bed, that level of agility. Watch." Without warning, Ashildr swung a punch at Jenny's head, which Jenny barely managed to dodge. She did dodge it, though, and Ashildr's other hand came to give her an uppercut she also avoided.

"What are you doing!?" she shouted, Ashildr coming for her, reminding her of the first time they met.

"Making you look good in front of Danny!" Ashildr said, Jenny ducking and weaving out of her way and backing towards the kitchen, sometimes hitting away Ashildr's kicks but otherwise remaining entirely defensive. This amused the others, until Jenny stumbled on the leg of the armchair, unprepared for a fist fight, and another punch came for her face. She grabbed Ashildr's arm with as much strength as she could with her weakened left arm and broken right hand, and swung Ashildr around her, managing to throw her to the floor.

But what followed was a lapse of concentration on Jenny's part, Jenny thinking that Ashildr would stop now she had ended up on the floor. The feeling of Ashildr wrenching on her battered, stitched-up thumb was more painful than getting shot a few hours ago, and she involuntarily shrieked when it happened, and then Ashildr was torn away with great force while Jenny staggered and almost fell to her knees.

"Don't you dare hurt her," she heard Clara speak, and looked up to see her girlfriend holding Ashildr by the throat, lifting her off her feet. Danny looked on in horror. "You might be a million years old, but you're still human enough, and I haven't had a drink for a while." Jenny hadn't ever seen Clara threaten somebody before as she held onto her bandaged thumb. Her eyes were practically black.

"Clara…" Danny said, staring at her, but she didn't seem to hear him.

Ashildr managed to speak hoarsely with Clara's hand gripping her, "Oh lord, lead us from the unreal to the real; from darkness to light; from death to immortality. May there be-" Clara dropped her immediately and clutched her hands to her ears, and Jenny realised Ashildr had begun to say a prayer. Clara tentatively removed her hands, and then Ashildr began, "In the name of the father, the son and the holy-"

"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Clara covered her ears again, "Don't pray at me."

"I'll throw garlic bread at you if you lay a hand on me like that again," Ashildr said coldly, "I'm already immortal, I don't need to add bloodlust and an inability to sunbathe to my list of traits." Fists hammered against Clara's front door, Old Twelvey yelling through the letterbox that he had heard somebody scream within the house.

"Look, you've brought the mob to my door now," Missy said, Jenny watching Clara carefully as Ashildr reaffirmed herself, "Just when things were starting to get interesting and I thought she might bite somebody."

"Clara wouldn't bite anyone," Jenny snapped, then she spoke softly and quietly to Clara, "How did you get back so quickly?"

"…I'm a vampire," she said, "I can move quickly. I heard you scream. Nothing else mattered. He can march right in here for all I care, as long as you're not hurt."

"You're a monster," Danny Pink declared, looking at Clara like he was seeing her for the first time. Twelve kept banging on the door. Clara's expression became broken.

"What does the Doctor want, though?" Missy interrupted, and it took Clara a second to answer.

"Oh. I told you he might come looking for that bike, Jen," Clara said coolly, addressing Jenny, though her tone of voice was more to do with the others in the room, "The anti-gravity one I have in the garage I kept. He was muttering to himself that he couldn't remember where he left it. He didn't see me."

"I can't believe you would drink someone's blood," Danny continued, not caring about this, "Blood, Clara! A real person's blood!"

"I'm not sure if Ashildr counts as a real person anymore," the Shadow said.

"Oi! I'm more of a real person than you, you're just a swarm," Ashildr argued. Missy was getting to her feet, collecting her things, Twelve continuing to hammer on the door. Oswin's security was designed specifically against him, though, so his attempts to use the sonic screwdriver to get in were futile.

"It's awful. I told you, Clara. I don't do weird," Danny said.

"I'd rather not wait around until he finds his way in, that's enough entertainment for one night, I think," Missy said, "Perhaps I'll enlist Danny here as my own companion. Do you know I once launched his frozen heart out of a cannon at your mother?" She spoke to Jenny, but it was Danny who was outraged by this.

"Yes," Jenny said stiffly. Thirteen had told her about that before.

"You're just going to leave then? You literally just came here in some sort of attempt to fuck up my life, did you?" Clara asked.

"Isn't it afterlife now?" Missy asked, and Clara scoffed. Twelve still battered his fists against the door, yelling that he was coming to help whatever defenceless woman had just been attacked by the imaginary motorbike thief. Then again, Jenny had already practically stolen a Porsche that day, so perhaps she was being hypocritical.

"Don't come here again, not ever," Clara said, "If you even dare, I'll bite you, then you'd need the blood of a Time Lord to live, and even if you fed on the Doctor, he'd still die eventually and then you would as well. It's a curse."

"Maybe I'll just drink the blood of your pretty little girlfriend," Missy said.

"I suppose I'll just have to break your neck with my fangs then. Headless Time Lords can't regenerate." Missy narrowed her eyes, Danny stammering at this show of threats from Clara, who was usually so gentle and so opposed to violence and conflict, perhaps against her vampiric nature.

"You really are a monster. An animal. I don't ever want to-" Jenny presumed Danny was going to say he did not ever want to see Clara again, didn't want to even hear anyone speak her name, didn't even want to remember that Clara Oswald had ever existed and been a significant part of his life. But Danny's words were cut off as he was dragged away with Missy in a blue blur of light; a teleport beacon. Typical. She didn't even care where they went.

"That's a shame. She has a huge bounty on her head I could have collected," the Shadow said. Clara stared at the floor. Jenny needed to talk to her, but they needed to be alone. She began to say something, but Old Twelvey crashed through the door. Apparently Oswin's security system didn't bank on him just kicking it down, and now Adam Mitchell was going to have to pay for a new lock.

"Your house isn't very secure," Ashildr remarked.

"What's all this?" Twelve asked, looking around, looking face to face. His eyes passed over Clara and he said, "Aren't you a waitress?"

"I beg your pardon?" she asked.

"You just posed as a waitress once. To check his memory wipe worked," Ashildr explained quietly.

"I've never had a memory wipe," the Doctor declared, "But you! The Viking. Trouble. That's what you are, trouble, and…" his eyes finally found Jenny. Time was, she may have felt some attempt within her to scrounge a sense of relatability from this man, but she had met her mother, and she loved her absent mother dearly, so she no longer felt anything when she looked at him, other than anger that he had gotten Clara killed by setting a shoddy example. "Jenny? Is it really you? It's been… I don't know… thousands of years…"

Jenny didn't know how to answer. She didn't need to. A thudding sound accompanied the rolling of the Doctor's eyes back into his head, and he crumpled to the floor with the Shadow standing behind him, the Shadow who had just hit him very hard around the back of his skull. Jenny winced, knowing what that felt like. Jenny stared at him, still tacitly in charge.

"I'm sorry, Clara," she said finally, "…I have to call Jack. Get him to bring the TARDIS down here, and the diamond for the Shadow. Not to mention enough retcon to brainwash an elephant so that this idiot doesn't remember seeing me… go give him his motorbike back while he's here. My dad has the same one and he's never used it, he'll let you have it, promise." Clara didn't smile, not really, just sighed, and went to do what Jenny asked while Jenny took out her phone to call down her ex-husband to rescue them all.

*chapter 926

**chapter 949