Chapter Text
The floor of the cell was cold, but Osgood couldn’t make herself rise. Pain radiated out from her chest to every part of her body, her breath a shaky whistle she could barely draw into lungs that felt like they were on fire. It was all she could do to lie there and force that frigid air in and out, in and out, to keep staring at the slow drip of water down the stone wall through the cracked left lens of her glasses.
The guards had decided she was making too much noise during her last asthma attack.
She coughed, forcing herself to keep breathing as deep as she could, knowing it was the only way to stave off another bout. If she could just drag herself to a sitting position, she might…but it wasn’t like it mattered much, anyway, she supposed. Any of this. It was only habit keeping her fighting for her breath, only a kind of dumb animal instinct that clawed for every second of life, even when there were so few seconds left.
Her own fault. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
If she had just followed orders—
But Rani Chandra had been only fourteen.
She’d evaded the authorities for weeks after smuggling the test subject out of the EuCom labs at Eastchester and onto a tanker headed to France, and if it’d just been a matter of coding the chip in her own fake I.D., Osgood would still be free.
But she’d had to check in on her dad in the hospital, make sure they were treating him all right despite his traitorous second daughter. She’d had to linger until the last moment before leaving him, and get caught out after curfew by a random patrol.
She wondered what time the execution was going to be. She hoped sunset. She’d rather like to see a last sunset. Assuming she rated a firing squad instead of a quick bash over the head before they dragged her out with the rubbish.
A sound out side the cell, footsteps. The guards, returning for a second round? Osgood’s chest seized up again, and she desperately tried to focus on keeping her breathing as steady and soft as possible. Yes, it was footsteps, definitely footsteps, and closer. Two people: one the slow, heavy tromp of a standard issue soldier in standard issue boots, the other a light clicking sharper, faster, decisive as machine gun fire.
So it was happening now. No sunset after all.
The viewing grate on the door scraped open. Osgood didn’t look up.
“You sure you want this one?” Osgood thought she recognized the voice from earlier, with all the kicking in the ribs. “She’s practically dead already. Keeps having fits.”
“Quite sure.” Crisp tones, husky but female. Used to being obeyed. “You should have your a medical file buried somewhere in your office. Why don’t you make yourself useful and dig it up.”
It was not a suggestion.
#
For the first twenty minutes of the car ride, the prisoner sits as perfectly still and upright as she can, her posture so rigid that the handcuffs in her lap don’t even clank together when wheels bump over yet another pothole, trying her best to breathe silently and survey her new captor from under those long, dark eyelashes.
Brigade Leader Stewart can feel the scientist’s eyes on her, but she waits another twenty minutes before saying anything. “It’s on the other side.”
Dr. Osgood starts, her handcuffs jangling. “What?”
“My scar. You were staring.” She turns a page in the medical file she’s perusing. Still doesn’t look up. The eyeglass prescription for this prisoner is appalling; she’s already going to have to dig up an inhaler if she doesn’t want the woman to drop dead in her first week, there’s no way she can justify the additional expense. If Dr. Osgood wants a pair of glasses without a smashed left lens, she will have to earn them. “It’s on the opposite side that my father’s was.”
Out of the corner of her eye she sees the girl flinch, duck her head down. Right on target. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“If I had a penny for every time someone stared, I’d be eating bon-bons at high tea with the Supreme Leader, not carting you back to the Tower,” she says dryly.
The scientist fidgets for a moment, blurts: “Why did you?” She takes a deep breath. “Save me, I mean.”
So this newest acquisition does have a spine after all, or at least enough scientific curiosity to push past her cowardice. “We had to…terminate the employment of several of our more promising scientists,” the Brigade Leader says, turning another page as her tongue lingers significantly on the word ‘terminate.’ She hears the prisoner gulp. “Luckily for you,” she goes on, “the government sent me out with a shopping list. You were on it.”
#
Osgood had heard rumors about the Tower of London Scientific Labor Camp: about their mission to defend the state against alien forces bent on interference, about their near-indistinguishable-from-magic tech scavenged from alien ships and weapons, about the power they wielded behind the scenes, bending politicians and generals with whispered promises and threats. She had even heard about their benefactor, the mysterious Master who occasionally dropped by with a hint about nuclear fusion now and a cheat sheet for genetic modification later, spiriting away a favorite or two of his (usually not to return, although when they did, there was invariably a political shake-up that left them significantly more powerful than they had previously been, and with significantly bloodier hands), leaving behind a collection of mostly human bodies in his wake, though the corpses of his extraterrestrial enemies also made an appearance. Much of this was top-secret, but Osgood had always been interested in acquiring information, and just mousy enough not to be remembered poking about in the filing cabinets. Yes, she was quite familiar with the history of the Tower of London Scientific Labor Camp.
She had never expected to be working for them.
She tried to keep her head down and blend in as quickly as she could. She had been given a second chance, and she was done taking risks. The regimented routine of the camp was a blessing, something to pull over herself like the identical white uniforms all the scientists wore, becoming an anonymous part of a greater whole.
She roomed with the other scientists in a guarded barracks outbuilding; they treated her cordially enough but kept their distance. Understandable: she was an unknown quantity, and if her head ended up back on the chopping block, they didn’t want theirs to be alongside it. Each morning, soldiers woke them and herded them to their work stations in the Tower itself, to the canteen for lunch and dinner, and back to the barracks at night.
Osgood got shoved a few times when she wasn’t moving along the rations queue as quickly as the guards would like, and the first night one of the captains had cornered her in the prisoner showers and ‘broken her in for the lads,’ but on the whole, the Tower was a vast improvement over the Eastchester Scientific Labor Camp where she’d been assigned for the past eight years. For one thing, she’d been given an inhaler upon arrival. For another, rations arrived promptly at the scheduled meal times, everyone was allocated a blanket regardless of their place in the pecking order, and the guards only administered beatings for offenses that had in fact taken place. Kate Stewart had an actual policy against random beatings. It was rumored that the last soldier who had decided to disregard that policy was now stationed in Antarctica, tasked with maintaining a radio control tower and waiting for all of the bones in his right hand to heal.
Not that she was a bleeding heart or a pushover. The scientific problems being worked on at the Tower were much more interesting than those at Eastchester, but being on the cutting edge did often mean that people, well—got cut. There was a reason that there had been a vacancy for Osgood to fill, and that reason was that Kate Stewart did not tolerate incompetence. The Brigade Leader was nothing if not hands on, and demanded daily in-person reports not only on immediate crisis situations like an Auton invasion or Zygon infiltration, but on ongoing long-term research such as anti-plastics and Z-67 gas as well. Defending the state from alien threats was challenging bordering on nerve-wracking, and the first time Osgood was forced to admit, with the threat of a Dalek incursion breathing down her necks, that she didn’t know something—in this case, the exact kind of electromagnetic pulse that should disable the Daleks’ eyestalks—she was fairly certain she was going to get taken out back and shot.
But while Ms. Stewart was harsh, she certainly didn’t waste resources that had proven valuable in the past. Following Osgood’s admission, the older woman had simply looked at her for several long seconds—seconds in which Osgood felt sweat trickle down her neck and tried desperately to remember how to breathe—and then said, “Then your new deadline is this time tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow?” Osgood had asked before she could stop herself.
The Brigade Leader had raised an eyebrow. “Because if you haven’t figured it out by this time tomorrow, we’ll all be dead.”
She had turned, and Osgood had caught herself on the edge of the counter, gripping tight to keep from sinking down to the floor in relief, still trying to remember how to breathe—
“You were given that inhaler in the hope you would actually use it,” her commander had said as she left the room.
Slowly, so slowly Osgood didn’t notice it for weeks, she started taking the lead in more and more of the in-person reports to Ms. Stewart. It wasn’t until one Sunday when she’d been talking for nearly an hour, interrupted only by the Brigade Leader’s sharp, incisive questions—and it wasn’t that those scalpel-sharp questions had become less terrifying, but it was plain that her commander had had some scientific training, not like the Section Leader back at Eastchester, who’d kept demanding that Osgood break the laws of physics, and it was such a relief to report to someone who understood what she was saying, who could ask questions that made Osgood stop and reconsider and oftentimes put her on just the right track—that Osgood realized that she was giving more reports than anyone else. That the other scientists were, had been for weeks, subtly pushing her forward to speak for their projects as well as her own.
McGillop didn’t deny it when she asked him about it, later, their heads down at their tables to avoid catching the eyes of the soldiers.
“Better you than me,” he said with a shrug. “She’s not going to shoot her new favorite.”
“I’m not her favorite,” Osgood said automatically, because she’d seen what rumors like that could do, the resentment that could build and build and lash out in a thousand unbearable ways.
“Well, you’re certainly auditioning for the position,” he said. “The work you put in, you’d think we were getting paid.”
He gave a hollow laugh, which attracted a glare from a nearby soldier, and they both bent their heads over their meals and chewed silently until they were no longer under his scrutiny.
“Besides,” he added. “I think she’s flattered. You’re the only person who gets distracted by her legs instead of that eye.” He gave a shudder. “Thing gives me the creeps. Why she can’t cover it up like her father…”
“It’s not that bad,” Osgood said automatically.
McGillop gave her a knowing look, and she blushed, looking away.
“I was going to die. She gave me a chance. That’s all.”
The eye really wasn’t that bad though. It had been distracting for the first few days, certainly, that silver line like a break in a windowpane slicing directly across her cornea, that clouded surface like a storm cloud filled with lightning waiting to strike.
But now it was just another part of Kate Stewart, and though Osgood still had a healthy fear of her superior officer, she knew that there were far worse things in the world than having her fate held in the Brigade Leader’s hands.
#
At first, Kate Stewart doesn’t spare much thought for her camp’s newest acquisition.
She delegates the responsibility of housing, feeding, clothing, and medicating her to the appropriate junior officers; checks on the status of the other three names on her go-to list in case Dr. Osgood has to be disposed of before the week is out; quickly loses herself in the routine of coordinating departments, reporting to government liaisons, disciplining her soldiers and their charges, and, when time permits, foiling the occasional alien invasion.
The scientist shows up on Kate’s radar a bit more frequently as time marches on: her reports are intelligent and insightful, not as concise as Kate would like, but then, rambling is a common response to fear. For the first few weeks, she has the same trouble as everyone else does meeting her superior’s eyes, which is, of course, the reason Kate has eschewed her father’s eye-patch: when you’re a woman trying to make your ways through the ranks of an organization like U.N.I.T., you use what you can to throw people off and intimidate them. Leaving her ruined eye and the long scar through it on display is a constant reminder of what happened to the man who did that to her, and saves her the trouble of having to constantly maintain discipline through inefficient things like random beatings and executions.
Only the odd thing is, after the first few weeks, Dr. Osgood begins looking her in the eyes when she talks to her.
There’s nothing of defiance in her gaze, those big brown eyes wide and eager to please, her fingers trembling as she gestures towards diagrams and test tubes and experimental rocket engines. Her voice starts out as a stammer, grows quickly more confident as she enters the realm of hard science, facts and figures and equations she is keen to impart. Kate inserts questions like knives and Dr. Osgood pounces on them in something like delight, as if they are gifts, and the words pour forth even more quickly: hypotheses and theories flood from her lips, uncontainable. She is, suddenly, in these moments when she is expounding on some new discovery, cheeks flushed and practically bouncing on her toes…compelling.
And the way she looks up at Kate when the click of her heels against the cold stone floor announces her entrance to the laboratory, the whip of her long dark hair as her head jerks up, that flash of fear like lightning across her face, and then something that is almost a smile—she hides it, isn’t trying to curry favor, but it’s there. She is pleased to see her.
And that thing that is almost but not quite a smile—it stays on Dr. Petronella Osgood’s face the entire time she gives her reports, it shades every other emotion that dances across that too open, too trusting face—fear and interest and fear and frustration and fear and triumph and fear, always fear. Kate doesn’t trust that almost-smile, but she cannot make herself forget it either; it occurs to her in odd moments: dotting another ‘i’ on the interminable budget paperwork as the clock strikes midnight, or attending another U.N.I.T. formal function where she has to play the political game and simultaneously fend off wandering hands, or standing alone before a window watching the rain.
There is someone who is pleased when she sees her. There is someone who is glad of the chance to speak to her, to give enthusiastic long-winded explanations to her. Who is terrified of her, and looks her full in the face anyway.
It is…an odd feeling.
One day Dr. Osgood actually interrupts her in excitement, so consumed by her own gusto that she doesn’t seem to realize she’s done it for a full thirty seconds. Everyone else notices it immediately; the scientists freeze, prey hoping not to catch the eye of the hunter, so still there is not even the sound of their breathing. A soldier steps forward, his eyes hard and his hand on the baton in his holster—and for a second Petronella only looks confused but then there it is, the dawning horror on the young woman’s face as her mind races backwards and find the exact moment in time when she made her mistake, and the panic in her eyes is mixed with something horribly like resignation, an expression Kate has seen—an expression Kate has caused--countless times. It is the face of someone without hope, because hope would imply the possibility of escape from punishment, of mercy.
It is an expression with nothing of a smile in it at all.
Kate raises a hand, and the soldier stops.
“Ma’am, she interrupted you.” Bewilderment makes an appearance on his face like an uncertain guest; soldiers, so uncomfortable with any emotion besides anger.
“She did indeed,” Kate says. Her voice is frosted steel. She cannot show any weakness in this moment. “And if she turns out to be wrong, you may proceed with disciplinary action, but since we’ve only got twenty minutes before the Autons start strangling us to death with our own computer cables, I suggest we not cripple the one person who has a suggestion for getting us out of this mess.”
Later, Osgood’s suggestion saves all their lives.
Slightly after that, Kate Stewart puts in an order for a new left lens for Dr. Osgood’s spectacles.
#
Osgood desperately needed to thank the Brigade Leader. Not just for the specs, though that had been amazing and completely unlooked-for; she’d assumed she’d be spending the rest of her life trying to filter out the fractured left half of her world. She was a little worried about potential backlash from her colleagues—she hadn’t forgotten McGillop’s jibe about her being the Ms. Stewart’s favorite—but even if a mysterious “accident” did end up crushing her glasses to dust, she would still owe her commander a debt of gratitude for getting them in the first place.
She already owed Kate Stewart her life. Owed her this job, this chance to do useful work.
She already owed her for stopping that soldier.
She wasn’t foolish enough to think that the Brigade Leader had stopped the beating for any sort of sentimental reason—just because giving her commander a report was the highlight of her day didn’t mean that her commander had much more regard for her than she did for the computers and the office chairs. She was a useful resource, that was all. And if Osgood had been idiotic enough to think of that raised hand as somehow protective, she would have been disabused of that notion on her first attempt to stutter a thank-you.
If Kate Stewart had wanted to forge some connection with her, that would have been the perfect opportunity. Instead she had been cold, dismissive, not letting Osgood even finish her sentence before cutting her off with a curt reminder that emergency situations would not always be around to save Osgood’s hide.
So Osgood was left to express her gratitude only in her actions instead, and she took to the task with zeal. She worked twice as hard as before, skipping meal times and working late each night in the lab—she had to clear that the guard on duty, who would radio in her name to the roster-checkers at the canteen so they didn’t think she’d tried to go off the grid.
Not every guard was appreciative of this complication of schedule, and some time was occasionally lost paying the price they demanded. And when they took her back to the barracks, tired and sore, her stomach would grumble and clench and keep her from sleep, and the next day she would sometimes have to stop and grab onto the counter as her vision flickered black at the corners.
But it was worth it for the Brigade Leader. She had saved her life.
A few weeks into this, Osgood got an inkling of the way the Brigade Leader might be looking for thanks instead.
#
Kate hangs in the doorway for a moment, a hand up to keep the guard from announcing her presence. The other scientists have already seen her, but Dr. Osgood, normally so observant, is too absorbed in scribbling away at the papers in front of her to notice if an entire tank crashed through the window. It gives the Brigade Leader a moment to survey her unnoticed, her behavior unaltered, as though the young woman is a particle somehow exempt from the observer effect.
Her uniform and lab coat are pressed crisp and spotless, as if she is expecting an inspection at any moment. Kate Stewart will give the Eastchester Scientific Labor Camp this, they certainly know how to impress attention to detail onto their charges’ psyches. There is nothing out of place, not one crease or wrinkle or mismatched button that could call attention to its owner, to indicate that she is a human rather than some particularly well-programmed robot—
But her hair. She hasn’t simply pulled it back into a ponytail today. It’s a set of braids instead, twining around each other. Perfectly within protocol, of course. Still, it speaks of—‘confidence’ is entirely the wrong word. A desire to impress? That should please Kate. It does, of course it does. Of course that is preferable to the idea that Dr. Osgood feels safe and settled enough to let bloom some tiny proof of individuality.
Kate runs her eyes up and down the figure before her again, looking more critically for anything else new. There are circles under her eyes that Kate is certain weren’t always there, and a slight tremor in her hands. Has someone been disrupting her sleep, stealing her food?
There is a pulse of anger in Kate’s chest that startles her. These rivalries will happen between the scientists. When so little power has to be divided between so many people, it’s natural to expect some reaction when favor is shown to one. Sometimes that reaction might be insinuating flattery designed to siphon away some of their good fortune, but in the case of such a perfect victim as Osgood? Of course it’s going to be retaliation.
She should have accounted for this when she gave the girl her new spectacles. She did account for this, she just—
She didn’t account for her own reaction in response.
This is…this is unexpected. And potentially dangerous.
Nonetheless, she comes up behind Dr. Osgood silently, and lays a hand on her back. Pretends that she does not feel the younger woman jump at the touch.
“M-m-ma’am!” Osgood stutters, gulping nervously. “I—I’m so sorry, I didn’t hear you come in—”
“Obviously.” Kate makes her voice as dry as the Sahara. Watches the way Petronella’s eyelashes flutter in consternation, the flush that alights on her cheeks, the way her chest heaves slightly as she tries to hold in a wheeze. “Inhaler.”
Permission given, Osgood fumbles for it in her pocket, takes a short puff. She doesn’t take her eyes off Kate the whole time.
Kate likes the way that makes her feel, the power that coils light and ready in her chest.
She traces a line on the diagram before them, her left hand mimicking the movements slightly against the younger woman’s back where the braid brushes against her lab coat. “Making some adjustments here, I see.”
Osgood swallows hard, tries to answer, stuttering and stumbling. “Y-yes, ma’am. We were losing fifty percent of our output with the previous power source, but if we replace that with the Warpstar—”
“And that can be done without blowing us to kingdom come?” Kate asks, raising an eyebrow. She leans forward slightly to get a better look at the plans, deliberately brushing against Osgood’s arm as she does so. Her left hand toys deliberately with the tip of Osgood’s braid, not quite tugging it. That would be interesting.
“I—I think so. It looks promising.” Her breath is coming in little short bursts; her body is trembling, erasing the distance between them. “The technologies are very different, but adaptation is—” She gulps again, holding herself as still as she can; it is not very still at all. “I think I can—make them compatible.”
Kate can feel the harried rise and fall of her breaths through the thin lab coat. Her hand on the diagram moves slightly to trace another line; she lets her fingers brush against Petronella’s wrist. Her pulse is rapid. Dr. Osgood’s eyes are wide; she is frightened. But she is not pulling away. She knows which side her bread is buttered on.
It would be so easy to move her left hand downward, to pull Osgood closer. She holds this young woman’s life in her hands; she is entirely in her power. Kate knows she would do whatever she asked. Look at her, the way her pupils dilate, the way her tongue darts out to nervously lick her lips--she probably even wants it, the little queer, would welcome the opportunity to get down on her knees in the supply closet and prove her dedication…and she’d do it anyway even if she didn’t want it, because she’d want the opportunities that came with it, the little perks (packets of chocolates, an extension on a deadline), and she’d be too frightened to say no—Kate could open her mouth and issue an order right now—
It would all be so very easy.
“Be sure to fix the power ratio here,” Kate says, tapping the paper once before moving briskly away. “Unless you’re actually planning to blow up our entire facility.”
#
Dr. Bush, one of the programmers, brushed past Osgood several minutes after Kate Stewart had left, pretended to be inputting figures to the computer next to her.
“She’s interested in you, you know,” she murmured.
Osgood very nearly knocked over an electron microscope.
“I—I don’t know what you’re—she couldn’t possibly—”
“Oh, relax,” Dr. Bush said, her words colored with the suggestion of a scoff. “I’m not bitter; I’ve had my youth and my looks and I’ve used them as best I can. I’m simply suggesting you do the same.”
Osgood swallowed, her fingers fretting at the edges of the diagrams in front of her. She wanted to make another denial, but she couldn’t, the memory of Kate Stewart’s fingers like a brand against her back, against the inside of her wrist. The ghost of a breath against her ear as she had leaned in close. But she didn’t know how to do what Dr. Bush was suggesting; she’d never learned to navigate these games to her advantage, had settled for being as inconspicuous a player as she could.
“You could do worse,” Mel Bush went on, her voice encouraging. “Hasn’t aged too badly, isn’t into anything terribly esoteric if the scuttlebutt can be believed. She doesn’t officially sponsor anyone so there’s no long-term benefits, but she takes the occasional one-night bedwarmer and the word is she doesn’t leave anyone out in the cold if they’ve been of service.”
“That’s…good to know,” Osgood managed. Her hands were trembling again. She wanted to ask for advice, but she was no longer that callow young girl ready to spill her innermost thoughts to the first warm, motherly figure who offered a shoulder to cry on. This was the only real conversation she and Dr. Bush had ever had, and she didn’t know enough about the other woman to guess what her real motivation was, the stakes she played for and how reliable an alliance would be. “I’ll keep that in mind when she takes what she wants.”
“You oughtn’t to limit yourself like that,” the older woman chided gently. “Compliance’ll buy you an extra blanket and some oranges; be sweet to her and who knows how far she might go for you?” She logged off the computer and bent closer for a moment under the guise of reorganizing her binder. “Before you know it you’ll be my age, and you’ll miss the advantages you had when it wasn’t only your brains and experience they wanted. Life’s hard enough without taking what reprieve you can.” She jerks her head subtly towards the captain hovering outside the laboratory door. “And it’ll get him off your back, at least.”
#
Kate Stewart isn’t in the habit of wandering the cold halls of U.N.I.T. HQ after midnight, but it never hurts to throw people a little off-guard. The hasty salutes and widened eyes that mark her progress shoulder up the creaking supports that hold up her game face, though inside she still feels hollow. Every time she speaks to her daughter on the phone they have less to say to each other, Gordon’s death lying like a chasm between them. Or perhaps that’s just a convenient excuse. Perhaps the secrets would always have piled up between them, all the comprises and cruelties she has had to perpetuate to keep this world safe—to keep Beth safe—making Kate hard instead, a stone-cold statue who has nothing to offer her daughter but stilted words on her mobile, and the money to keep her safe in her boarding school far away in the north.
Perhaps there is only enough nurturing in her to keep alive the orchids in her greenhouse, and barely enough for even that.
She finds her feet taking her to the laboratory down in the dungeons, considers resisting the course but doesn’t deny herself. She’s signed off on the guards’ overtime, she knows there’s a good chance Dr. Osgood will be there tonight, throwing herself diligently into her work. She will be surprised to see her commanding officer, and nervous, her eyes wide, her voice choking in on itself and her fingers fretting at the ends of her hair—but there will also be that almost-smile.
Kate needs that almost-smile tonight, for reasons she will not examine. And if there is one good thing about power, it is that you can take what you need.
But the barely-suppressed panic in the face of the guard at the lab door tells her even before she enters that someone else has learned those lessons of power all too well.
“Captain Carter.” Her voice cuts the air like ice as he scrambles off Osgood, trying to salute and pull up his trousers at the same time. “The British government is not in the habit of handing out overtime pay for fucking.”
“Ma’am,” he begins. “This wasn’t—you know how they are, trying to get away with anything—a bit of discipline, that’s what they need—”
Kate keeps her gaze fixed directly on him. She very deliberately does not look at Osgood, still bent over the counter, the silent tears coursing down her cheeks, her hands shaking.
“I’m not interested in excuses. You have just one choice—the past four weeks’ worth of evening shifts can come out of your next paycheck, or they can come out of your hide.”
“P-paycheck,” he stutters, his face flushing red.
“Wise decision,” Kate says dryly. “In future, you will confine your assignations with Dr. Osgood to the barracks, and to your off-duty hours.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Dismissed,” she adds with a raised eyebrow when he lingers, and he manages to fasten enough buttons that he can let go to throw his salute—sloppy, and she’s tempted to take that out of his hide instead—before beating a retreat.
Osgood stands very slowly, her hands held loosely but protectively in front of her, her eyes cast down. “I don’t have a paycheck,” she says softly. “So I suppose it’s coming out of my hide.”
Something twists inside Kate’s chest, but she ignores it. “I’m not blind, Doctor,” she says curtly. “I know coercion when I see it. Clean yourself up.”
The younger woman shuffles carefully over to the sink, splashes some water on herself. Her hands are shaking and half of it goes on her trousers.
“For God’s sake,” Kate sighs. She snaps on a pair of latex gloves, grabs a washcloth and soaps it up. “Here.” She grips Osgood’s shoulder firmly and turns her around, scrubs her with quick, brusque motions. Osgood freezes, her hands clenching at her side, but she doesn’t do anything as foolish as try to break away. “All done. Zip up. I suppose you need birth control.”
Osgood’s fingers fumble at her uniform as she straightens it; she doesn’t look at her commanding officer. “No.”
Kate raises an eyebrow. “But he wasn’t using—ah.” She takes in Osgood’s glasses again, the thickness of the lenses. The Eugenics Committee has always had its most ardent supporters amongst the opticians and ophthalmologists. “The operation wasn’t in your file. Before we acquired you?”
Osgood’s voice is quiet. “When I was eight.”
Not an uncommon age for sterilization among the indigent and the unfranchised, but early for the daughter of a war hero. “EuCom didn’t make an exception for your test scores?”
Osgood shrugs. “Hard to test well when you keep having an asthma attack every time the proctor looks your way.” She is still looking at the floor. Kate is not in any way annoyed that she is still looking at the floor. She does not miss having someone who looked her in the eye. “Could have been worse,” Osgood goes on, still softly. Still with her shoulders hunched, as if she is expecting to be hit. “With my eyes and my lungs as bad as they are, I probably would’ve been slated for euthanasia without Dad’s service record.”
Kate has the absurd urge to reach out and grip Petronella’s arm. She straightens the other woman’s already straight collar instead, says nothing. Osgood leans slightly into the touch, looks up. Her eyes are earnest.
Kate’s heart does not jump at how earnest those eyes are. She is not so weak.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Dr. Osgood is saying. “I didn’t—I shouldn’t have let—I don’t know how they find me, how they know I—I just want to do good work. I—I just want to do good work here. For you. For—”
Kate curls her fingers around Osgood’s bicep, pulling her down onto a stool. “They find you because you do everything but light a signal beacon.”
Osgood’s forehead creases. “I…I don’t understand.”
Kate wants to sigh. She is not this person. She does not patiently explain the patently obvious. “You don’t ever let anyone know what you want. It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter how little it’s worth. Once it’s known, it can be withheld.”
“Oh.” Osgood bites her lower lip. “But how…how can you get anything, then?”
“Lies,” Kate says. “Force. Machinations. Take your pick.”
Osgood looks up at her. “I’m not good at any of those things.”
Heaven help the honest. How can someone so intelligent know so little about how the world works? Kate should really just dismiss her; there is nothing to be gained in tutoring a hopeless case.
Instead she says, as patiently as she can, “Then you should get someone to do it for you.” Inexplicably, the words keep coming out of her mouth: “I’m talking about sponsorship.”
“Oh.” Dr. Osgood looks down. “I haven’t—no one has—I’m not—for long-term, people want someone more—” Her hands flutter nervously. “No.”
“There are advantages,” Kate says. She keeps her voice dispassionate, as if they are discussing the weather. In a way, they are: there is nothing more ubiquitous than the shifting of alliances and power balances in the state, its own kind of atmospheric pressure and wind front. “It would soon stop all this, for one thing.”
“But then you’re…” Dr. Osgood hesitates, forges on bravely despite the fact that she is very nearly contradicting Kate. “You’re stuck with one person.” Her hands twist in front of her; she is still not looking Kate in the eye, in a way that feels almost pointed now. “If they’re cruel…it can be worse than this. This at least…it dies out eventually. When they get bored. When they find someone new. When you get used to…hurting, and it’s not fun for them anymore.”
“There is that risk,” Kate agrees. “It doesn’t do to enter into these things hastily.”
Dr. Osgood glances at her sidelong through her lashes, probably wondering if Kate is speaking from personal experience. She is and she isn’t—having Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart as a father meant that the times she’d had to add her body to the bargain in her rise to power had been few and far between. But having him for a father also meant that she saw quite a comprehensive list of examples of all the ways the sponsorship system could work and not work. She’d seen women worn down into frail shadows by his cruelty and bullying bluster, and she’d seen the way those same things had taken other women like Elizabeth Shaw and honed them, made them hard and ruthless and gleaming and in all ways stronger and more powerful than her father could ever hope to be, even if they owed a kernel of their magnificence to him.
Elizabeth Shaw. Now there is an idea.
“If you’d prefer a woman—” she begins, and Osgood’s eyes widen, and she must nip this in the bud, because she is her father’s daughter, and that is why she does not play this part of the game, because she saw the way he used his protégés to prop himself up and yet grew weak the more he took, entangled in a game of egos and desire—“General Shaw still has an eye for young things,” she says bluntly. “I could do the introductions. She’s mellowed considerably in her old age. Or Colonel Haggard—”
But Osgood is flinching away. Her head twists to the side, looking down and towards the wall. “I’ve been…of use to women before. It didn’t strike me as considerably different."
“Well, it can’t be, can it?” Kate gives a harsh laugh. “Or it’d be queer.”
Osgood’s eyes almost flicker up to Kate’s. “Heaven forfend.”
It’s only the faintest trace of sardonicism. Kate could still punish her for it.
Instead she says, “Well, I’m not going to push the sponsorship option if you’re dead-set against it. It’s your life.”
Osgood does meet her eyes then, gives her a crooked smile. “Is it?”
Flirting with insubordination, she doesn’t say. She grips Osgood’s shoulder—it really is a very nice, very firm shoulder—and pulls her to her feet. “Come on. I’ll walk you back to the barracks.”
“You don’t have to—“ Osgood starts to protest.
“I insist.”
#
One week later, Osgood was summoned to the Brigade Leader’s office.
“Ma’am?”
Kate Stewart didn’t look up from her pile of paperwork, just gestured at the chair across from her desk. “Sit.”
Osgood sat.
She tried very, very hard to keep her knees from knocking together.
She looked around the office.
It was a large room, made cramped by all that had been crammed into it. There was a window directly behind the Brigade Leader, looking out over the road below, but the rest of the stone walls were crowded by filing cabinets and bookcases, overflowing with binders and papers and scientific journals. To her right, a whip and a swagger stick leaned against a coat-rack, and a makeshift curtain hid the alcove where a small bed—little more than a cot—pressed against the wall, insurance against the frequent nights when it wasn’t worth the commute across London to her flat. The hiss and squeak of old pipes betrayed the water closet to the left. The desk directly in front of Osgood was so covered in official paperwork that it was very easy to initially miss the two photographs set out there, both of her father.
Ms. Stewart set down her biro with a sudden snap that made Osgood jump.
“I have a mutually beneficial proposal in mind,” she said, fixing Osgood with those impenetrable eyes, one dark brown, one cloudy silver-blue.
Osgood’s throat was suddenly very dry. She cleared it. “Oh.”
Her superior raised an eyebrow. “I take it you have some idea where this is going?”
Osgood shook her head rapidly. “I—wouldn’t want to, to presume. Ma’am.”
A wry smile. “So you do have some self-preservation. That’s promising.” Kate Stewart leaned back in her chair, surveyed Osgood thoughtfully. “Nonetheless, I do believe you have some notion of what I have in mind.”
Osgood very carefully kept her gaze from the curtain over the bed. It felt, very suddenly, like the only thing in the room besides her and Kate Stewart.
“Have you given any thought,” the Brigade Leader went on, “to our discussion of sponsorship?”
Osgood’s mouth fell open in shock.
“To be completely clear,” Kate Stewart said, steepling her fingers, “I would like to take you on, on a permanent basis. You would see to my needs, and in exchange, it would be understood that no one else would lay a finger on my property. There would of course also be the usual rewards for services above and beyond your remit, but I imagine you would find those less attractive than a predictable list of responsibilities and the opportunity to conduct your scientific work in peace.
“There will be no punishment if you do not take this offer,” she went on. “It is a simple economic transaction. An exchange of goods and services. You are already aware of some of the disadvantages in yoking yourself to someone who may later tire of you; you should be aware that there is also the risk that one day I may fail to correctly navigate the lately rather stormy political waters, and as my protégé, you would be swept up in any purge. On the other hand, should I continue my record of landing on my feet, you will enjoy significantly more stability than you would otherwise. You would be able to pursue the work you find most meaningful and interesting without fear of some of the more…permanent…consequences that usually attend eccentricity or failure. Depending on your performance in future, if there are one or two activities you find particularly unpleasant, I would be willing to negotiate taking them off the table or at least reducing their appearance.”
Her speech concluded, the Brigade Leader leaned back in her chair, her face as impassive as if she had just asked Osgood for the numbers on the latest protein synthesis experiments.
Osgood’s brain was in a whirl, and the words spilled out. “I don’t understand, you don’t sponsor people—”
Kate Stewart raised an eyebrow like she was unsheathing a sword. “Listening to the office gossip?”
Osgood clamped her mouth shut with an audible snap, backtracking as quickly as she could, heart racing. “No, no, of course not, I wouldn’t—I just—from what I’ve seen, that is, I know I haven’t been assigned here long, but—”
“You’re right, of course,” the Brigade Leader interrupted, with something that could very nearly be mistaken for mercy if not for the cold smirk on her lips. “It is a break from my usual pattern. People will talk. At my age, some sentimentality is to be expected, particularly since I am a woman, and there will be a few probing attempts to ascertain if I have gone soft.” Her smile was hard and feral and absolutely ruthless. “Those attempts will not end well for the people who initiate them.”
“You’d take that risk.” Osgood’s confusion let the words dangle one at a time from her lips, like figures trembling on the edge of a cliff before being pushed over. “To…have me?”
“Do you think my grip on power so weak that you could shake it?” the Brigade Leader said, her voice like ice.
Osgood throats closes up on her, choking. “No,” she whispers. “I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t presume…”
“Inhaler.” The word fell from those lips like a royal decree.
Osgood obeyed.
“You clearly have further reservations,” Kate Stewart observed flatly. “If you refuse to be honest with me, I will be forced to conclude that tendering this offer was a mistake, and withdraw it accordingly.”
Osgood should have let her withdraw the offer. She should have agreed that she was unworthy, and let Kate Stewart do what she wanted to do to her that night, and let herself be escorted back to the barracks and back to the pattern of her days, predictable for all that it was filled with bursts of fear and pain.
Instead she found herself saying, “But I’m just not—I’m not worth it. Ma’am.”
“Are you questioning my judgment?” Anyone else and those words would be playful even as they were cruel, a cat-and-mouse game that could only end with Osgood trapped under claws. Out of the Brigade Leader’s mouth they were opaque, and Osgood didn’t know what to read into the slight disappointment that colors them.
“You could have anyone, ma’am,” she said, because she had run out of survival strategies and all she had left was honesty and she had to pray that it was enough. “If you wanted to—to take someone on, permanently. You could have someone—beautiful, like Captain Oswald or—“
“Captain Oswald is indeed lovely,” the Brigade Leader agreed dryly. “And so would be the knife she would plant in my back. Ten years ago I would have found that kind of game terribly exciting. Now—age may not have made me soft, Doctor, but it has led me to more deeply appreciate the value of predictability. Loyalty.” Her gaze burned deep into Osgood. “I appreciate your loyalty.”
Had the room seemed small before? It seemed even smaller now. There seemed to be no space for anything except the Brigade Leader’s eyes. She could feel them piercing her like lasers, seeming to penetrate down to her bones, to scorch her blood until her pulse burned in her neck and wrists.
And yet, it was not so difficult as it had been, even moments ago, for Osgood to breathe. “Thank you, ma’am. I have tried—to, to thank you. To be—”
“This is not some insipid state-sponsored soap opera,” the Brigade Leader warned her, abruptly standing. “I will not coddle you, and I will expect you to continue to do your job. If you’re harboring some kind of romantic notion that I’m going to pet you and praise you and let you get away with murder, the best thing for you would be to forget this conversation ever happened.”
“I wouldn’t—” Osgood started to protest.
Kate Stewart raised her hand, cutting her off. “I don’t need, or even particularly want, an answer immediately. If you find after further consideration that this offer is something you’re interested in then ask to be escorted to my office on Friday.” She walked to the door, opening it and dismissing Osgood’s into the care of the guard outside with a sharp jerk of her chin. “That will be all, Doctor.”
#
Kate makes fewer visits to the laboratory over the next week. On her visits there, she deliberately ignores Osgood as much as possible without making it obvious, focusing instead on the other scientists. She has allowed them to become far too complacent. It is pleasant to watch them scramble to put themselves together even to report to her. It is a reminder of the power she wields, that even when she chooses not to exercise it, it is always there, waiting, coiling and ready under her fingertips like the whip on her belt next to the swagger stick.
If it is also a reminder to Dr. Osgood of how much more unpleasant things could get if she does not acquiesce to Kate’s wishes, well. She said there would be no punishment. She did not say there would continue to be rewards. She is only human.
And if Petronella Osgood does have the strength to say no—and it seems unlikely, but Kate suspects it may be true, suspects that that bedrock of loyalty may only so firm because of the untapped wells of fortitude beneath—then it is best to get used to ignoring her now, best to harden herself to the loss of her pleasure in that not-quite-smile, in those fearful but pleased eyes, in the way Osgood has of listing towards her, like a flower to the sun.
#
It was Friday afternoon, very nearly evening, and Osgood knew what she was going to do.
She had known what she was going to do all week, but she had tried not to think about, even as she could think of nothing else. The arguments went around and around in her head: she wasn’t prepared for this, she had never been expected to do this before, she didn’t know how to be what Kate Stewart needed, not long-term. Kate was beautiful and strong and she seemed sane and no more sadistic than the next military officer, and Dr. Bush had advised doing what she could to get her as a protector, but it was one thing to lie back and submit to keep from getting hurt—they always got bored in the end, they always moved on to newer, more exciting prey—and another thing to walk into a room under her own power and say yes, yes I accept, yes I will serve you for however long until you tire of me and I will promise not to disappoint you and I will pray that I do not break that promise, that you do not break me for breaking it, that you will not suddenly become something worse than you are because I have no more ways to retreat--
She knew all the arguments against what she was going to do. She also knew that it was inevitable.
She was so tired of looking over her shoulder for the next blow to land. If there was a place to take shelter, she would grab at the chance.
And if that place was Kate Stewart’s bed, there were far colder and more terrible places in the world to be.
It was Friday evening, and Osgood asked the guard on duty to take her to the Brigade Leader’s office.
Kate Stewart didn’t even look up from her paperwork when the door opened. “I take it you have something to tell me, Dr. Osgood?” she said coolly.
She was going to make her say it. Osgood took a deep breath.
“All right,” she said. “I accept.”