AN: Sorry about all these kind of random-seeming chapters, this whole Day is basically stuff to do with wrapping up or continuing some of the ongoing character arcs, a lot of different plot threads moving around right now, all necessary.

A Brain the Size of a Planet

Clara

She'd never been overly-keen on animals. She didn't hate them, but she had never been the sort of child to beg her parents for a pet hamster because they were cute under the guise of learning to be responsible. When she was much younger, they had had a cat, but it had died when she was four and her mother had always said she didn't want another cat now they had a daughter. That was why she resigned herself to sitting in her room and reading instead of fawning over the new-born kittens in Nerve Centre, if they were even born yet. She wasn't following it that closely, nor was she fascinated with watching a hairball give birth. She was much more interested in re-reading Sense and Sensibility with the new knowledge that Jane Austen had fallen in love with her.

There was a fervent knocking on her bedroom door though; Clara had been so caught up in her daydreams about what it would be like to live in Jane Austen's house being covert-queers at the turn of the Nineteenth Century that she had not been paying much mind to her connection to her sister, or to the alarming lights of the Echoculum atop the piano. Absently, still not noticing, she held the book in one hand and wandered over to the door to open it with the other. But she dropped the book on the floor when she saw that Oswin was standing there, after hobbling over with her cane, tears streaking her eyes. No longer did Clara Oswald care about any pre-Victorian writers.

"Oh my god, what's happened?" she asked, seriousness taking over. She dragged Oswin into the room, Oswin who was trembling and unable to explain immediately what had taken hold of her. It couldn't be Adam Mitchell, could it? No, she didn't think so; Adam Mitchell couldn't upset someone if he tried, let alone his girlfriend, his girlfriend with five grown-up brothers and one very telekinetic twin sister. "Oswin? Os, talk to me, please," Clara begged her, holding her arms to keep her upright.

"It's nothing," Oswin choked.

"Nothing!? What's 'nothing'? Nothing wouldn't make you come crying to me," Clara said, "Tell me what's happened, please, sweetheart." Oswin cleared her throat slightly.

"Nothing much. Fyn called. He found our dad." Oswin left out as much emotion as she could while she said that, on purpose, growing despondent, recoiling into the usual static melancholy it was a habit for her to adopt whenever the world got too much for her to bear. Which was frequently. And then, for a second, Clara was perplexed. She had to dig into the mental link between herself and her sister to find out if these tears were tears of sorrow or tears of joy, and she was harrowed to discover it was the former. Oswin was devastated.

"Why is that bad, Oswin?" Clara asked softly, pulling her into the room towards the sofas where she could sit down, "I thought you liked your dad?"

"Exactly! What would he think, having me for a daughter? Me?"

"He'll think the same thing I think, that you're wonderful," Clara said.

"He would hate me."

"Why's that?"

"The Doctor hates Jenny."

"The Doctor thinks the world of Jenny; he thinks she's god's gift to the universe."

"Fyn wants me to go see him. Fyn already saw him. Said he was excited to hear about me or… something… what kind of shit must Fyn have-"

"Oswin," Clara said, "You're going to go see him."

"No! No, I can't, I-"

"Yes. You will. And you'll go now, before you overthink it, and I'll come too," Clara declared.

"N-no. No, Clara, no! You don't know anything about-"

"Oswin," Clara said after she had stood up with the plan to get ready, seeing as she was still in pyjamas, "This will be good for you. And we're going because I'm telling you to, because you'll never go on your own and Adam wouldn't try to make you and you'd just ignore Fyn. So we're going now, and it'll be fine, because I'll be there, okay?"

"You can't be there! How am I supposed to explain who you are?" Oswin said frantically.

"Your father is a genius physicist or something, Os! I'll just tell him the truth. You're making excuses."

"He'll hate me."

"No he won't. Make yourself presentable now while I get dressed. You're not going to win this argument with me and you know it, and you know you want to see him and you want me to be right so you'll do what I say," Clara said, wondering when it was, exactly, that she developed such a stern way of speaking to her baby sister. But you couldn't make Oswin do something if you weren't stern, and she was the only one who might ever get Oswin to do anything. Oswin was probably more scared of making Clara upset with her than her father she hadn't seen since she was two, though. And that was why she did what Clara bade.

"He'll hate me, he'll hate me…" Oswin muttered over and over. Clara had never been to Venus before; she hadn't even known of these Venusian cloud colonies, floating above the planet's boiling, hostile surface. True, they had walked past some credibly creamy, rosy views, but now they were in a creamy, rosy hallway that didn't have any windows and reminded Clara surreally of something you would see in Stanley Kubrick films.

"No he won't." They were outside of an apartment door. Clara wanted Oswin to ring the doorbell, but she didn't think she was going to. Fyn was not there, Fyn thought it would be good for Oswin to go without him. Clara disagreed, but it didn't matter now.

"I should've told Adam. Adam wouldn't've made me come somewhere I didn't want to…"

"Where is Adam?"

"Oh, Other You came to bother him, something about getting the lock fixed on her front door. Maybe we should go see how he's doing? I'm the one who designed the security system, we should really-" Oswin tried to leave, but she was very slow hobbling around, and Clara just took her elbow to hold her there.

"Are you going to ring the doorbell?"

"No!"

"Alright, fine," Clara said, "I'll do it."

"Clara!" Oswin protested. Clara reached for the electric doorbell, but Oswin grabbed her hand to stop her. Clara pressed it telekinetically, and Oswin glared at her with more sudden hatred than Clara had ever seen in her eyes.

"It'll be fine," she whispered, "He will not hate you – and even if he does, which he won't, you've still got me, okay?"

"And what are you? A physical manifestation of my own ego following me around pretending it's my mother?" Oswin snapped, even snarled, and Clara was shocked. She could see Oswin regretted saying that, though, but it didn't matter. The door slid open, and there stood a man. A hologram, in fact, one who bore a startling resemblance to Fyn Kyris, and the same brown eyes Clara and her offspring all possessed. She didn't know why she was surprised at how young Oswin's father, whose name she didn't recall, looked, but holograms didn't have simulated ageing. He must look the same as he did the day he died, three decades ago. And he looked between them, and Oswin couldn't say a word, because it was probably very surreal seeing your father's ghost and him looking identical to how you remembered. She couldn't imagine what it would be like if she saw her mother again…

Clara resolved that she needed to speak.

"Hi," she said finally, still holding Oswin's arm, only now it was more out of trying to support her. The right leg, the one closest to Clara, was the mangled one, so it was probably good she was keeping her steady. "I'm Clara. This is Oswin. Your daughter. Do you mind if we come in? She has to sit down."

"You're identical."

"Yes," Clara said, "It's complicated. I have a lot to tell you about, uh, who your daughter is. About what she is." Oswin was shell-shocked, just staring. She was on the tipping point of going into one of her slumps, where she wouldn't move or speak for days. "I don't suppose you have tea in this century, do you?"

They did, in fact, have tea in that century. It was not very nice tea, but it was, nonetheless, tea, so she could cope with it. Apparently it came already in this flat, and had been there for quite some time with no organic person around to consume it, so Clara willingly took the bullet.

"Who are you, then?" he, whom Oswin told her psychically was called Rrob, asked.

"Right…" Clara summoned all her knowledge about Oswin's complicated family, "Um… well. You see. Oswin is kind of my… uh…"

"For someone with an English degree you're terrible with words," Oswin muttered. She didn't look at her father. She had seen too much of the negativity surrounding Jenny and the Doctor to be wholly un-cynical when it came to paternal reunions.

"Have you ever heard of Time Lords?" Clara asked.

"Everyone's heard of the Time Lords," Rrob Oswald said. It was odd he had her surname, it was almost like she was meeting an ancestor. Though, of course, she had no genetic ancestors, aside from the Echoes. And she didn't desire any aside from the Echoes, either. "They wiped themselves out."

"One of them survived, the one who did the… wiping," Clara said, making a mental note to tell her husband later what a travesty she was making of all this, calling him the 'one who did the wiping.' Oswin gave her a horrified look when she said it, like she was being indecent. Imagine that, Oswin Oswald, worried about decency. It was like seeing a pig fly. "The Doctor."

"I've heard of the Doctor," he said, and Clara braced herself for Rrob to say something awful and probably, unfortunately true about the Doctor, "Isn't he some sort of hero? A fairy-tale prince figure?"

"I'd say he's more like the wizard in the fairy-tale," Clara said, pleased to hear this, "Anyway, well, he's my husband, actually. And this creature-thing called the Great Intelligence-"

"Creature-thing?" Oswin questioned.

"He never really explained to me much about it," Clara said, "Anyway, it went into his time stream, which is like his whole life, or something, tried to kill him thousands of times, I went in to stop it and created Echoes to save him thousands of times. And-"

"Oswin is one of them?" he asked.

"Well, exactly. Not that that makes her less of a person, or something," Clara said quickly, "I'm not saying that, Oswin and the other Echoes are the most important things in the world to me. I got this scar protecting them," Clara held out her left arm to show off the burn that looked like tree-roots, bandages still over the nastier, third-degree welts on her wrist. "Not to say you're not her parent, also, but I see her like she's my own daughter, in a way."

"You're laying it on a bit thick…" Oswin grumbled.

"Is that true?" Rrob asked. He was asking Oswin. Oswin didn't notice until Clara elbowed her and she finally looked at him. She didn't speak though.

"This isn't anything like what happens in the Odyssey when Odysseus and Telemachus reunite after decades of thinking Odysseus is dead…" Clara said. She didn't know how this sort of thing was meant to go. On Jeremy Kyle they always got very emotional.

"Didn't you know I was here?"

"Mother kept your letters a secret. Fyn must have explained," Oswin said, "None of us knew."

"Does your brother know?" Oswin frowned. "Dret?"

"Oh. He's not… he disowned me. When mother did."

"Your mother disowned you?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"For bringing misery into her life. She wrote me a letter about it on her deathbed, saying I was the worst thing to ever happen to her, me and my intelligence," Oswin said. Oswin hated talking about her mother. Clara supposed things were different with her actual dad, though. Maybe she was too used to the tenseness of her husband and Jenny Harkness, those two always tiptoeing around each other. This wasn't very strained at all, really. She supposed there was no reason for it to be. Rrob Oswald had never abandoned his children, not in any way.

"Fyn told me."

"Told you what, dad?" Oswin asked. She was sort of clinging to Clara in an odd way, the two of them side-by-side on a small sofa, while he just stood, unable to really sit, or do much of anything. He couldn't touch things like Oswin could, but Clara was sure she would help with that as soon as the opportunity arose, if he so desired.

"About what happened on Horizon, in 5121, and how you died, he said it would be hard for you to-"

"He shouldn't have done that," Oswin said, "He shouldn't have – shouldn't have said anything." 'Calm down,' Clara thought.

"It wasn't your fault, Oswin," her father said, "It's the fault of whoever detonated the-"

"No, don't – don't talk about that, you shouldn't have to hear about it," she said, scrunching up her face.

"Did Fyn tell you she's sick?" Clara asked seriously. Rrob narrowed his eyes, meaning no, Fyn hadn't told him that. "Oswin struggles with, um…"

"Everything," Oswin muttered, "I struggle with everything."

"We look after her, Adam and I," Clara said.

"Don't mention Adam," Oswin hissed.

"Who's Adam?" Rrob asked.

"Adam's great, Adam Mitchell," Clara said on Oswin's behalf. Of course Rrob would love to hear about Adam – she could only imagine her own dad's joy if she were to bring a boy like Adam Mitchell home, "Oswin's boyfriend, he's from my time. The Twenty-First Century. He's a genius, and he's probably the sweetest boy I've ever met." Oswin glared.

"Fyn didn't say you have a boyfriend," Rrob said.

"No, well, Fyn wouldn't," Oswin said, "Fyn's like that. He'll leave something out to make my afterlife more awkward…"

"Don't say 'afterlife,' you can't dwell on death like that," he said, though he spoke fondly, "The state of living and being alive doesn't correlate to the acts of breathing and having a heartbeat. The only glum thing is your perception."

"Wow. Everybody else usually just lets her be morbid."

"Okay, Ravenwood is way worse than me."

"Ravenwood isn't all that good of a role model, sweetheart," Clara said.

"It's understandable that you'd be harrowed after the things Fyn says have happened to you," Rrob said, "I'll help in any way I can, though, I don't want to lose contact with you again, you or Fyn. It's a shame about Dret…"

"It's not, Dret's a…" Oswin stopped herself, "A not-very-nice-brother. I like the younger ones, I practically raised Reker when mother couldn't be bothered."

"Anyway, anyway," Clara said, "Nobody wants to hear you be depressing, Oswin, you ought to tell him something of the good things you've done that Fyn might not have heard about."

"I haven't done anything good."

"You freed those enslaved Cybermen and helped them build their own peaceful city? You cured the Manifest crisis? Helped me catch a serial killer? Rescued Squidzilla? Invented a serum that can cure literally anything? Invented the Echoculum? Built an entire spaceship from scratch and redesigned time travel technology?" Clara listed only the first things that came to mind, then added to Rrob, "I'm very proud of her, I'm sure Fyn is as well."

"I want to know about all those things! My daughter is the most intelligent human being in existence, why wouldn't I want to hear about her achievements?" he said, smiling.

"I wouldn't really say they're… achievements…"

"Don't argue with your dad. Do you know what would happen to Jenny if she argued with her dad?" Clara asked.

"Going by experience, her stepmother would probably have sex with her," Oswin remarked, "Or someone would try to rip her thumb off."

"Well, that's… fair…"

"Tell me. Tell me about the Cybermen – there's a peaceful Cyberman city?"

"Well, it's actually Atlantis, you know? The basis for the myth. It's a spaceship in the Bermuda Triangle…" and so Oswin, finally coming to her senses about all of this that was going on, began to tell these stories, stories she never told in a way that she might be proud of them. It was both funny and sad that the majority of the ego Oswin projected was an act; the only facet of it that wasn't was that she knew she was pretty (of course, the pair of them were both very pretty, in Clara's knowledgeable opinion). Aside from stating the fact that she was the smartest girl in the universe, Oswin didn't really think herself above the rest of humanity. The only time she boasted about being clever was to put the Doctor in his place, and she had been so isolated in her lifetime she really wasn't used to showing off quite like this. But Clara thought this marked a turning point in the psyche of her favourite daughter, and she accordingly resigned herself to silence for the rest of their visit, which turned out to be very long indeed.