AN: I don't know how interested anybody will be in this, but I've rewritten Chapter 837 (337 in 4D12C, "Another Girl Another Planet VIII") - which is the chapter where Jenny and Ravenwood confess their feelings to each other and get together finally - because I've never liked the way I wrote it. Fundamentally the events are obviously still the same, it's just tonally very different and a lot more serious and melancholy. So if anybody wants to read that then it's there now, but it was more for my own sake.

-Wedding Crashers-

Life is a Cabaret

A troupe of dancing, scantily-clad women paraded up and down a low stage in the centre of a smoky, smoggy underground club; no windows, dim table lamps, the music thick with the sound of a loud, jazz accompaniment to the high-kicking, feather-boa'd girls. Clara and Oswin laughed and cheered, booed and jeered, along with the crowd at all the right moments, Oswin with an array of empty milkshake glasses in front of her and Clara an ashtray full of coal-coloured cigarette butts. She took a heavy drag from her latest one and blew out a stream of smoke to join the grey clouds filling the room, coating the ceiling, the chairs, the furniture, in yellow stains and soot marks.

"I wish we were closer to the stage!" Clara said loudly to her sister over the cacophonous music, Oswin who was partway through her sixth milkshake of the night. She was consuming milkshakes as quickly as Clara was consuming cigarettes. One of the dancers wrapped her feather boa around the neck of a man lucky enough to be right at the edge of the stage, accompanied by a gang of bachelors all leering at the women and trying to hand them money in exchange for indiscriminate favours.

"Can you believe we were going to go to a wedding today and miss all this?"

"I know!" Clara laughed as the number reached its final chorus, the music increased in volume even further, another pack of Marlboros found itself in Clara's hand and another chocolate milkshake greeted Oswin, and the performers began to lose their clothes to uproarious applause for every item shed. A whole garter was flung through the air towards them and Clara clapped until her hands were raw. Finally, the girls, almost entirely naked, took their leave from the stage and disappeared. A record was flipped and put on as the band wrapped up to prepare for the next act, a world-famous burlesque dancer straight out of Berlin.

"God, I've missed the taste of milkshakes, Clary," said Oswin, slurping through a multi-coloured straw. Clara stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another one with the novelty lighter on the table. The lamp looked like a pair of legs of indeterminate gender wearing fishnets. "D'you think there'll be any boys?"

"It'd be a shame to come all this way and not see at least one cute boy in sexy tights," said Clara knowingly. Oswin nodded; she shared the sentiment but couldn't complain about the girls. Crackling big band music played at a low enough volume to become ambient sound and murmured conversation and tinkling glasses became the noises of the club. "Can you believe Jenny's missing this?"

"I know, she'd love it. Why didn't we ask her to come?"

"Well, you know, because…" Clara thought. "Just, you know."

"Yeah," Oswin nodded, even though Clara hadn't answered the question. "I was never allowed to go to clubs on Horizon."

"I'm never allowed to go to clubs now I'm married."

"You were in a cabaret with Rose just last month!"

"I know!" she laughed, "But it's no fun anymore. I was in a place just like this once when I was twenty-one, celebrating my graduation, a sort of mock mid-century speakeasy place, managed to get backstage and seduce two of the dancers. I night I won't forget in a hurry."

"It's no surprise you've caught so many diseases," Oswin quipped.

"Hey! I'm very proud of that. It was quite possibly my greatest accomplishment."

"Imagine if Rose finds out where we are, that we've ditched her whole wedding to come here!"

"What did she expect if she's going to have a wedding without any naked women?"

"Yeah," said Oswin, "It's just… I don't remember leaving."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't remember deciding to come here."

"It's those milkshakes, sweetheart, you've had about six of them," Clara advised. Oswin frowned but slurped again as they waited for the next act to appear. Thinking, she was about to say something else but was interrupted by the pianist taking the needle from the record and playing a loud chord. Silence fell as he began his next announcement for a famous, European beauty who had recently fled the streets of Austria as political tensions increased. Clara's eyes were glued to the stage as slowly, in time with the gentle piano and clarinet, the dancer entered. Of course, she was blonde, which absorbed every last drop of Clara's attention and, frankly, quite a lot of Oswin's.

"No, hold on…" said Oswin, shaking her head. Somebody tapped her on her shoulder, a waiter, bringing another drink, "No, I haven't finished these ones," she indicated the other glasses.

"But you said you miss the taste," said the waiter, smiling at her. There was a passing resemblance to… to Adam, perhaps? A glitter of him in the waiter's face? It made Oswin do a double take and accept the milkshake and then, as the performer began to sing into the chrome microphone, he dropped a newspaper down in front of Oswin. Some of the words didn't make sense, they were illegible and only confused her more as the music picked up. She couldn't see a date, a city, a publication title, but the headlines swam into coherence: Twin Detectives Catch the Ripper, and a photograph of two identical women – she and Clara, though from the black and white image even she couldn't tell which of them was which – standing proudly with a handcuffed criminal between them.

The articles continued, all with matching photographs. They had been arrested for smuggling prohibited alcohol across the Canadian border for a prominent mobster in New York. They had rescued a celebrity chef from a vicious killer. They had helped some mermaids recover a legendary conch shell, discovered the Chupacabra deep in the Mojave, saved some survivors from marauding zombie hoards, stopped an invasion of planet Earth by little green men, investigated a haunted asylum, and saved a threatened wedding from a violent werewolf.

"Clara," she said seriously.

"Shh, shh," Clara waved her away.

"Clara," Oswin implored. "Clara, would you listen to me? Stop looking at the woman. CLARA." The music was interrupted by her and an awkward silence fell in the room. The dancer glared at her. "…Sorry. Just carry on. I'm only… talking about the milkshakes." The cabaret patrons scowled, but eventually, the band resumed, and all eyes turned back on the Austrian dancer.

"What? What's the matter?" Clara asked, stubbing out another cigarette. Oswin held up the newspaper to her. "What?"

"Look at this, read the headlines," Oswin forced it into her hands. Begrudgingly, still with one eye on the dancer, she flipped through the pages and took in the news, growing increasingly concerned.

"Hang on… this doesn't make any sense. This is what happened in the Dream. Why is it in a newspaper?"

"Because! This is a dream!" Oswin whispered.

"It's… what?" she glanced at the stage again, still preoccupied with the show. Oswin kicked her, at which point she realised with shock that she had both of her legs again. That settled it – combined with her ability to smell the smoke and taste the thick milkshake, nothing around them was real.

"We must be in another coma," said Oswin.

"No. There's no prank war."

"Then I suppose someone did it to us! Someone who obviously knows your greatest weakness: women."

"Shit. They are my greatest weakness," said Clara, looking at the stage again. Oswin shook her head. "Lingerie and cigarettes. I really can't handle it. And what about your milkshakes?"

"I'm a hologram, Clara, I can't drink. I can drink in the Dream; I can't drink in real life. And I have two legs. And your arm! There's no scar." Clara looked at her left arm and was startled to see her electrical burn, which normally ran from her shoulder all the way down to her wrist and across the back of her hand, completely disappeared. "Someone wants us out of the way of the wedding."

"Well… that's not our fault, is it?" Clara asked, "If we get stuck in the Dream again and are just forced to spend time smoking and drinking in a cabaret, instead of going to Rose's wedding…"

"This is exactly what they want, whoever did this! They knew you'd be enticed."

"Oh, sorry, are you not enticed? Don't act like you're straight, I know you're about as far from straight as it's possible to get."

"I'm not a lesbian, so how does that make any sense?" Clara just waved her away and smoked some more. "Would you take this seriously?"

"Okay, fine. So, what? Someone's EMP'd us? Great. You know full well from the last time it happened that we can't do anything about it. We couldn't wake up until you were switched back on."

"Who would do this?"

"Someone who's read the Odyssey? Here we are with the lotus eaters. Sirens, all of them…" her eyes trailed across the dancer, but only for a moment until she returned to lean across the small table and talk to Oswin. "Do you have a way to communicate with anybody on the outside?"

"No," she sighed. "But someone will notice we're missing when we don't show up at the wedding. God knows how long that'll take, though – another two weeks? Two weeks of cabarets in an ambiguous time and place? When are we supposed to be?"

"Twenties? Thirties?" Clara suggested. Oswin rolled her eyes. "Hey. It's not that bad. We did it before. And we're friends now, not at each other's throats, right? And you have unlimited milkshakes."

"I suppose," she grumbled, "But I don't like this. Somebody wants us out of the way of the wedding."

"Maybe it's Rose. Scared Ten's going to declare his undying love for you and leave her at the altar?"

"Clara. That's ridiculous."

"I thought he has a thing for you?" Oswin shook her head. "You pretended to go out with him that time."

"So? I've pretended to go out with a lot of people."

"Alright. I'll bite."

"I'm not into biting."

"Ha, ha. You've been weird with me all day. Like you're trying especially hard to be obnoxious. I know you didn't need to say those awful things to Rose's mother," Clara pointed out. Oswin crossed her arms sulkily and leant back in her chair. "Well? We might have weeks alone together. You'll have to talk to me sooner or later, Os."

"It's not you," she said eventually. The patrons were now ignoring them completely, despite the illusion being ruined. It wasn't like they could leave even if they wanted to, though; there was no incentive for their psychic conjurings to keep them that enamoured with the dream world. "I'm annoyed at Rose. I don't want to go to this wedding."

"Because you're secretly in love with Ten?"

"And I'm the obnoxious one…" she muttered. "It's because… it's… I thought you were dead, alright?"

"What? When?"

"Yesterday! The mind patch was gone! The emotional connection was gone! There was nothing, nothing to… moor myself to. You don't understand how important that empathy link is to me."

"What do you mean?"

"I need it to… so that I'm okay. Because I'm never okay, but you are, and I can feel that and it helps, and then it was gone and I thought – you could have drowned, gotten lost in the sea, and that's Rose's fault. So maybe I'm not too excited to go to her stupid wedding."

"Oswin…" said Clara, taking her hand, "You're the reason something like that won't happen, alright? The nanogenes. That's you. And it's for you."

"But I couldn't contact you at all," she reiterated.

"And I'm sorry. I didn't like it, either. And I should warn you, the thing that happened yesterday… you're the one who invented the technology."

"What?" Oswin immediately retracted her hand.

"That's what Missy said. At some point in the future, you're going to be blackmailed into helping her with her stupid pirate theme-park scheme, but you have to know that it's all already happened, and we were fine. All five of us, even me and even Martha. So when the time comes, just… do what she says. Okay?"

"Great. Because that's just the knowledge of the future I want. Blackmailed into helping someone try to kill my own sister. I suppose I'll try to work in some sort of self-destruct to stop her from using it repeatedly. Could get started on it right now. What else am I going to do?"

"Watch the sexy dancers?" Clara suggested. Oswin raised her eyebrows. "What? There were, like, basically no hot girls in the Dream last time. Certainly not like this."

"Clara, you are legitimately so superficial it hurts me."

"I'm not superficial, I just have a limited attention span. I'm distractible. Besides, how do I know you didn't put us in another coma, hmm? Get me to spend more time with you, and an excuse to skip the wedding?"

"Because… well, I don't know, because it wasn't me, alright? How dramatic do you think I am, staging something like this just to avoid going to a wedding?"

"The gays are famously dramatic," said Clara, looking at the dancer again, her legs most specifically, "And we certainly are gay…"

"If you want to shag the dancer, shag the dancer," Oswin shrugged, "Is it cheating if it happens in a dream? Ooh, do you think the female Doctor will show up on that stage? I'd kill to see your response if that happened." Clara clenched her jaw, mood instantly soured. She no longer felt much of a desire to watch the performers. She couldn't even answer Oswin's question; she hadn't a clue what she'd do if a dreamy Thirteen arrived to do a jazz-themed strip-tease. Implode?

"I'm not gonna shag anyone in this dream," Clara said firmly. "Maybe you should. Sleep with a girl one last time before giving everything up for Adam Mitchell."

"I've always got Jenny as a last resort if I get too bored. And you know, I don't think women in general have ever held quite as much power over me as they do you. I, at least, can string a sentence together with Sally Sparrow in the same room."

"Okay, so I'm desperately in love with Sally Sparrow, where's the crime? It's a tragic love story."

"Depends what decade we're in as to what the crime is," said Oswin. "And you shouldn't be objectifying women."

"I'm not objectifying women, I'm appreciating them."

"You sound like a garden-variety misogynist."

"I do not! I literally am a women! Woman. I am a woman."

"It's the internalised misogyny that gets you. Insidious."

"Oh, be quiet. Being into them isn't the same as objectifying them. There's nothing inherently impure about same-sex attraction. And – why am I even arguing with you about this? I don't think about women the way men think about women. As phallic receptacles." Oswin didn't say anything. "Let's talk about something else, come on. When are you and Adam getting married?"

"What? How should I know? He could dump me."

"He won't dump you."

"Then, I haven't a clue."

"Are you going to propose to him?"

"No."

"Is that sort of thing still taboo in the future?"

"No, it's just a logistical issue. How am I supposed to get down on one knee? With my legs? Honestly, Clara; think these things through. And I'd hate to make him feel even more emasculated than he does already."

"Well. That's boring. What about Nios and her crush? What's the news on that?"

"They're not official, but they text non-stop, and she asks me for help replying to every single one of them. Which makes me feel valued, y'know, but I do have other things to do, and she should be able to talk to Cohen without my help," Oswin explained.

"Is that what she's doing on her phone constantly? Texting a girl?" Oswin nodded. "Aw. That's cute. I wish my husband had a phone so I could text him. I have to talk to him in person, can you believe that? So old-fashioned."

"You're literally never away from him," Oswin pointed out.

"If that were true, we probably wouldn't be in this situation, would we?" she argued. "But no. You had to be an arsehole at breakfast, so I had to wheel you away."

"Kidnap me, you mean. You can't wheel people around without their consent, Clara. It's total ableist entitlement."

"You've been especially naughty this morning."

"So? What're you gonna do? Spank me?"

Clara scoffed, "Don't be gross. This is exactly what I mean, you're out of control. Heinous. Can't you just think awful things to yourself instead of saying them out loud?"

"Ah, but you are myself, aren't you?" Oswin reminded her.

"You know, you're actually really nice, and a really good friend. I don't know why you put up this barricade of disgustingness to everybody you talk to."

"I'm easily bored, and I suppose I love the sound of my own voice." Clara grimaced. "You know what that's like, Clary." Clara didn't say anything, leaning back in her chair again and lighting another cigarette. As usual, it didn't take long for Oswin to relent and talk to her properly. "What am I supposed to do? Be personable all the time? Helpful? I can't do that. People will expect too much of me. Besides, I have you to be nice on my behalf."

"I just think it's a bit unhealthy to put out false images like this."

"I don't know where you get the impression that there's anything healthy about me," she said seriously. "I'm a deeply disturbed individual. I have issues, with a capital 'I'."

"I wonder what's going on out there," Clara changed the subject, not wanting to entertain Oswin's self-deprecating habits. "Something bad. Something they think we can stop."

"Are we really that formidable? You don't think Rose can stop crazy aliens messing up her own wedding?" Oswin questioned.

"Maybe it's all an elaborate ruse to stop you from saying something horrible during the ceremony."

"I wouldn't do that."

"Really? You don't have any witty remarks to say during the, 'if anyone knows of a reason why these two should not be wed' bit?"

"Because he's an alien? Because she's not a virgin? Because they've both been married before? Getting remarried is a sin according to the Bible, you know," she said, "Because… I fancy both of them? I don't know. I wouldn't speak up during that segment. Your wedding, on the other hand, is a totally different matter. I'll say you can't get married because I'm madly in love with you."

"Please don't do that."

"But it's true."

"But it won't stop me from getting married."

"What are you saying? I'm just your side-piece?"

"That's actually exactly what I'm saying," Clara nodded.

"You know what, Clara? You disgust me. And not just your appearance, though it is sickening, but everything else about you, as well."

"Maybe I'll speak up when you and Adam get married and tell everyone you're in love with Jenny," Clara retaliated.

"But everyone knows that already."

"Are you going to let me make a speech?"

"We're not engaged. He literally told me he'd rather wait at least a few years before even thinking of marrying somebody, even if that somebody is me. And honestly, I share the sentiment."

"Yeah. But. You're so insistent about mine."

"What would you possibly say?"

"Nice things. About how proud of you I am, about how much I care about you, about what a good person you are, that sort of thing." Oswin frowned.

"You'd say that? And mean it?"

"I'd say it and mean it now, without the matrimony."

Oswin thought and sighed. "Maybe you're right."

"About what?"

"Maybe us getting trapped in this stupid coma isn't that bad on the whole, even if we don't know how long it'll last. Because we are friends, I suppose. And you know, I have been missing you lately. Seems we hardly see each other anymore."

"Well. I'm willing to bet that things will change soon, all this talk of people leaving… wouldn't be surprised if we were left with only a handful of everyone there at the moment."

"Yeah… it really does feel like something's ending…" They both stopped to think on this, right as another act was announced and, lo and behold, it was a male burlesque dancer dressed to impress in almost nothing at all. "While we're here… I might as well just enjoy the milkshakes."

"And I'll be enjoying something else entirely," she said, leaning on her hand to get a better look at the stage while Oswin hailed down the waiter again to replenish her dairy supply.

"Despicable, Clary. Honestly, despicable."