Disclaimer: I own nothing anyone recognises.

A/N: Um, yeah, not sure where this came from. Originally, it had no angst in it. I swear. Not entirely sure what happened, there. I also wrote the end first, because it all came out of the beginning of the last sentence. Which is itself part of a Crowded House lyric, so...yeah. For those interested: this is only vaguely related to the other Jenny-fic I wrote, but there are a few extremely vague links there (beyond the deliberately mimicked style of the summary, that is).

Blind Dates

The water flowing swiftly beneath the stone bridge under Jenny's feet is dark and silent. It runs all the way through the town, quick, quiet, deep, and occasionally disappearing beneath paved streets. Jenny crumples the scrap of cloth in her hand and, stretching her arm out over the balustrade, drops it. The material drifts slowly down until it touches the water, soaking it through and tugging it away downstream.

Jenny watches it go. Tears another strip of cloth from the mass of it bundled in her arms. Drops it after the others.

She doesn't know where the river ends, or, for that matter, its origin.

She tears another scrap.

It's probably better, Jenny thinks, to leave some things as mysteries.

She opens her hand, and lets the scrap fall.

There's something more concrete she's trying to figure out at the moment, anyway.

Jenny pauses her hands' automatic movements, listens to her mind spin out countless possible scenarios, and tries to solve her question: to steal – sorry, find – an appropriately glamorous dress for the occasion; or to go as she is. She suspects her Dad would choose the latter option. But regardless of advanced methods of progenation, and specifically her own creation, she isn't her Dad. For one thing, it is by far easier for men to act oddly without explanation, in this the Third Era of Post-Modernity Upon Bayfadarn (it had semi-embarrassingly taken Jenny nearly three-quarters of an hour to learn the correct, formalised name – Najmi VI – but she prefers the other anyway).

Jenny can hazard a well-educated guess that if she shows up in her usual outfit of military fatigues she would be thrown out of even a dinner hosted in her own honour. While that would probably be an adventure in its own right, any further interference with this society's patriarchal theories on life might be a case of far too much, far too soon, given what Jenny can grasp from a cluttered handful of her Dad's slightly blurry recollections.

She's pretty sure that her Dad doesn't come by this way for a few hundred years. It takes him a while longer than this, linearly, chronologically speaking, to figure out that the womenfolk of Najmi VI were repressed, mistreated and uneducated in the attempt to shield their minds from the Ghirarden that lurk, intimidating and ever-threatening, in the forgotten crannies of the undertown. Thinking that through oppression there was a faint hope of hiding the electrical signals of their brainwaves, rescuing them from the risk of tortuous living death.

It doesn't work.

Jenny thinks that even the men who perpetuate the oppression know that it doesn't work. And there's something shiftily obnoxious about the assumption that women need greater protection than men. The assumption that they can't handle the truth of their own lives. Even if part of Jenny's brain tells her that there's something vaguely chivalrous about it, husbands and fathers and brothers and sons willing to sacrifice themselves in place of their womenfolk, living with the burden of the knowledge of what stalks their cities, hidden in the shadows...they're doing it through a medieval-style subjugation that Jenny can't pretend that some of the menfolk don't enjoy.

It was never going to work, ever, and so it doesn't even have that saving grace, what the people of Najmi VI are doing to themselves. But Jenny can't change it. She can't do anything about it at all. Because it's her Dad that's supposed to change this society, and she already knows that. The knowledge doesn't help, of course (and she already knew that, too).

And she would prefer not to tie a paradoxical knot in the timelines. Or at least, not until she is in a position to properly tell her Dad what a hypocrite he would be to lecture her about it.

But she can't meditate uselessly on what she is helpless to change (by virtue of her gender, of her age, of the time period, of the continuum and her knowledge of it). She won't.

So instead Jenny leans against the stone parapet of a bridge (constructed hundreds of years ago, long before the monsters crept out of the abyss to haunt the shadows) and tosses the crumpled shreds of a ripped and stained formal dress into the dark water, watching them sink slowly. And instead of thinking about dark stains on pale embroidered fabric, or about the painful, pitiful attempts of a society trying to save itself pulling it further down, or that adventures aren't quite as fun when there are dead bodies of innocent young women at the end…

Instead of all that, Jenny tries to decide if she should try finding a dress suitable for the guest of honour at a formal dinner.

The answer, she thinks, is yes. She hasn't tried wearing a dress yet, after all. She might find she enjoys it (unlikely, because she prefers freedom of movement, but possible); if not, she is sure she will enjoy the holistic experience (holistically speaking, she has discovered she can find enjoyment of some description in most of her new experiences). She doesn't really want to be kicked out of the formal dinner in question for ignoring the strict dress code (awkward, she predicts, even if she has inherited her Dad's predisposition to be practically immune to embarrassment).

She doesn't want her overriding memories of the dresses worn here, stiff with beautiful, intricate embroidery, to be of blood and despair and secrets so carefully hidden that any evidence is buried (drowned beneath the dark surface of the silent river).

She will find herself a dress to wear, Jenny decides, looking down at the tattered remnants of the dress in her arms, tracing a finger over a delicate ridge of embroidery. It leaves a faint, rust-coloured powder on her skin. Dried blood. Jenny brushes it off on her trousers, gathers the cloth more securely, and hefts it over the edge of the bridge, holding it there.

She lets it drop.

It sinks, waterlogged, and is swept along by invisible underwater currents. Gone.

The girl standing on the bridge watches the water a moment more, almost expecting the material to reappear. It doesn't. She turns and walks away.

It doesn't take Jenny long to find a dress shop run by staff susceptible to a tear-jerking story about the unfortunate loss of her proper clothing, and now the pressing need to find a dress suitable for a formal dinner tonight, and although she is more than capable of paying, she has found considerable difficulty with customer service in other shops, and this is her first time on this planet, and, and, and...

It takes a good deal longer, however, to find a dress that Jenny thinks she could possibly actually move around in while wearing. And then there's some more time tacked on the end of that to find a dress that, visually and aesthetically speaking, would allow her to wear with it a moderately clunky leather wristband from which she refuses to be parted (a vortex manipulator is a messy way to travel through time, but not bad for technology she'd homemade from scraps).

The young women that make up the shop staff fall into the search with energetic vigour, apparently enjoying the challenge however much their supervisor sniffs disapprovingly in the corner. On her part, Jenny surprises herself by finding the whole experience enjoyable, and not only because it is new.

The new dress that Jenny ends up acquiring (and, semi-novel, legitimately paying for) has less embroidery than most. Despite the shop staff's best efforts, too, the dress isn't precisely complemented by her cobbled-together vortex manipulator. But the dress is sufficiently decorative to blend in without looking shabby. And she likes to think that she looks quite pretty, wearing it (because, Jenny has discovered, just because one is the clone-daughter of a renegade Time Lord with a penchant for running does not mean that one is without vanity).

Jenny wears her own clothes out of the shop, the dress over one arm, and makes her way through the cobblestone streets back to the house where she had first appeared in the Third Era of Post-Modernity Upon Bayfadarn. The house, constructed mostly of stone as is everything here older than a handful of decades, is really more of a mansion, or possibly a manor. Multi-storeyed, much of its lowest level is taken up with a great dining hall. It is an area past which Jenny quietly sneaks on her way to her allocated room, trying to avoid not so much the busily productive noise as the eye of her hostess, overseeing the bustling servants as they work.

She is unsuccessful. At the foot of the back stairs, Jenny is caught, and the Lady Marilla descends upon her with a swish of skirts and a glad cry. A moment later, Jenny's hostess has summoned a pair of maids and swept them all into Jenny's room in a whirlwind of enthusiasm. The dedication that the older woman applies to her self-appointed task of making Jenny ready for the dinner is, Jenny thinks, astounding.

Jenny does her best to lose herself in the moment, to the practised care of the other women, and to simultaneously remember how they manage the process, so that she might one day complete it herself if necessary (or even if she merely feels like it, because she can, even it might not be especially practical). The Lady Marilla ends up needing to lend Jenny a pair of high heeled shoes (Jenny's first thought, seeing them, is that it will likely be very difficult to run while wearing them), and there is a brief debate over the vortex manipulator, but otherwise the adventure in beautification seems to have been successful. It also seems to have done away with all the spare time she had previously had until the dinner began.

Jenny isn't nervous. It is her first time attending a dinner as guest of honour; her first time wearing a dress, and high heels. But most of what she has done, and done without fear, she had been doing for the first time. New experiences are nothing new to her. But, Jenny is finding as she walks slowly down the stairs to the dining hall, defeating sea serpents, or running laughing from local law enforcement, or joining a revolution to overthrow a malicious tyrant, is not quite the same as this.

The entire dining hall is filled with people, laughing, eating, drinking. Celebrating. Jenny momentarily wonders who here knows what monsters lurk in the dark, who knows that this morning a girl died and now they feast. She shoves the thought to one side (she is a soldier; she should know how to deal with death, the knowledge implanted into her mind at her creation).

But for all the build-up to the occasion, there is little to do at this celebratory dinner but make small talk. Jenny is not very good with small talk. She needs adrenalin, excitement, exhilaration. Fun. In short, Jenny thinks, she needs a distraction before she ends up following her Dad's example and leaving (she doesn't want that, not least because it is rude, and she did buy this dress).

And then across the room, lounging confidently in his chair, Jenny catches sight of a good-looking bloke wearing a military-style greatcoat that's, curiously, from neither this planet nor this time period.

Her Dad would probably warn her against him just on principle – not to mention on the grounds of the way the guy's looking at the women, and the men, and the suspiciously-advanced smelling pheromones he's giving off – but her Dad isn't here. And even if he were, Jenny would probably ignore his advice anyway.

She has a blind date with destiny, and she doesn't much care where – or when, or with whom – she makes a start.

[-end-]