Poor World Below
Title: This Poor World Below
Author: Lillian
Pairings: Vastra/Jenny, possibly others if you squint
Rating: PG
Summary: The TARDIS knows what she’s doing: a non-linear life. There was a reason that Vastra and Jenny behaved so familiarly with the Doctor during A Good Man Goes to War.
Spoilers: A Good Man Goes to War, a vague spoilers for Season 6 season finale. Also, references to The Brilliant Book.
Disclaimer: If I owned them, these ladies would get their own spinoff. More’s the pity.
Author’s Notes:
Thank you to sun_chan for the piece of artwork that spawned this in the first place for the DW Reversebang! Not sure this is quite what she had in mind, but hope it works!
Thank you for my wonderful betas, Lisa and Andrina! Any suckage that remains is my own blasted fault.
”The pure, tender, loving spirit... is above us, loving us... that first birthday in another world must have been a far brighter one than any in this poor world below!” -Queen Victoria
“Did I say Earth?” the Doctor demanded of his ship, put out. “I did not say Earth! I am more or less completely sure I said anywhere that I wasn’t going to run into people I know! And where am I almost sure to run into people I know? Ear-“
A drunk man in a fine waistcoat and carrying a silver-headed walking stick wandered past, a strong contrast to the filthy, narrow alley around them, staring at the Doctor as though he were mad and possibly dangerous. The Doctor turned and waggled his fingers. “Hullo. Don’t mind me. Just having a conversation with my ship.”
The drunk gave the Doctor a suspicious and disapproving look, then pointed him toward a wooden door set into the far wall, half-hidden by shadows. “That’s the place you need,” the man slurred in the extraordinarily posh way the aristocracy often excelled at, and then wandered off toward the crowds of people bustling around just past the mouth of the alley, already calling for a hansom cab. The Doctor checked his watch; even at this late hour, London was always bustling.
With a little pat to the TARDIS’ blue exterior, the Doctor wandered a bit closer toward the door that the man had indicated. He may have been trying to lie low, but it was still impossible to resist a good mysterious door. You never knew what might be behind a door. Even better than windows. As he opened it, the door creaked and a bell rang. The Doctor looked up. Bells. He decided that he liked the bells. Maybe he could get some bells for the TARDIS so he’d know if anyone tried to sneak inside. Mind, it wasn’t like that happened more than once every fifty years or so, but-
Then the smell hit him and the noise. It was a bar. Or a pub, perhaps. It was filled with noisy, drunken people. Though-
“Gas lighting!” the Doctor exclaimed, wandering in through the rear of the pub. “That’s... what is this? 1860? That’s awfully posh for a place to get yourself snoggered, isn’t it?”
The barman turned, his florid face shocked under a long, pale mass of hair. “Get out from behind there!” he all but shouted as he realised that the man had come in behind the bar instead of from the usual patron’s entrance. “Who do you think you are?”
The Doctor grinned. He knew the answer to that one. “John Smith,” he suggested.
The barman looked at him as though he was a madman. “I don’t much care who you are,” he exclaimed. “Get out from behind my bar!”
***
The Doctor certainly hadn’t meant to come back to Earth, but once here... well, it had its charms, didn’t it? He found himself crowded around a wooden table that had once been a fine oak, though now it was marked by years of water stains and messages left with pocket knives. He was engaged in a game of Hazard with several interesting grey haired gentlemen, one of whom had, he claimed, served with Sir John Franklin on one of his expeditions to the Polar Sea.
It was the Doctor’s turn to cast the dice. “Seven!” he requested from the universe at large. “Come on, lucky number seven! Oooh-”
That was when the screaming began.
***
The police, when they showed up, would say that it looked like a garden variety stabbing. That sort of thing happened in crass places where you sold alcohol. Just because a gin palace was a bit more upscale didn’t make the inebriated customers less likely to behave stupidly. Best as the witnesses could tell, a tall, dark haired man walked up to the bar, asked the bartender, “Are you Aberle Wilcox?” and when the bartender agreed that yes he was and what about it, the man had leaped over the bar and stabbed him, then ran out again as quick as you please. Mind, he might not have been tall. Or dark-haired. They weren’t entirely sure. After all, in a gin palace most people weren’t really at their sharpest.
The bobbies summoned a local doctor they kept on call for such things. The doctor, John, was a bit rough looking despite the fine cut of his clothing, but he examined the wound without a trace of discomfort and pronounced the man quite beyond saving.
All that would come a bit later.
But, immediately following the stabbing there were two things of more interest to the Doctor. Well, three if you count that a man was dead on the plank wood floor.
The first was that, according to the sonic screwdriver, the stab wound was contaminated with traces of jauxite, presumably from the murder weapon. That being interesting because jauxite couldn’t be mined anywhere in a hundred light years of Earth and who the heck would use it for a weapon anyway?
The second thing that was of more interest than the patron’s account, for the moment, was that when all the screaming started, people started running over to see what happened. People came in off the street to gawp and so did all the tenants living in the upstairs flats, including a very familiar profile in a hooded cloak. It was hard to forget the unique way a Salurian’s cranial ridges looked, even under fabric. “Hello, hello, hello!” The Doctor all but sprang to his feet and planted himself in front of the woman, trying to peer inside the hood, peeking at the green, scaley face. “Vastra, that you?” Surely it had to be! How many Salurians could there be living in Victorian London?
There was a pause and a clenching of leather-gloved fists before a deep feminine voice asked, “Do I know you?”
“Ohh!” The Doctor smacked himself in the forehead. “Well, yes, but I looked a bit different. All rude and patched and curly. And, well, there was that time I looked the same, but that hasn’t happened for you yet.”
Another pause and then an wryly amused and slightly confused, “Doctor?”
***
Jenny was less than pleased to meet Vastra’s old friend. “Just... the Doctor?” she said slowly as the man paced about their little room above the gin palace, inspecting their cheap grey blankets and the dinky little iron stove. Her outfit was highly respectable, if slightly masculine. Navy brocade and white linen with a perfectly knotted tie and her dark hair swept respectably up off her neck. Her accent, however, was pure gutter-snipe.
“Al...right.” The word was drawled out, thoughtful, her pale pink lips pressing together thoughtfully. Finally, she concluded, “You in that show she did with old droopy-face?” She tilted her face, eying him as though trying to spot gills or see through a perception filter.
The Doctor looked at Vastra curiously but she shook her head hard. No, she did not care to talk about that.
***
“It shouldn’t be that hard to find an extraterrestrial presence in Victorian London!” the Doctor said enthusiastically. A less enthusiastic Jenny and Vastra walked arm in arm behind him. “Most everyone here is human!”
Jenny gave Vastra a curious look from under her dark immaculate brows. “Most?” she mouthed. Vastra only shrugged and gestured toward herself. And then, as an afterthought, toward the Doctor. He was almost human in her book, regardless of his funny smell. A bit like bananas and motor oil.
He’d gone into a long, rambling explanation regarding the way that he was going to detect non-terrestrial presence using a device that utilised sonic frequencies and an interface with his ship. Only problem was that Jenny lacked the education to understand more than ⅛ of it and Vastra didn’t care to; she’d long ago realised that the Doctor just liked to talk whether or not anyone around him was listening. He didn’t want to do anything alone, of course, but she had no inclination to stand there like one of his humans saying ‘my, what does that mean, Doctor?’
The sonic device led them toward the wharves where the streets grew shabbier as did the people on them. The nightwalkers were drifting away with the light, leaving only the homeless hiding in the shadows and the cutpurses. The three of them stood out, even at this early hour. They looked, perhaps, a bit like church workers, there to spread the word of the Lord. Who else would be so mad?
A ship was docked along the Thames, in ill-repair and smelling of rot, but afloat. The Doctor leaped onboard while the women exchanged curious looks between them as if to say ‘Do you think he has any plan?’ ‘No, likely not. Ah well.’ They continued to hesitate until they heard a horrible sound, like the screaming of a panicked horse and then the Doctor’s shouts. Two pairs of slender black leather gloves grasped the side of the boat and both women scrambled on as well, coming to the madman’s aid.
The Doctor was standing on top of a stool, his clothes in tatters, looking very alarmed while something nipped at his heels. “Good doggie!” he yelled at the creature that had him cornered, though it was clearly no dog. It’s dark blue hide looked leathery and it had large ridges along its spine like a dimetrodon. It also had some truly impressive teeth that it was snapping at the man, though it suddenly turned when the women headed toward it, dashing toward them at top speed. Jenny yelped but pulled out her knife, flicking it open. Vastra simply stood ready, hands poised to grab the thing.
“Sit, Molly!” shouted a reedy voice and the great creature stopped, whined, gurgled, and turned around in a circle before jogging toward a thin, elderly man with barely a tooth in his mouth coming down the dock. “Get off my boat or I’ll let Molly rip your legs off!” the man shouted at them. ‘Molly’ rubbed her great scaley head against the old man’s legs, begging for attention and approval.
“So Doctor,” Vastra growled as calmly as she could as the Doctor climbed down from the stool with an absurdly beatific smile, as though nothing could please him more than nearly getting mauled by an extraterrestrial not-dog. “I don’t suppose you can narrow it down to intelligent non-terrestrial life?” They might have gotten killed for a man’s guard dog?
“Terribly sorry,” the Doctor said to the elderly man, showing his psychic paper. “Boat inspectors. You pass with flying colors.” He almost pointed out that ‘Molly’ was actually a male Jogurfian... or, well, a close approximate to male, but the old man seemed so happy with his guardian that it seemed nit-picky to find fault.
Limping slightly, the Doctor held the tattered shreds of his suit against his body, face beet red as he walked away from the dock with his two guides. “I don’t suppose you have anything I can-“
Vastra and Jenny turned and both looked at him incredulously. His eyes skated down their slender bodies, taking in their blouses, petticoats, and skirts, under their cloaks, not to mention the fact that Jenny was at least a head shorter than himself. “Right,” he admitted.
“The next time I see you, I am going to remind you about this,” Vastra said dry as dust.
“Next time you see me, I probably won’t remember this,” the Doctor pointed out.
Vastra hated time-travel.
***
The shonky shop was the kind of place where clothes went just before it went on the rag pile. The shoes were worn most of the way through, the elbows and knees patched and repatched, the hems of pants tattered.
The Doctor was dashing around like a kid in a candy shop. After all, when you were a time traveler, almost everything could be interesting. “Look at this!” he said with enthusiasm, holding up a straw bonnet trimmed with stained and worn white ribbon. “I knew this woman, Mary, who used to wear one just like this! Charming woman, even if her husband was a bit of a rake. Suppose she might have had an idea after Percy’s first wife-”
“Doctor,” Vastra sighed. “Might we get back to finding out who killed my landlord?”
***
The Doctor strolled into the police station as though he absolutely, certainly belonged there. He had discovered, through a great deal of practice, that it wasn’t a bit hard to move freely about places where he did not belong. A slip of psychic paper and a general attitude of ‘Stand back! I know what I’m doing’ got him into most places, even when he stood out like a sore thumb.
He strolled past the scarred desk of the night sergeant. It was a desk sergeant's job to keep people out. On the other hand...
“Hello there,” the Doctor said, putting his hand out with disarming confidence to the beleaguered inspector sitting at a desk in the corner. “I’m the Doctor! Charming little place this. Though, must admit, I was hoping for the actual New Scotland Yard. Did you know that the reason they call it that is because the original Yard stood on the site of a medieval palace where-”
The inspector, a Mr. Rowland Laveline, had automatically put out his own hand to shake, but now he was trying to decide whether to offer the Doctor a seat or to shove him out the door. He eyed his visitor’s appearance with a certain amount of confusion and bewilderment. The stranger in front of him calling himself ‘The Doctor’ was wearing the clothes of a hunter, or perhaps a gentleman taking a weekend out in the country on the backwoods and marshes. The suit was pleasant enough, if of exceedingly poor quality, worn through at the elbows. None of it was at all what one wore about town and the hat... who wore such a deerstalker’s hat in the city?
Laveline didn’t know, of course, that it could have been worse. The Doctor had been considering that bonnet.
Before the man could make up his mind, the Doctor tugged on his hand, drawing the inspector up out of his seat. “Let’s go for a walk. I need a drink.”
A moment later they were walking in step out the door. Apparently the Doctor had said the magic word.
***
Ten minutes later, instead of the smoke room of some local public house, enjoying a quiet pint as Inspector Rowland Laveline had hoped, they were standing in a nearby thoroughfare busy with foot traffic. A scruffy street vendor gave Laveline nervous looks as the Doctor accepted two cups of a pinkish-orangish drink from the young woman. “Sherbet!” The Doctor announced, thrusting one at him. “Best drink in the universe!” Laveline accepted his dubiously. It looked like one of the cooling drinks young ladies drank. “I didn’t used to think so,” the Doctor prattled on. “But-” He took a long sip and made a satisfied sound. “Only thing that would make it better would be the little umbrella.”
Inspector Laveline looked very confused and eyed his ladylike drink for a long moment before sighing and taking a sip. Free drink was a free drink, after all. “Is there a reason you dragged me out here?” the man asked, pink liquid clinging to his neat mustache.
“Yes!” the Doctor exclaimed, gesturing with his drink. “Yes there is. I dragged you out here expressly for the purpose of helping you catch a very bad man. A very, very bad man. Who kills people.” Seeing that he was losing the inspector, he pushed forward to his point. “There was a murder last night at the Gin Palace on Fullers Way at Cheapside.
The inspector looked like he was resisting committing an act of violence himself. “You have evidence?”
The Time Lord paused. No, that wasn’t really an option, was it? Not as though he could just show Laveline the sonic and the man would say, ‘Ah, I see! Jauxite!’ This would take a bit more careful handling. Reaching into his pocket, the Doctor waved the psychic paper at Laveline for a moment, which subtly changed the expression on his face. The man still looked frustrated and annoyed, but he said, “Ah. Special Branch. What can I do to assist you, Detective Inspector?” Laveline’s voice strongly suggested, ‘Oh god, what did I do to deserve this?’
***
They found Vastra and Jenny loitering beside a tiny coffee stall nearby, sharing between them a cup of cocoa and a slice of current cake, passing the two items back and forth, back and forth, occasionally both holding the cup together for a long moment. Vastra’s hood was up, and the coffee seller looked a bit uncomfortable, but would not turn away paying customers.
“Doctor,” Jenny said, turning, her stance shifting into something less comfortably intimate and more wary and ready, like a greyhound scenting prey.
The Doctor ignored their wariness and tugged the inspector forward by one navy sleeve. “This is Rowland Laveline!” he announced cheerfully. “Rowland, this is Vastra-” He gestured to the hooded figure. “-and Genevive Wharton.”
The dark-haired woman scowled ferociously, not sure how the Doctor knew her full (embarrassingly toff) name and not caring for it a bit. It bothered her how he seemed to act like he knew her when they’d only just met. No matter what explanations of time travel she was given, that was just a bit disturbing. But she extended her hand all the same like she had nothing at all to be uncomfortable about. “A pleasure.”
“Likewise,” he said cautiously, but was distracted as the stall owner got in a minor tiff with the Doctor as he tried to pay for coffee with a golden Roman solidus instead of the silver pennies he owed for his cups of cocoa and boiled eggs. Vastra smoothly stepped in, took the solidus, and slipped the man his pennies. Laveline looked more puzzled as her accent contrasted strongly with ‘Genevive’s.’ Vastra, still hidden in her cloak, sounded respectably middle-upper class, her accent quite finer- in fact- than his own.
If asked later, he couldn’t have said exactly why he then proceeded to tell them about the three other murders with similar traits in the past few weeks. As bribes went, a cooling cup of pink sherbet, a warming cup of cocoa, and a boiled egg did not make for a spectacular bribe, and the Doctor’s identification, while exact to the last particular, seemed more than a bit peculiar, but he’d spilled everything he knew: names, addresses, occupations, all the usual.
The first victim, stabbed just as randomly, had been a curio seller, the second a footman, the third a factory worker. None of them were highly important people and though they lived in distantly the same neighbourhood, that hardly narrowed down a list of suspects. The bobbies had, of course, investigated the families. But while everyone had secrets, there didn’t seem to be any particularly murderous secrets, nor anything obviously in common between the four.
“So, is Special Branch taking over this?” he asked, almost hopefully. Laveline ordinary chafed a bit if those jumped-up coppers invaded their cases, but it would be a bit of a relief to be done with this one as it seemed to be going absolutely nowhere.
But the Doctor shook his head. “Oh, no. No, no. Not taking over, just... assisting.” He turned his face to Jenny. “You got enough there to be getting on with?”
Jenny- who had answered to no one since she was 13 year old- looked like she wanted to hit him, but she kept it in check, particularly in front of a policeman. “Enough, yeah.”
***
The Doctor escorted the good inspector back to the station while Jenny and Vastra actually tracked down the men involved. Admittedly, the bobbies had already tried this, but it was amazing how much more talkative people could be when you spoke with the same working class accent they did and weren’t likely to try and toss them in jail as an accessory. Someone who knew how to ask in a quiet, no-nonsense voice that suggested it would be simplest to talk to someone who would be discreet instead of someone else.
‘Someone else’ could make some even more talkative when she flashed them a smile of very white, very sharp teeth from out of a scaly green face. Vastra found, after the first two inquiries, though, that she was better off keeping her tongue tucked away. People tended to react to it less than favourably. There was a fine line between babbling in fear and fainting dead away.
After their fifth visit of the night, and indeed it was getting on towards morning, the women stopped in a quiet alleyway. In dark cloaks, they could have been anyone if you didn’t look too carefully. Jenny leaned against Vastra, hands on her lover’s biceps. “You think it as well, don’t you?”
With Jenny leaning up into her space, her soft breath tickling the scales just below Vastra’s protective neck rings, Vastra was less thinking about the murderer and more about how long it had been since they’d been able to lie down and rest together. The murder had been over 24 hours ago, and they’d not had a chance to rest in all that time. If she pressed Jenny’s head against shoulder more firmly and undid the dark hair from its pins so it spilled down the human’s back. Would Jenny just fall asleep against her right here and now? She imagined carrying her lover into a hansom cab, hitching one corner of her dress up past her thigh and-
“Well, don’t you?” Jenny repeated, sounded sharp and decidedly less sleepy. “The police want to blame this on a nobody like us.”
“You’re hardly nobody, Genevive Wharton,” said a gentle masculine voice from the other end of the alley and both women jumped, hands scrabbling for knives. “And Vastra is and will be somebody indeed.”
“Doctor,” Vastra growled. The man had execrable timing.
“Jauxite!” the Doctor declared, striding up to them. “The weapon contained jauxite. But no one ever uses jauxite for weapons! It’s used for the hulls of ships! It’s too unstable when not in the middle of a vacuum. The only reason you’d make a weapon out of jauxite is if you didn’t know anything about it.”
Vastra pulled her patience together, pulling off her gloves and tucking them into her belt. “Your point, Doctor?”
“This may be a human after all!” he said with wide eyes as though humans didn’t kill each other in London every single bloody day.
***
The only ones awake at this hour of the morning were fast gentlemen, loose girls, and working men on their way through the dawn light to another long day. That and, of course, policemen. Dr. John Culverton had no legitimate business by that reckoning to be out and about at 4 AM. He didn’t look well for a man of his standing. His eyes had a strange glossiness, his sideburns were overgrown and mussed, and his beard was cut unevenly. He looked like a man who hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week.
When confronted with an officer of the law, his reaction was to smile absently and attempt to walk right through Laveline. Inspector Laveline was reluctant to draw his club, despite the rudeness; after all, Culverton was several social strata and quite a few pay grades higher than himself.
Fortunately, Vasta had no such concern. A doctor or not, he was just another mammal. A moment later, the disheveled man was sprawled on his back, his fine professional top hat rolling on the ground as Vastra’s tongue retracted into her mouth once more. Laveline gaped at her, the Doctor looked vaguely disapproving, and Culverton’s eyes began to glow with an inhuman light. The pupils, after all, are merely opening into the body, and there was far more clinging to the man’s central nervous system now than neurons and glia.
“Where is the knife?” Vastra demanded. With her cloak thrown back, her three great cranial crests were revealed along with her delicate, feminine features. Culverton’s strange golden eyes turned on her and his lips pulled back. Despite the fine cut of his wool suit, the man looked more animal than human now.
The sonic whirled and the Doctor reached forward to take the knife from its hiding place in John Culverton’s bag. The man jumped to his feet, holding the bag close, holding the knife close. “You can’t have it!” he said and his intonation was entirely wrong. It was made with human vocal chords, but the prosody- the rise and fall and pauses and such- were all strange.
Laveline’s reluctance was fading fast. “As an officer of the law, I request you pass over your satchel for inspection,” he said in a tone that suggested ‘request’ actually meant ‘demand right now.’
Culverton didn’t seem inclined to listen. He ran for it.
They all ran. Four paced of leather boots (two of them heeled) ran after the man. Most of them were saving their breath for running, but the Doctor- as he was the Doctor- kept talking. “You see, it’s not really John Culverton in charge. The big clue is that jauxite! He had a lot more of it this time. He’s collecting it you see! From the effects of the people he kills.”
Laveline gasped out, “I think the glowing eyes were a good indication too!” He despised running. They split up, trying to circle around Culverton, to cut him off. By the time Vastra reached him, he had his knife out, and took a swipe at her. Mind, she was wearing a cloak, a thick leather vest, neck rings of a metal that wouldn’t be developed again on Earth until her people returned to the surface, and her own strong scales. He, on the other hand, had fragile human flesh; her small, simple switchblade sliced into his arm and his knife dropped to the ground where the Doctor grabbed it up dancing backward with it and Jenny grabbed the rest of Dr. Culverton’s bag, dumping it out onto the street. Inside were four ornaments made of what seemed to be no more than pot metal to the human eye.
The sonic told another story. “Jauxite,” said the Doctor.
“Our ship,” protested Culterton in that wrong-voice. “They did not know what they found. They destroyed it. We can create what has been uncreated.”
“Our,” repeated the Doctor. “Our would be-?”
“The Aghikhian,” said Culverton. His eyes were golden and past his ragged beard his mouth just looked like a hole in his face, not moving quite right for ordinary human speech.
“You aren’t an Aghikhian,” the Doctor protested.
“No,” Culverton agreed. “I am all the Aghikhian crewmembers of the Vigilant Spirit.” The eyes glowed brighter.
“You’re not,” the Doctor argued; his voice was gentle and a bit sad, like a man delivering bad news. “You’re... maybe an echo of the Aghikhians. They would have died on impact. You’re more like... more like their shadows smeared across the wall.” He’d seen that before, would have preferred to forget.
“I am-!” Whatever he was going to say was cut off as Vastra swept his legs out from beneath him, knocking him hard to the ground. She’d heard enough and was ready to administer justice. It wouldn’t take long at all, really. A flick of the tongue and he’d be poisoned to whatever degree she chose. If she wanted, he could be out in moments, and then she’d be able to have a proper meal for once.
“No, wait!” the Doctor cried and held out the magnifying glass. Vastra’s muscles were strung taut, a warrior with her weapon poised and the enemy within reach. “Hold him in place,” the Doctor whispered, and a chill ran down Vastra’s spine. The Doctor had, in her mind, always been the peacemaker, the one who fought to prevent bloodshed. The tunnel dwellers’ lives. Her own life. But as the Doctor moved closer and yet closer, and the Inspector jerkily slid into place, holding down the other side of the man with the glowing eyes, he seemed as old and as dangerous as the ancient stories would have had her believe.
“Detective Inspector, what are you doing?” Laveline demanded.
“We can repair our ship!” the felled man insisted. “We will be able to return-”
The Doctor’s magnifying glass was held directly over the man’s glowing left eye and then he touched the base of the glass with his sonic and adjusted it to setting 965. It hummed against the metal, through the glass, and as the sun shone through, the man gave a startled cry. Vastra’s species relied more on scent and hearing than sight, but there was something there. Something small and light seemed to rise up, glowing golden. It was no bigger than a single snowflake. It pressed itself against the circle of glass. Another rose and another. The man’s back arched as a stream of gold pulled from his eye, through the air, and against the magnifying glass, coating the clear surface in sparkles. He made a pitiful whine like a frightened mongrel as the sparkling flowed out and out in a torrent, finally slowing to a trickle and then nothing at all.
Culverton lay panting shallowly, his colour waxen and his eyes red-rimmed. “What?”
The Doctor shook his head slowly. “I’m sorry. Someone borrowed your brain for a bit, but you should be alright now.”
That didn’t seem to help Culverton at all. He just looked more lost as he slowly, painfully sat up.
Vastra scowled as she realised this meant Dr. John Culverton wasn’t actually a bad man after all. At least not yet, he wasn’t. She couldn’t eat a man who had only done harm under the influence of foreign neurological tampering.
Jenny put out a hand for the human man. She suspected that between the bobby, the alien, and the madman, she was probably the closest thing to comfortingly normal in this group. Culverton grasped her hand and let her pull him up. He wasn’t a small man, but Jenny was all wiry strength under her concealing white linen blouse and dark vest.
Culverton’s pale eyes met her dark ones and his teeth bared in a snarl, a flash of white in the dimness. His hand tightened around hers. “Demon,” he practically hissed. “You took them!”
Vastra tensed. That didn’t sound good. She could see the tension in Jenny’s muscles too, in the line of her back.
“It’s for the best,” the Doctor said, taking a step forward and holding up the magnifying glass, still coated in sparkling gold. Jenny thought he looked more like a mad wizard with a golden wand than an inspector. “I can take what’s left of them home for a proper burial. You couldn’t have helped them. They were beyond help, John.”
Laveline looked confused by the whole thing. But the man’s eyes were no longer burning a hellish gold, so the Doctor must have helped. “Dr. Culverton, perhaps you’d best go sleep off the night. You seem a bit done in.”
Culverton’s eyes finally left Jenny, which was a relief to both women; the man was a bit unnerving and had looked on the edge of violence. “We-” he started and then shook his head. “I am a bit tired. If you will excuse me.”
Laveline watched him go, consideringly. He could charge the man for murder. Possibly, even, he should. He wasn’t sure. This wasn’t the sort of issue he dealt with ordinarily. Still, it might pay to keep half an ear to the ground regarding their man Jack. “You aren’t a bit Special Branch,” he said aloud and regretted the saying of it, as that made it true.
“No, well yes, but mostly no,” the Doctor agreed, tucking sonic and magnifying glass into his pockets.
“And that woman was in Jago’s freak show, I swear she was!” Lavelin continued. He looked like a man with a terrible headache.
The two women gave him a single distainful glance. Vastra had starred in old droopy face’s stupid show. They drifted closed together and Vastra could hear the way the adrenaline still made Jenny’s heart beat a bit too fast.
“I rather enjoyed that,” Jenny admitted quietly to Vastra, watching the retreating form of John Culverton. Her pale face was pleasantly flushed, even though the ruler-perfect part through her hair was unmussed. “Might we do that more often, do you think?”
“Find killers?” Vastra asked, surprised. “I... suppose so.” Her face was thoughtful. No one would mind if she ate really terrible humans, and perhaps people would pay her well for the service? “I believe we would be good at it.”
“You were very brave,” Jenny said, grinning, taking off her gloves so she could examine the rend in Vastra’s shirt.
“You were too,” Vastra said, removing Jenny’s hand. “You could be my face to the world,” Vastra said, her gloved thumb stroking over the back of Jenny’s delicate human hand.
Inspector Laveline, standing only a few feet away, looked like he might burst a blood vessel. “You’re telling me that not only should I turn a blind eye to vigilantism in my city,” he said slowly and distinctly, his mustache quivering with each word, “but that I should employ one?”
“Rowland, Rowland, Rowland…” The Doctor slung an arm around the inspector’s shoulders, drawing out each word, sounding more like a patronizing old professor than the 20-something he looked like. “Look at these two lovely ladies! These sweet, young debutantes. Alright, one’s not your species and would eat you if she was hungry enough, but they don’t look like street toughs exactly, do they?”
“That doesn’t change-“ the man tried to protest, but the Doctor interrupted, fiddling with Laveline’s top button.
“Rowwwwland.” In the Doctor’s mouth, the inspector’s name was a good six syllables long. “Have a heart. Have a care. Have a beer, but only one, they find out that’s actually good for you. Walk with me. I want to introduce you to the sexiest lady in the universe.”
Jenny stared at their retreating forms with a curious expression. “Your Doctor,” she said slowly. “Do you think-?”
Vastra just shook her head. “Just his way. He’s not actually human, you realise.”
Jenny’s brow raised archly. “Like that need stand in anyone’s way.”
Vastra smiled, showing even white teeth. She flicked her tongue, ever so slightly, just to watch Jenny’s pupils dilate and smell her involuntary response to the tease. That would never grow stale for Vastra. “I suppose not.”
***
Epilogue
The next time either of them saw the Doctor, they were a year older and significantly better heeled financially. Quite a few people- including, at times, the Yard- paid well to have unpleasant people dealt with. Discreetly. And permanently.
The Doctor, in contrast was eight months younger and shook Jenny's hand firmly as though they'd just met. Vastra hated time travel, but they did owe him just a bit. One more adventure with the mad alien, Jenny at her side, and then they'd return together to Notting Hill, to their lovely new home. She packed their swords and Jenny's favourite old navy brocade vest with the matching tie and entered the Tardis.