One Last Job

Jenny

Her face was an embittered grimace as she watched Martha Jones meticulously cover her right hand in plaster cast again. Apparently, she 'wasn't letting it heal properly', or some other ridiculous excuse, which Jenny thought was completely unfair considering all the lengths she was going to just to try and keep herself safe. Midway through her move to Hollowmire to begin a modest job in a bakery in just a few days (the day immediately following the wedding, in fact), and she hadn't really been roped into any schemes at all. She was doing everything right, and yet Martha still wanted to stop her from being able to use her grotesquely-scarred, right hand as much as possible.

"I don't see you going on at Clara about her arm like this," Jenny complained, watching the kittens crawl all over each other out of the corner of her eye. The black Maine Coon destined for Ravenwood's home glared at her menacingly from underneath a cabinet; she could see the threatening glint from its corneas and nothing else. The one with the tentacles was floating close to the ceiling and looked frightened of the height it had gained. Martha, allergic, had Jenny as far on the other side of the room as possible, and kept sniffing. Mickey was there too, loitering because in recent weeks he had become attached to Martha like a limpet, keeping the kittens occupied and cooing at them in a manner Jenny deemed most unlike himself.

"Clara actually followed my instructions about how to look after her burn to the letter. She keeps it moisturised with the prescription ointment, bandaged at night, makes sure to clean it properly to prevent any infection, has me check it regularly. You, though? You have your thumb snapped off and run and hide," Martha said, "Not to mention this black eye." Then she had to quickly stop what she was doing and grab a wad of tissues from a nearby box. She sneezed three times in succession, Jenny leaning away so as to avoid getting any stray snot near her.

"You alright?" Mickey called over.

"Fine. Just those bloody cats… why do they have to live in the medibay? Why can't they go stay in Adam Mitchell's room, or something?"

"Oswin hates them," Jenny said, "That's why. Hates them. He'd keep them all in there if she'd let him. I'm not too keen on them, personally." Martha went back to bandaging up the cast, more blue bandages. Jenny had said that if she was going to have her hand put in a cast again, she at least still wanted it to look blue, her favourite colour (which she apparently had in common with her father.)

"There," Martha declared, cutting off the bandages. "You're about done. And I'm going to text Ravenwood my instructions about your hand, too, so she knows as well what rules you have to stick by and how often you have to check in with me. I know she's competent."

"I'm competent!" Jenny protested as Martha began to clear up the bowl full of plaster and put everything away again. The kittens meowed in the background. Jenny would much prefer if they were dogs, she loved dogs.

"Prove it, then," said Martha, "Don't go getting in trouble."

"I won't!"

"Promise me."

"Promise you?" Jenny raised her eyebrows.

"Yes," Martha said firmly, pulling off her latex gloves.

Jenny clenched her jaw, "I promise."

"Good. And if you don't reply to my texts, I'll be forced to come to Hollowmire myself and chase you up."

"Alright, alright," Jenny said.

While Martha and Mickey cleared out as quickly as possible once Martha was done with her latest attempts to repair Jenny's broken thumb, Jenny hung around for a while. It had struck her while she waited for Martha to mix the plaster that she didn't have any medical supplies on her ship, beyond a half-empty packet of plasters and a roll of bandages she wasn't sure were sterile. Standing up from where she had been seated for the last half hour since getting stolen away at the end of the murder mystery extravaganza, she glanced around for items she may be able to pilfer. A sewing kit, disinfectant, fresh bandages, anything she could use.

In the back pocket of her jeans her phone rang. Digging it out with her left hand, seeing as the right was yet again borderline immobile, she began examining some of the bottles of various medicines lined up on top of a small, metal trolley.

"Hey," she said casually, lifting up a glass bottle of what she recognised as cough syrup. She was expecting it to be Clara Ravenwood, or failing that it would surely be Esther, because only they – and sometimes Eleven – ever rang Jenny. But it wasn't.

"Hey, there, Zero."

"Pasz!" She dropped the bottle of syrup and it shattered at her feet, getting dark-coloured medicine all over the floor. She would have to clean that up before the kittens came over and started trying to eat it.

"You haven't forgotten about me, have you?"

"Forgotten about you? No," she lied. She had most certainly forgotten about the crime lord Pasznoxo, with whom she and River had bargained to get information on Jack's little adventure to Rospaonus some weeks prior. "You'll get your Fabergé Egg. It's just in a sort of… vault. Very large vault, poorly organised. Hard to dig it out." And because she hadn't been looking for it.

"No. It's too late now."

"Okay, so I don't owe you the Egg, then. Is that all?"

"No, no, no. What is it they call you? The toast of the Blacklight Society? The thief of the century?"

"I wouldn't like to blow my own trumpet. How, exactly, did you get this number? I don't give my number out to people."

"I have a lot of friends," he said, "It's a favour for a favour. I need a girl like you to do a job for me and write off your debt, forget all about the Egg. This is much more important. And then I'll never touch this number again."

"I can't really do a job right now," she said, "I'm kind of, retired. And I promised I wouldn't get into any trouble."

"Retired? You'll go to the most dangerous known-planet to rescue one immortal idiot, but you won't do a tiny favour for me? Whom you owe?" Pasznoxo paused. Jenny didn't say anything. "It's not as hard to track down a time traveller as you might think." No, she thought, it wasn't. Not with the resources someone like Pasz had, and not in his century. He had already managed to get her phone number, which somehow felt more intimate and invasive than her location.

But she had just promised Martha, and Clara, and her father, and everybody. She couldn't just keep saying 'one more job' all the time, it would never end. And she didn't even want to help Pasznoxo.

"Are you sure you don't want the Egg? I can very easily-"

"A planet's exploded out in some far corner of space. Completely uninhabitable, blew up on its way to be sucked into a black hole. I'm no chemist, but there was a very rare mineral in that planet's centre which was released as it collapsed. I sent a professional team of three people to go and get the ore and bring it to me."

"Uh-huh."

"But there was a problem. Engine malfunction. They had to jettison the cargo so that they had the fuel to make a warp jump and hitchhike a ride back to me to tell me they were 'very sorry, Pasz, but we couldn't get the ore you wanted.' So now you're going to get it. I'll send you the coordinates. And don't think of jettisoning anything yourself, or I'll have to take the same drastic measures I took with them."

"…Which were what?"

"Cutting off all their fingers. They certainly won't be jettisoning anything after that."

"…You don't want me to kill anyone, do you? This is just going to space to get a bit of rock, or metal, or something?"

"Heavens, no, don't kill anyone. If you make a mess, you'll owe me a lot more than space rock. But just remind me about why they call you 'Zero', again?"

"It's the number of jobs I've failed."

"Good. You know where to find me afterwards." Pasz hung up on her, and she almost swore. This was fantastic, getting harangued by a criminal two days before a wedding she was supposed to be baking an extravagant cake for.

Should she dare leave Pasznoxo hanging? Wait a few days, talk to Clara about what she thought was best? But then, was it worth the risk of him really coming to find her in Hollowmire? If she welched on two deals, the Egg and this ore, he wouldn't be so forgiving as to stop at only cutting off her fingers. Yet again, she was in turmoil. She at least had to talk to somebody, possibly somebody who wasn't Clara. Her go-tos for any outing like this were Jack and River, but Jack was up to his eyes in wedding planning – not to mention the fact that she didn't actually want his help. And if she told River, while there was the benefit of River being the one who introduced her to Pasznoxo, she was also a wild card. Maybe there was a reason Pasz had contacted Jenny instead.

But who did that leave to turn to?

It was a question she mulled over as she knelt and cleaned up the chunks of glass and the potent cough syrup, trying to get as much of the gloopy, sticky liquid off the medibay floor as she could. Time Cats on cough syrup would not go down well with the others on the TARDIS.

Honestly, she thought, annoyed; she'd only been back for the one night to pack her things onto the ship and then return to the village, and she'd already been forced into a murder mystery – bad enough as it was – and now she was being blackmailed into something potentially dangerous. Staring at the messy, dark patch on the floor, a small bag full of glass shards and slimy paper towels at her side, she was hit with an epiphany: Oswin. Oswin would, at least, help her decide what to do. Ignore Pasz, or do what he wanted.

Deciding that she had done her due diligence and cleaned up the medicine to the best of her abilities, Jenny dropped the bag down a metal chute built into the wall which was generally used for the disposal of biohazards. That is, when she had her hand amputated a few months ago that was where the burned remains of it went. Why was she suddenly so unlucky when it came to her hands? For two-hundred years before that, it had been her gnarled feet which had suffered the most, after putting them to so much work doing acrobatics and having a brief stint as a ballerina (which was just as painful as everybody made it out to be.) Before her regeneration at the hands of the Time Lord Xenomorph, her feet had in fact been scarred, grizzled and malformed after centuries of turmoil. She even used to be missing her little toe after a bizarre accident with a mousetrap (damn Konrad and his mouse phobia, though it certainly wasn't the worst thing to come out of her time in Germany.)

Jenny left the medibay and the cats behind, finding Nerve Centre completely empty save for Rory – now free from the maid outfit – who was making tea with his back to her. She didn't speak to him, instead cutting through into the console room and jumping up the steps towards Oswin's laboratory two at a time. That was where Oswin had said she would be earlier, after all, and where she usually was. Jenny was also lucky enough to be gifted with a keycard, one of the few who actually had one, and got into the lab without making a sound. She found Oswin, typically enough, muttering to herself. Or perhaps she was muttering to Sprite, who scurried up and down the table in front of her as she sketched on a large piece of paper, holding the pencil in a very strange way. She didn't notice Jenny come in.

Jenny crept towards her, thinking more about what her opening line would be rather than listening to Oswin mumble. Oswin who was much too engrossed in her drawing to realise that anybody else had even entered the room.

"Why is it that your handwriting is so terrible, but you can draw so well?" Jenny asked quite loudly, making Oswin jump and drop her pencil. She glared at Jenny, and Jenny leant against the lab table and smiled back.

"We have to stop meeting like this, you and I," Oswin said, leaving the pencil where it was.

"You're losing interest in our chance encounters?"

"There's never anything 'chance' about an encounter with you. And it's because I've practised a lot. Drawing, I mean. I can read my own writing, at least," Oswin defended herself. "I painstakingly learnt how to draw over many years. Clara's always been too busy sticking her fingers inside other women to really learn to do anything substantial with them."

"She plays the piano," Jenny pointed out.

"Which is a lot easier than drawing schematics. I know that because she's been teaching me how to play for ages. What're you after?" Oswin asked suspiciously.

"Nothing," Jenny lied. Oswin's eyes strayed to her hand.

"Martha's finally had her way with you, then?"

"Mmm." She jumped up to sit on the table next to Oswin, getting in her way so that she couldn't really get on with her drawings. Glancing at the paper, Jenny realised what they were. "You were serious about the wheelchair?"

"Absolutely. Even if I wasn't going to fill it with fancy gadgets… it's just less painful. Than trying to limp around everywhere, relying on people to catch me if I trip."

"I haven't dropped you yet."

"I was talking about Nios."

"But I'm your favourite."

"I don't know. You're much less interesting."

Jenny leant down towards her, "You don't mean that."

"What do you want, Jenny?" Oswin turned slightly more serious.

"Why do you think I want something?"

"Because why else would you be flirting with me so aggressively?" Oswin questioned. Jenny shrugged. "Is it Clara? Is she not satisfying you, sexually? Do you want me to drop some hints that she should go down on you more?"

"No!" Jenny exclaimed, her demeanour faltering now. "Don't say things like that."

"So you really are just here to try and manipulate me, hmm? Seduce me into joining one of your schemes? Isn't that how your divorce started?"

"We're not divorced. We weren't really married."

"So you always say. Are you going to tell me what you want yet, or are you going to wait for me to try and have sex with you? Because I'm not going to." Jenny narrowed her eyes and slid off the desk, instead leaning on it with her elbow and invading Oswin's personal space as much as possible. Unfortunately, this didn't have too much of an effect on Oswin, who merely raised her eyebrows like she was challenging Jenny to actually try something.

"I need your help."

"My help. How intriguing. Do tell, I'm all ears."

"…There's this job-"

"There's what?" Oswin asked her coldly, snapped at her so that she stopped mid-sentence. "A 'job'?" It was dreadfully like being told off by Clara, almost as unpleasant.

"Well…"

"What do you mean, 'a job'? You're supposed to be keeping yourself safe. You've been beating yourself up for weeks with guilt over what Clara might think if something happened to you, what your father might-"

"Nothing will happen to me," Jenny hissed, "It's a simple job, okay?"

"Would you listen to yourself?" Oswin hissed right back, matching her tone and leaning in even closer, until Jenny was the one who was forced to look away. "What's the matter with you? Why are you always doing this? It's not healthy."

"Look, I'll tell you the truth, okay? The truth is that River and I may have made an unwise deal with a prolific crime lord in exchange for information on Jack's whereabouts when he went missing a few weeks ago. I told him I'd get him a Fabergé Egg because dad has one of them somewhere on the TARDIS and he won't even notice it's gone. But now he's changed his mind and wants me to go fly out into space and get him some ore or mineral from the remains of a planet being sucked up by a black hole. He already sent some people to do it but their ship malfunctioned, and now he wants me because I've got a reputation to uphold as an excellent… retriever-of-objects-"

"Or 'thief.'"

"I'm not stealing a bit of rock from anyone specifically," Jenny argued. Oswin rolled her eyes and motioned for Jenny to continue her spiel. "Anyway. I told him I'm retired and I promised not to get in trouble, then he threatened to find out where I live. If he does that, he can hurt Clara, and he could hurt the Spooks, and anyone else who lives in the village and knows me. That's a lot of innocent people."

"And here people say trouble follows your dad around – you're much worse. It's beyond me how you keep getting roped into these situations, it's non-stop. One thing just leads to another. Why come to me and not Jack? He owes you, after all, especially if you made a deal with this bloke to save his life," Oswin said. "Or River, even? If she was also involved in this deal?"

"River didn't approve of it."

"I wonder why."

"I'm not even sure how much I trust River Song, quite honestly."

"What an awful thing to say about your ex-stepmother. And here I thought you usually take a keen liking to your stepmothers. Y'know, since you fucked one of them. A lot of times."

"As for Jack," Jenny completely ignored her, because she wasn't even being factually accurate at that point, "Well… maybe he does owe me, quite a lot in fact for inadvertently reuniting him with his lost love. But I'm still angry with him."

"And he said all those things about your strap-ons earlier."

"Which he had no right to say. It's not like I've told anyone about the string of egg-sized anal beads he likes. I mean – forget I said that."

"Forget you said that!? This is a goldmine! I'm saving that for a rainy day, for sure. How many of the beads are the size of eggs?"

"The smallest ones are the – I'm not telling you this," Jenny stopped herself, shaking her head, "It's completely irrelevant. Are you going to help me or not, Oswin?"

Oswin leant back quite precariously on her stool, balancing it on only two legs, then let it drop forwards again so that the sound of it banging back to the floor punctuated her next sentence: "You're an idiot. Nobody else is brave enough to say that to you, but it's true. You're stupid. That's why this happens to you, because you're a stupid, adrenaline junkie, with absolutely no self-preservation instincts who never thinks anything through and would much rather improvise a solution, just like your frankly useless father." Jenny didn't say anything, Oswin's words stinging her a great deal. Briefly she grew quite self-conscious and guilty, looking at her feet. "But I suppose I don't have much of a choice, do I? I'm actually quite good at avoiding trouble. And at least sorting it out when it happens. Not to brag."

"And you'd never brag."

"Says the 'excellent retriever-of-objects.'"

"Look, we just go to the coordinates, I do a spacewalk and you stay inside and run ops."

"Really utilising my core skillset there. And you're absolutely sure you don't want to take someone who could, you know, use a spacesuit and come and get you if something goes wrong?"

"What, and you can't use a spacesuit in an emergency? You designed the spacesuits, and the ship."

"I know, I'm a genius."

"Oh, you'll be fine. There's no gravity, it's not like you'd be putting any weight on your leg. I'll take the emergency teleporter if that'll make you happy."

"It will."

"You worry too much."

"I worry too much!?"

"You do. Too careful. We're a good match."

"Keep telling yourself that. Moron. You're going to end up with two broken hands and two broken feet before you know it and then you'll be the one who needs the wheelchair."

"I'm sure it'll be a brilliant wheelchair if you designed it."

"Wish you'd stop trying to sleep with me."

"No, you don't," Jenny smiled at her. Oswin shook her head. "Thanks."

"For what? Having a go at you? Someone needs to. Your dad's too scared of pissing you off, you don't give a shit what Jack thinks, and Clara… she doesn't want to upset you. And for some reason you never seem to listen to Martha. But you really are a stubborn arsehole."

"Well," Jenny crossed her arms, "At least I'm not a conceited glorified-corpse who's borderline insane and can't even walk."

Oswin laughed, "Nice one. Totally unwarranted attack on my fragile state of mind and physiology, but I suppose if it made you feel better, that's what's important. Now, go make yourself useful and get a proper first aid kit, god knows I'm not taking the fall if you get into trouble again."

"Knew you wouldn't be able to resist helping me."

"Yeah, yeah. Now go be cute somewhere else and I'll see you in ten minutes to pop my Georgia cherry."

"To… excuse me?"

"The spaceship, I've never actually travelled in it. That's her name. I christened her by carving it into a part of the engine."

"…Ridiculous name." Jenny made to leave and go finish what she had been doing earlier; raiding the medical supplies for anything useful.

"Really? I don't know. I think there's an affinity there. Something about you just… resonates."

"You're imagining things," she said, turning to go.

"I'll see you for lift off, Major Young." Over her shoulder, Jenny gave a joking salute.