Double Blind
5
Clara was slammed very hard against an uncomfortable, metal surface; from the way it dug into her back she deduced it was shelving, but she was more concerned that somebody was actively pushing her like they were in the midst of an illicit rendezvous. The Thirteenth Doctor had lunged to stop them from teleporting without her and must have lost her balance in the kerfuffle.
Clara cleared her throat, "If you want me all to yourself, you only have to ask." The Doctor scoffed and let her go. There was no light source in whatever room they had appeared in; she had not even been able to see the other Doctor in front of her, though she had been more than close enough for Clara to note that this one did not have that strange cinnamon scent sticking to her skin like the Cosmic Doctor did. Then again, maybe it was being overpowered by another stench thick in the air, something Clara couldn't quite put her finger on.
"You don't actually need to try and shag everyone you meet, Clara," Rose said from somewhere nearby, in the gloom.
"I wasn't the one pushing people against walls," said Clara, reaching into her coat pocket to take out her lighter. With it, she illuminated a very sheepish Doctor.
"I did not intend for that to happen," she said firmly, "For the record."
"Maybe I'm just irresistible," said Clara, then she turned to look around the room and nearly shrieked at what she saw had been on the shelf just behind her. "Fucking hell! Is that a brain!?"
"What?" asked the Doctor, snatching the lighter from her hand. Rose scrambled to pull out her phone and switch on the torch, at which point most of the room came into view. They were in a very small room, only a little larger than a storage cupboard, full floor to ceiling with human brains kept preserved and floating in jars. That was the strong smell: formaldehyde.
"And I thought Donna and Amy keeping their brains in jars was weird," said Rose, staring around.
"Sorry, could you just explain every single word you just said?" the Doctor asked her.
"They were abducted by these aliens, and then their brains were… Donna's still not got a brain. She got hit in the head once, it was awful. I've got photos if you want? Massive dent," said Rose. The Doctor paused to think.
"…No, thanks. To the photos. They keep their brains external to their bodies?"
"Ood do that, don't they?" Clara asked, getting out her own phone eventually since the Doctor apparently didn't think to relinquish the lighter; ironic since she was so offended by smoking.
"Well, yeah, but humans aren't really built for that sort of thing."
"Look, if you want us to call Donna and get her to show you the tank she keeps her brain in, we'll have plenty of time later," said Rose, "It's not like she's that busy."
"Where is she?"
"On the TARDIS. My TARDIS, with my Doctor," she said, "We've got three TARDISes now."
"Funny universe, this…"
"They're labelled," Clara said, leaning in to squint at the tanks, "This one says 'super-strength'… 'flight'… 'telekinesis' up there, I think… 'telepathy'…"
"These are Manifest brains," Rose realised, "All those ones he drugged and killed, he still took their brains anyway, even if they weren't immortal."
"Oh my god…" said Clara, "Do you remember Heroes?"
"Excuse me?"
"I remember it," said the Doctor. Of course she did.
"Well, they all had superpowers, and one of them was a serial killer who took the brains of others to steal their powers," Clara explained.
"And what did he do with the brains?" Rose asked, "Like, eat them?"
"Can't remember," she said, "But some of these brains have bits missing…"
"He must be trying to manufacture drugs for every superpower… obviously, immortality has the biggest price tag," the Doctor thought out loud, "But I'm sure you could charge a lot of money for some of these."
"Like in Misfits," said Rose.
"Okay, so you've seen Misfits, but not Heroes?"
"Why have you seen so much TV?"
"Have you like, met or spoken to my wife, ever?" Clara asked sarcastically, "Or my reclusive sister who hardly ever goes outside? Or Adam Mitchell, the other person I've been living with for decades? All nerds."
"Yeah, alright," Rose muttered, "So you can sell superpowers for profit and he's got some gross brain-harvesting business going…"
"Seems like standard fare for evil drug companies, to be honest," said Clara, walking along the row of brains to read the other jar labels, "Speaking of Adam Mitchell… there's an empty jar here that says 'cryokinesis' on it. Ominous." She unlocked her phone to send a message to the shoddy excuse for a 'group chat' she had with the previous TARDIS residents, which was only herself, Oswin and Adam because the Doctor didn't have a mobile. The only messages in there were Clara inviting them for dinner every few weeks. Now she sent a message asking what the two of them were up to, to find out if they were alright without alarming Oswin by asking if she knew Will Smiles had a jar ready and waiting for Adam's brain to be installed into it. "I wouldn't be surprised if some of these come from the M.O.C.s." There could be as many as a hundred human brains lining the walls of just that room, and who was to say there weren't more rooms, whole facilities, waiting to be filled with organs?
"Eurgh…" said Rose, "It's like he's farming them, farming people."
"I think that's exactly what he's doing," said the Doctor.
"Why didn't you want to let us go off on our own, then?" Clara asked her. "Don't you trust us to deal with a Manifest problem?"
"It just all sounded a bit unfair. We come all the way here from a completely different universe, and you want to go off and do everything by yourselves," she argued.
"I see. You've got FOMO."
"Total FOMO," said Rose.
"I do not have… whatever that is – what is it?"
"Fear of missing out," said Clara.
"I do not have a fear of missing out."
"Mm, did you just grab me like that for some other reason, then?"
"Oh my god, you are literally so annoying," Rose muttered.
"Yeah, that's another thing," the Doctor said quickly, trying to divert scrutiny away from herself while they continued to read the labels on the many brains, "I thought you two don't like each other?"
"…We're fine," said Clara after a few seconds, "Things are different now. Since Mickey and Martha died and Mattie came to live with us."
"Oh, right…" said the Doctor, understanding Clara's implication that Rose was lonely.
"How'd you meet that lot, then? That must be a less depressing topic," Rose said.
"On a train," she said, "Alien stuff."
"And you just happened to run into a pair of conventionally attractive nineteen-year-olds, did you?" Clara quipped, "Isn't that always the way."
"They're my friends! It's not like that. You see, this is what I haven't missed about you, you're filthy," she said, "Both of you, in fact."
"And you are so lucky you didn't show up on a day when Oswin was visiting," said Clara.
"Shh," Rose said. She was closest to the door out of the storage room, "I can hear voices."
"Who is it?" Clara whispered. They hadn't exactly been trying to be quiet. "Is it guards, or something? Looking for us?"
"I don't think so," said Rose, "It's just someone talking."
"Who to?"
"Themselves, I think."
"I have an idea; one of you give me a phone," asked the Doctor, holding out her hand. Rose just looked at her blankly, aghast at the suggestion of giving her phone to somebody else. Clara, however, was very used to lending her phone out to people, especially her wife who viewed Clara's phone almost like it was collectively owned. She handed Thirteen the phone, who promptly took out her amber screwdriver and did something to it. Then she put a finger to her lips and set the phone down on the floor by the door, and they listened as it picked up the distant, mumbled voices and amplified them back.
"That's Will Smiles!" Clara exclaimed, an exclamation which was projected back at them at a much higher volume. The Doctor hit her on the arm and glared, then put her finger to her lips once again to indicate that they all needed to be quiet, too.
"What was that?" Smiles' voice asked. Nobody replied to him. "Strange noises in here sometimes, Dexter. I think it's something to do with the brains. They whisper, especially at night." Rose and Clara exchanged a look that meant Smiles was obviously insane, though maybe they were a little slow on the uptake since he was killing people and harvesting their brains in an elaborate conspiracy. "Did I tell you about the brains yet, Mr Willard? I wonder what will happen to your brain, whether it will grow back. I'll tell you what I'm doing, Mr Willard, because you're never going to leave this room no matter how many times your brain grows back. I'm going to be rich. I'm going to be the richest person alive. I'm going to live forever, be all-powerful. I know what you're thinking," Smiles laughed coldly here, "That sounds like something a comic book villain would say! Well, perhaps it is. But this is a world with plenty of would-be heroes, so is it surprising?
"The Lightning Girl, for instance. A thorn in my side. She's making people sympathetic to the Manifests, making them acceptable when really they need to be eradicated. They don't deserve their gifts, only people like me do. Innovators – innovators and their paying customers. Only the people at the top of society deserve these abilities so that we can preserve the natural order. Do you understand that, Mr Willard? You don't deserve this power you have. And I know what you're thinking, I'm the one who gave it to you. And you're right. You're half right. You always had the genetic potential, serum or not, I only sped the process along. It's a predisposition you don't deserve. A genetic impurity that grants eternal life! I could cry at the irony, at what a marvellous sense of humour the universe has… to give abilities to people like you, while worthy people like me go without.
"And what did the Lightning Girl do to deserve this attention? Save a few lives? Show off? She makes people forget how dangerous it is letting people like you, like her, onto the streets. And don't get me started on… Adam Mitchell," he said Adam's name like it physically pained him, "He disgusts me. But don't worry, Dexter. I'm working on that. Soon I'll take his brain, too – my scientists know he can't heal himself from injuries. He's made of glass, and so is his reputation. I'm sure he has a million filthy secrets, skeletons rotting in his closets. Nobody can be that good, that generous. He probably has scams running. He could be an international drug dealer for all the world knows. I've already planted bombs on those abominable rain machines… why prevent climate change? An apocalypse would wipe out the scum of mankind and leave people like me, Will Smiles, genius inventor, to rise from the ashes…" Clara picked up her phone and closed it, killing the microphone effect in the process.
"He's mental," she said.
"Have to agree with you," said the Doctor, "Why's he so obsessed with Adam Mitchell? Just because he's a philanthropist?"
"Smiles is a capitalist, what do you expect?" Clara asked, "Look, I've already dealt with one power-hungry lunatic this year, I can't be bothered to listening to the monologue of another one."
"What lunatic?" Rose asked.
"When we went back in time to the Sixties. In May. You weren't there," Clara said. "We went to the races and the Doctor accidentally walked in on a bloke getting sucked off. Very awkward."
"Sounds it…" muttered the other Doctor, "Right, then. I have a plan. I say we go in there, and deal with him."
"Can't be a bit more specific, or-?"
"Deal with him," she repeated firmly. "Come on." One by one and very carefully, Clara phased them all through the door of the storage room.
Dexter Willard, bloody and filthy, was strapped to a tabled in a glass tank in the centre of a vast and dark laboratory. There were no windows, the walls lined with glowing tanks filled with bright, artificial liquids. The tank was clearly being used as a cell, presumably for whatever Manifest of the day Smiles had captured in his supervillain lair, and was in a large, sunken floor surrounded by railings and then dozens of advanced computers. He was pacing around Willard, who looked terrified and was gagged and strapped down tightly, with his back to the storage room door. By his side, there was a tray covered in medical instruments; syringes, vials and jet injectors, as well as an array of sharp and violent tools. Looking at the scene, Clara felt like she was in a 1980s children's cartoon; it was one of the most clichéd 'secret labs' she had ever seen.
"…Well?" the Doctor whispered to them. Rose elbowed Clara.
"Go on," she hissed, "Say something annoying, get his attention." Clara clenched her jaw and stepped towards the railings, leaning on them with her elbows.
"How many gallons of water does that thing hold?" she asked loudly, and Smiles jumped and dropped a scalpel on the floor next to Willard's gurney. "Is it big enough for a shark? Because I think that's what this place needs – a shark tank. Honestly, it's like a Bond film in here."
"Who the hell are you!? How did you get in? I have wall-to-wall security out there," he snarled at them furiously, walking up to the edge of his glass tank.
"How do you get out? Does it have a door?" Clara asked.
"It's like that painting – what's it called?" the Doctor said.
"Nighthawks," she answered, "And it does look like that. Don't think Edward Hopper was into human experimentation, though – is it legal what you're doing here? Because it looks like a gross violation of basically every human rights law."
"Dexter here is legally dead. He doesn't have any protections."
"What a nice loophole," said Clara.
"I'm only going to ask you one more time: who are you?"
"Friends of the Lightning Girl. Some people call me the Phantom."
"Do they?" asked the Doctor half laughing.
"Yes," said Clara seriously, "They do."
"And who are your friends, 'Phantom'?" he mocked.
"I'm the Doctor," said Thirteen, waving.
"I'll just be Rose," Rose muttered, "Can't be bothered with these stupid names today… Look, mate, basically, you're a headcase, and we're here to stop you from torturing people and trying to make more drugs, yeah?"
"And which street corner did they find you on, 'mate'?"
"Erm, what did you just say?" Rose asked, making to step towards him. Clara grabbed her arm. Rose was much stronger than Clara and could have probably broken her wrist if she continued her advance, but Clara had seen something. There was a shadow creeping around behind Smiles' tank. Rose spotted it too and Clara let go of her arm.
"I said, which street corner did they find you on?" he repeated himself. Clara squinted to try and see who was moving in the background.
"Just one in London," said Rose absently, forgetting all about what he had been saying.
"Soho?"
"What?"
"Did they find you in the red-light district?" Rose didn't answer. "Are you a prostitute?"
"No," she said quite blankly.
"You should really pay more attention to me," he threatened.
"Course," said Clara. Was the shadowy figure on their side? Or was it some security goon of Smiles', one of his hitmen who had kidnapped Dexter? They were pretty terrible hitmen though, skulking around directly opposite the intruders.
"Do you fancy Adam Mitchell?" the Doctor asked him, crossing her arms.
"Excuse me?"
"Adam Mitchell. Do you fancy him? You seem a bit obsessed with him, that's all, and people always want him to talk about you in interviews, and when he doesn't talk about you, you get a bit upset. Publicly attack him. I was once married to a woman who spent years trying to assassinate me."
"What's your point?"
"There's a fine line between love and hate."
"I do not fancy him. That's disgusting."
"You're not being homophobic, are you?" the Doctor asked.
"What? No – I – it's not gays, the gays don't disgust me-"
"Convincing," Clara muttered, then mimicked, "'The gays,'" while doing air quotes.
"Adam Mitchell disgusts me."
"Because you're very confused about your feelings for him," the Doctor nodded knowingly. The shadow continued its approach, Clara trying to work out if it might be the Shadow, the covert assassin, but it definitely seemed to have more of an outline and a shape to the black void that the Shadow was. An oddly familiar outline and shape, though? Maybe Clara's eyes were failing her – she was in her seventies, after all.
"I don't – did he send you here? Is that what this is? He found out I killed his precious, pathetic Lightning Girl? Is this another of his schemes, helping deluded girls from poor backgrounds feel good about themselves? You should just crawl back to whatever gutter you came from," he said.
It was Jenny. Of course it was Jenny. Clara would recognise her anywhere, and she slid into the light for just a second, met Clara's eyes, and put a finger to her lips to indicate they shouldn't point out her presence. By the way the Doctor tensed up, Clara knew they were now all aware of the intruder.
"The Lightning Girl's not dead, actually," Clara said, "She's injured, but she'll be fine. She's also not a Manifest, she's something completely different. Something you won't understand."
"A cyborg working for CyTech."
"She doesn't work for anybody, she's just a good person, trying to do good things, like most people in the world," Clara argued, "Not that you'd know anything about that."
"Everything I do is for the betterment of humanity."
"Do you actually believe that?" Clara questioned. Rose swore under her breath next to her. Jenny, completely silently, scaled the back wall of the tank, about eight feet of glass, then perched on the edge. It didn't seem like it had a roof by the way she crept along it so carefully.
"I'm the one who cured meningitis. Not Adam Mitchell."
"And then you patented your cure and charge people a fortune for it," Clara pointed out.
"I'm running a business. I can't afford to give things away. I'm not a bleeding-heart socialist like Adam Mitchell."
"There you go again, talking about him – I really think you should tell him you're in love with him," said the Doctor, "Maybe you'll stop being such a maniac if you confess your feelings. Unless those rumours about him having a secret wife are true?"
"He doesn't have a secret wife," Smiles scoffed, "I'm not gay, but he definitely is." Oswin had been trying for fifty years to get Adam to admit to being anything other than a bland heterosexual to no avail – it was perhaps her biggest disappointment in life. But there was nothing else wrong with the boy, Clara knew; he was practically a saint. In fact, a few years ago there had been talk circulating about a sainthood for him, but he'd laughed them down. And he'd turned down every other offer of honours or decoration in his life. Except, of course, the offer of Oswin being his very real but very secret wife. Secret to the Twenty-First Century public, that was. "What are you supposed to be? A few Manifests come to save your own kind from the purity it needs?"
"Purity? Are you a Nazi now, too?" Jenny interjected, scaring the absolute life out of him. Then she jumped from the top of the tank, elbow first, and smashed him right in the face, knocking him to the floor.
"Who the fuck are you?" Smiles snarled at her, scrambling away in his tank and getting to his feet.
"No one you need to concern yourself with."
"Yeah – why are you here, though? Who sent you?" Clara asked her.
"Oswin, she's been looking into the bombs and Xboost. You know, like you asked her to? And then we got the data from Esther's suit, so she sent the pair of us to-" Smiles grabbed something from the trolley next to Willard and lunged for Jenny with it, cutting her off. But she was ready for him and dodged his slash quite easily. "Is that a syringe!? What's in there?"
"Wouldn't you like to know," he said, trying to stab her with it again. For all they knew it was filled with a lethal dose of anaesthetic, and while a lethal dose for a human wouldn't kill Jenny, it was more than capable of putting her out of action. Sickeningly, anaesthetic was probably the best-case scenario for what concoction Smiles was trying to smite her with.
Rose teleported down into the sunken floor and the tank exterior. Clara phased through the railing while the Doctor vaulted over it as they hastened to follow her, Jenny expertly dodging slash-after-slash from Smiles. Eventually, she grabbed hold of his wrist to stop him mid-swing, then kicked him in the knee sharply enough to make him buckle and crash to the floor. Unfortunately, he was injured in the fall.
"Oops…" said Jenny uncertainly. Their scuffle had been incredibly brief, probably thanks to Jenny being an elite, alien super-soldier and Smiles nothing more than a slimy industrialist, but the way he had landed after Jenny had kicked him led to him inadvertently stabbing himself in the neck with his syringe. "What's in there?" she asked him, but he started to gasp and convulse.
"That doesn't look good – get out of there," Clara advised from the outside of the tank.
"Did you say there are two of you?" the Doctor interjected.
"Did – what? Who are you?" Jenny asked her blankly.
"The Doctor."
"What's going on?"
"What's-? We could ask you the same bloody question!" Rose shouted at her.
"But you said the pair of you," the Doctor reiterated as Clara's heart missed a beat – she really was onto them, "You said Oswin sent the pair of you-"
"Look out!" Clara warned, but she wasn't quick enough, nor was Jenny. It still wasn't clear what Smiles had accidentally been injected with, but he now moved faster than Clara had ever seen anything move – anything except for the Lightning Girl and a younger Rani Chandra at the height of her powers. Anything except for a speedster. He slammed into Jenny so hard she went flying, shattering an entire glass face of the cuboid tank. And Rose, though she certainly had the means, was not the one who caught Jenny before she went crashing to the ground and breaking her bones. Something else, dark and smoky, came flying from the air somewhere above them and knocked Jenny away from the edge of the sunken floor, rescuing her from cracking her skull open. Ravenwood must have been lurking on-high as a bat, flying down at the last moment to materialise in her human-form and make sure Jenny landed somewhere else. But Clara still heard a nasty crack and a distinct shriek of pain.
"Jenny?" asked Ravenwood pleadingly at her side. Smiles pulled the syringe out of his neck and crushed it to pieces in his hand, grinding it to dust.
"I'm fine," Jenny gasped. She didn't sound it. In a fit of rage Smiles went for her again, and Ravenwood was in no position to stop him. She plainly tried her best and was stronger, faster, and deadlier than a human in that situation, but Smiles just knocked her aside like she was nothing and went to lift Jenny off her feet. That was when Rose, who had been in shock up until then, realised she had to intervene before he did to Jenny what he had done to the syringe; there was no regeneration from getting her brain crushed.
"You think you can break in here and inject me with that shit? That was a prototype, the side-effects could kill me." He was seething but didn't raise his voice, just spat angrily and tried to intimidate her. The Doctor also stunned by what was happening – namely Ravenwood's unprecedented arrival – it came down to Rose to tackle Smiles and knock him away from Jenny. Normally, Rose could stop a plane mid-flight by employing the right amount of force, but not this time, because Smiles was more than a match for her. Though she did manage to get him to relinquish Jenny, it was no different to trying to bring down a grown man without any superpowers at all.
"He's a Manifest!" the Doctor shouted, "The brains – and the drugs – whatever was in that syringe must be some sort of serum – if you can charge millions for one superpower, imagine what people will pay for dozens of them in one hit!?"
"That's not it at all," said Smiles, kicking Rose in the shin and hurting her a great deal. Rose hadn't been physically hurt for a very long time and was stunned by the sensation, while Ravenwood again attempted to pull a wounded Jenny out of harm's way. "I am exceptional, and in a world where anyone can be a superhero, I need a way to make it clear I'm a cut above the rest."
"You're just greedy, that's all you are," said the Doctor angrily, "Greed and nothing else. Trying to give yourself the powers of every single Manifest? At once? Is that where those brains are going? Just to you?"
"But I wasn't supposed to take it yet," he turned his attention on Jenny again.
"You don't fucking touch her," Ravenwood threatened.
"Or you'll do what? What are you, exactly?" He advanced and Clara sent a wave of telekinesis to stop him, holding out her hand because Rose had been thrown away uselessly, and she really didn't have the skill to actually fight somebody whose super-strength was on equal footing with hers. Unfortunately, super-strength wasn't his only duplicate power; he held up his own hand and sent a much more powerful and aggressive bout of energy at Clara, enough to knock her off her feet.
"So much for being powerful Manifests who could have this wrapped up in a matter of minutes," the Doctor quipped.
"Jenny's the one who injected him!" Rose argued.
"Oh. A vampire," said Smiles, "They're real, are they?"
"How do-?" Ravenwood asked.
"I read your mind. I can read all your minds. You're mostly thinking about me, and I'm flattered, but you…" he turned his gaze on Clara and frowned, "You're thinking about pornography."
"Why are you thinking about porn right now!?" Rose demanded.
"I'm not! I mean – it's just – it's like in the background, I don't know!"
"Do you know how much money you could make?" he continued to question Ravenwood, then he teleported in a blur to crouch in front of her, next to Jenny who was curled up with her eyes closed after her nasty impact with the floor. "One bite could earn billions. You can gift immortality already – that's my life's work. And all this time…"
"I'm not in the habit of making more vampires," she told him coldly, "I'm not the monster here."
"And yet you drink human blood… why are the two of you-?" He was midway through presumably asking why Clara and Ravenwood were identical (because they were the exact same person), glancing between them, when Rose grabbed him and teleported him. But this, too, was a fruitless effort; his teleportation was clearly just as good as Rose's, because within seconds he had brought them back, and they proceeded to disappear and reappear for a few seconds until Smiles telekinetically blasted Rose away from him. "What's the point of this? You can't stop me," he dodged another lunge from Rose, flitting just a few feet to the side.
"Wouldn't be so sure about that," said the Doctor, "What was in that serum? Because I didn't know it was possible for a Manifest's powers to activate immediately after consuming the serum. So that makes me think you mixed in a lot of adrenaline, in order to trigger all those superpowers you've gathered. And you said it was an untested prototype, with side-effects. How long do you think it'll take for those side-effects to kick in?" He glared at her, breathing deeply, his face already sunken and covered in sweat – not that he looked particularly healthy at the best of times. "Your heart must be racing right now, or maybe it's skipping beats? Funny thing about adrenaline, if you get too over-stimulated on it, it'll stop your blood flowing properly. First, your toes and fingers go numb, then your arms, and eventually your respiratory system. Do you know what happens to your internal organs when they stop getting blood pumped to them? The tissue starts to die. Of course, in an emergency adrenaline injection can be very useful – for heart attacks, allergic reactions, you know the stuff – but, you weren't having a heart attack. Or an allergic reaction. You weren't really doing anything."
"So?" he said. "You think something like that will stop me?"
"Something like your own heart stopping? You know, I've got a funny feeling it might."
"Who are you? What are you?" he asked. He made to flit towards her but collapsed halfway through his advance, and she stayed high and mighty above the sunken floor, leaning on the railings.
"I'm the Doctor. And I've got two hearts, so the chances of what's happening to you happening to me are a lot slimmer. What's your background in, exactly? Computing? Medicine? What? What are your qualifications?"
"I'm an innovator. An inventor."
"He was privately educated by rich parents," Clara said, "Got a third, from Cambridge, in history and politics."
"I've worked," he argued.
"You haven't worked for anything, and now look at you. Injecting yourself with chemicals you probably haven't even tried to understand. Kidnapping people, killing them, torturing them – and for what? Money? Fame?" He began gasping for air, falling. He began to flicker and twitch like his body was trying to teleport to a dozen different places at once, writhing, convulsing.
"We should do something," said Rose urgently, "Take him to a hospital."
"There's no time," said the Doctor, "He's been dead since the moment he took that."
"Don't say that," said Ravenwood, "Don't act like this is Jenny's fault. And – what do you mean you're the Doctor? Doctor who?" Thirteen declined to answer.
"There's something almost poetic about being destroyed by your own hubris like this," the Doctor said, watching Smiles. But then he convulsed so hard he looked like a rubber band snapping and there was a noise so strange Clara couldn't describe it, but going by the blood that started to spread across his chest she knew what had happened: Will Smiles' heart had exploded, before he'd been able to add Dexter Willard's immortality to the mix. Dexter Willard who had been forced to watch this play out, while gagged. They stopped and stared.
"That's cold," Rose told the Doctor.
"Oh, really? Because what I find cold is when it turns out that one of my companions isn't actually dead at all, but has apparently been living as a vampire for decades right under my nose with you lot lying to me and covering it up," she argued, indicating Ravenwood.
"What are you talking about?" Ravenwood looked up, but she was still poring over Jenny, "Wait – you're not-?"
"Old Twelvey's regeneration, yeah," said Rose.
"And also," Clara interjected, then indicated her other self and very unconvincingly said, "Oh my god, I thought she was dead all these years as well!"
"You should be ashamed of yourself," said the Doctor.
"I'm terribly ashamed of her," muttered Ravenwood.
"Well?"
"Well what?" Rose asked.
"What's going on! Because she died and I had all my memories of her erased. Then I got them back when I regenerated, and I've always wondered exactly what happened to her – I know she pretended to be a waitress, and went off with Ashildr, and now what? This is how you cheat death? Become a vampire?"
"That's not what happened at all," said Ravenwood, getting to her feet and matching the Doctor's angry tone, "At least, I don't think it is, because all I can remember is one day you show up for another trip out in the TARDIS to visit Rigsy, or something, and then five minutes later I'm being woken up tied down to a chair to make sure I don't murder anybody and drink their blood. Jenny told me that she," she pointed at Clara, "used her nanogenes to dig me out of my coffin and then we happened to go to Victorian Whitby where I got bitten by some scrawny, runt vampire who was the offspring of Elizabeth Báthory. Not that I can remember any of that, because of the whole frozen-in-time thing I only found out about because Ashildr came to my house looking for a vampire to slay. So maybe you should tell me what happened – or you know what? Don't, because this, here," she motioned to Jenny, curled up and motionless, "is my wife, and she's in a lot of pain, so that's my priority."
"Still had time to monologue, though…" Rose muttered.
"Your wife!?" the Doctor exclaimed, "And you used your nanogenes to bring her back!?"
"Okay, fine, maybe I have a complex," Clara said huffily.
"Stop worrying about me," Jenny mumbled. So she wasn't unconscious. Ravenwood immediately dropped to her side again. "I've just got, I don't know, a few broken ribs. Maybe a punctured lung. Arm might be a bit…" she stuck out her left arm and Rose had to look away; there was a bone protruding from the skin of her forearm. With Smiles taken care of Jenny struggled to get back to her feet, wincing and clutching her side with the arm that wasn't broken. She'd hit her face on the floor, too; it was red and certainly going to come up in an unpleasant bruise.
"Wife!?" the Doctor persisted, pointing wildly at them both, "Wife!? You've married my daughter!?"
"Uh…" Ravenwood faltered.
"My daughter!?"
"This is why I brought her back to life!" Clara argued in her own defence, "What would it have done to Jenny if she died?"
"Sorry – are you implying that there was something going on between them before she died!?"
"Oh, well, um…" Ravenwood still couldn't come up with anything good to say. "Maybe we… just saw each other. Once or twice."
"We were sleeping together for months," said Jenny.
"You were WHAT!? While you were travelling with me you were off having your way with my daughter behind my back!? Weren't you married!?" she asked Jenny.
"Well, yeah, a bit." Then Jenny flinched and her legs buckled.
"You need to go back to the TARDIS," Rose advised.
"Hold on," the Doctor persisted, "Did you say Elizabeth Báthory bit you? Because I was talking to Sally Sparrow earlier, who said she was part of the Gutkeled bloodline, and-"
"Oh my god, fine, yes, I bit Sally, are you happy now?" Ravenwood said, trying to leave.
"No! Why would you do that!?"
"Because she was dying of thyroid cancer and she begged me on her death bed, alright?" Ravenwood snapped, "Don't get so sanctimonious with me."
"One more question, actually, before I teleport you away," Rose interrupted, "Why are you here? You said something about Oswin?"
"Oswin works with Esther most of the time Esther's out and helps her with intel – she's like, Oracle if Esther's Batman. She suspected that Prometheus was behind Xboost and the bombs in the rain machines, she sent Esther to look into it, Esther got… well, we don't know what happened to Esther."
"She's at our house, she's fine. The Doctor saved her. My Doctor, I mean," said Clara, "Sally's with her."
"Oswin didn't know that you were looking into anything, so she told Jenny and me to look around Prometheus's secret lab after she found out," Ravenwood explained.
"I thought problems like this were the reason we started that group chat to begin with," said Rose, shaking her head, "Are you ready to-?"
"No, no," Jenny said, "Why is the Beta Doctor here at all?"
"Got a new name now. Astro Doctor," said the Doctor, "But we – me and my friends – just found ourselves here, on a rain machine this morning, ran into your Lightning Girl trying to defuse a bomb, and she told us to go to Brighton. Suppose we took a dodgy turn at Fornax A and ended up in the wrong universe."
"Look, you two just think of a plan to deal with… this," Rose glanced at Smiles, "And I'll make sure this one gets actual medical treatment for once."
"Take him," Clara advised, nodding at Willard, "Tell Oswin to cure him and give him some Retcon."
Rose rolled her eyes, "Fine, fine…" In a golden glimmer, Rose disappeared along with Ravenwood, Jenny, and Willard, who was vanished straight from his medical gurney where he'd been watching them with terrified eyes since they'd watched Smiles die and were relatively unfazed about it.
"So, then," said Clara awkwardly in the silence, "What do we do about this body?"
"Leave it there," said the Doctor, "Doesn't matter if someone finds it, he killed himself with his own concoction. Do you have a way to leak information to the public?"
"You want to blow the whistle? I'm sure Oswin and Esther could come up with something."
"We can't exactly call the police if his company is still bank-rolling them. Best thing to do is expose it, make everything here public knowledge. Can't Adam do something?"
"Oh, maybe. He could buy Prometheus and make sure everything gets destroyed, but I don't know how much money CyTech has to spend on stuff like that. You know he gave away his billions and invested them all back into charity and public welfare when he met my sister, he's just given himself and the rest of his staff triple the minimum wage ever since. So I'm not sure he can just buy companies."
"He should try. If Prometheus is distributing Xboost, if they own the Manifest prisons, he could end all that if he had control of the company."
"Well, I'll work on it, once you and your lot leave."
"What?" she was surprised.
"You're not hanging around, are you?"
"I've still got a lot of questions that need answering, actually. Like, what happened to your arm?" she challenged, "What's the real story?"
Clara paused, thinking, but ultimately relented. "There was a serial killer, targeting my Echoes. He was called Liam Kent, completely deranged, and a Manifest – he could manipulate electronics. And I think of them like they're my own, because they are, and I almost killed him when I found him. Esther stopped me. So I keep the scar to remind myself I have a duty of care to them, all of them. And also to remind me never to go too far, which I haven't." While she talked she went to lean against the wall of the sunken floor, which was about four feet high. Will Smiles' body continued to bleed from its ghastly chest wound.
"So, you ruin your arm just like Oswin ruined her legs?"
"In a way," said Clara stiffly. "You know, you're colder than you come across initially."
"And what would your wife have done? Sent him to the TARDIS to try to save his life? Have Rose bring him back? Have Clara bite him?"
"We call her Ravenwood, actually," said Clara.
"Well? I'm waiting for an answer. What would the other Doctor have done?"
Clara stopped to think. What would she have done? Would she have tried to save Smiles, after what he'd done? Shovelling Xboost onto the streets, murdering innocent people, bankrolling the police, building Manifest Observation Complexes as good as prison camps, almost killing Esther, trying to blow up CyTech's rain machines and kill whole countries, withholding medicine that could cure millions…
"Killed by his own ego," said the Doctor after a moment, crouching down to look at the body, "Ironic, after he named his company Prometheus. Humanity's tortured saviour and creator."
"She would have done the same thing," said Clara, "But I think she'd feel worse about it."
"And you don't think I feel bad? I don't like standing by and letting someone die. But I'm not going to manipulate the universe with advanced technology or mutagens or superpowers just to forcibly sustain a life. Not everyone can live forever, even in your universe. Have I ever told you I don't really like it here?"
"No."
"I don't really like it here. How does 'Ravenwood' put up with it? Gives me a headache. Not used to absorbing this exact type of background radiation." She stood up and crossed her arms as she continued to quiz Clara.
"I think she manages by, you know, screwing your daughter at every opportunity," Clara countered, to the Doctor's annoyance, who rolled her eyes.
"And your wife's just fine with that, is she?"
Clara laughed, "Oh, absolutely not. Well, she is now, most of the time, though Christmas dinners are awkward. It was a total nightmare at the beginning, them sneaking around – then my husband found out and tried to ground Jenny. Did not work, she does whatever she wants. But in the end, he walked her down the aisle. In the registry office, because Ravenwood's not good with churches. Y'know, because she's-"
"A vampire?"
"-queer." The Doctor frowned. "And a vampire, obviously. But you know, the queer thing. I don't like going into churches, either. Also, the reason we kept this a secret from you and Retconned you whenever you showed up to investigate her-"
"That explains some foggy patches in my memory…"
"-is because of that bullshit hybrid prophecy from your universe. Which frankly – and I was saying this to my wife earlier – must be a load of bollocks because nobody's come to try and separate the two of us to stop us destroying the universe."
"Well, prophecies can have a myriad of different interpretations," said the Doctor, "But I suppose it did all get a bit extreme towards the end." She stopped to think about this, and Clara didn't have anything else to say for a moment. They were surrounded by glass and blood, and she wondered why Smiles didn't have any security there. Perhaps he was just too conceited to think that anybody would be able to get to him.
"So?" Clara prompted when she got tired of the silence, still waiting for Rose to return, "What are you going to do? Ask her to travel with you again?"
She was surprised, "Should I?"
"Nope."
"I wasn't going to," she said defensively, "Seems like she's got things sussed, anyway, moving onto your TARDIS, with Jenny."
"Mm, she does have to live with my sister as well, though."
"Maybe she would've been better off dead, in that case." Clara laughed a little.
"Oswin tends to have that effect on people."
"Can I ask you something? While we're alone?" she relaxed her stance, dropping her arms by her side again and leaving Smiles alone.
"I'm flattered, but I don't think I can shag anyone with a dead body right there," Clara said wryly as she approached.
"Not that. Why did you want her to leave the TARDIS?"
"I got tired of the stagnation, and I wanted to teach," said Clara truthfully, "The idea is that we oscillate. In ten, fifteen years, when everybody starts to question our age and Matilda's old enough to be on her own or choose to live on the TARDIS, we'll go back. Then, maybe, come to Earth again. Keep switching. I'm not holding her prisoner, and it's not like she has a chance to get bored when shit like this keeps happening."
"Suppose not."
"I wonder if Smiles pays off UNIT…"
"UNIT?"
"Yeah."
"You've still got UNIT!?"
"They showed up to help deal with the trees. We'd already dealt with them, but it's the thought that counts. The Doctor said they were disbanded for a bit, but the aliens kept invading. Do you know anyone called Osgood?"
"Osgood? My biggest fan. Nerdy scientist. Has asthma, hangs around with a Zygon copy of herself. Or she did, until Missy killed one of them; no idea which," she explained, leaning on the wall with her shoulder, next to Clara.
"Her Cosmic-Verse double is the leader of UNIT."
"What? How old is she?"
"Not a clue. She's got a Scek. Which the Doctor says is kind of like a symbiote."
"Oh, I know what a Scek is. That's a terrible idea, like making a deal with the devil."
"She said that, too. Apparently, it's called Splodge."
"Well, that's the most ridiculous thing I've heard all day. And trust me, I've heard a lot of ridiculous things today," she said, shaking her head.
"If you actually know Osgood, or at least one version of her, do you think we can trust UNIT to get rid of all the stuff here?" Clara surveyed the room and its torture equipment and many, mysterious liquids again.
"Osgood will basically do anything I recommend, so if you manage to get to her directly, then she should sort all this out," the Doctor advised. "But you want to keep a close eye on her and that Scek."
"How pissed off are you about your Clara being a vampire married to Jenny, then? Just out of ten?" she asked, stepping closer to the other Thirteen.
"It's a very difficult emotion to quantify. Are they happy?"
"Yeah."
"Then I suppose that's all there is to it. And if the other Doctor's happy playing house for some reason that's completely inconceivable to me, then fair play to you. Bet you're glad me and my friends showed up and helped you sort out this Xboost mess, though."
"It's all thanks to you, is it?"
"Who else would it be thanks to?" she pretended to be oblivious.
"Is it too much to hope that one day there might be a version of you who doesn't have this unbearable ego?" Clara lowered her voice, leaning closer.
"I don't believe you've ever hoped for that, Clara."
"Gets very tiring being married to someone who thinks the world of themselves, you know."
"Should ask your wife how she does it. She'll give you some pointers."
"Pointers aren't the only thing she gives me."
The Doctor paused, smiled, shook her head and pretended to be more irritated than she actually was, "This is the one thing about you I've never missed; the endless innuendos."
"Ooh, so you've missed me?"
"Do you never stop?"
"If you want me to stop, we'll need a new safe-word."
"Erm," Rose cleared her throat loudly on the balcony above them, crossing her arms and scowling. Neither had noticed her teleport back in, and the Doctor jumped at the intrusion. "Are you two flirting?"
"No!" Thirteen was aghast and took a few steps back from Clara, "I would never flirt! Not with anyone, ever!" Clara was amused though and only winked at her before making to return to Rose so she could take them home again.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks," Clara jibed.
"You are so incorrigible, you know!" she argued, forced to follow.
"And yet, you're madly in love with me."
"I'm definitely not in love with you, madly or otherwise."
"You just keep telling yourself that, Doctor," Clara smirked.
"I will!"
"I really do hate you," Rose muttered. "What are we doing about this body?"
"Going to get my wife to call in a favour with UNIT. What did you do with Willard?"
"Drugged him, put him back in his own bed. Suppose he'll be a bit confused about why he's been declared dead, but Oswin said she'll… do something with the death certificates, I don't know. Time to get out of here then?"
The Doctor glanced at Smiles, at Clara, then at Rose, and sighed, "Definitely."