AN: FYI, I am super busy right now and the only reason there are updates is because I have the chapters done in advance, after this the next one is ALMOST done, and then after that there are about three more that haven't been started on at all, so I have absolutely no idea when I'm gonna get a chance to do those during Freshers' Week.

DAY 18,200

Educating Creature

Clara

If she had to pick one person in the entire universe to pair up with to teach sex education to teenagers, she would most definitely not pick her wife. Then again, of the selection of people who sprang to mind right away, the Doctor was probably the best of a handful of evils. Her sister was still the absolute last person she would pick. That was because she was inappropriate, though – but Thirteen? She wasn't inappropriate, so much as… prudish? A bit of an idiot? At least she wouldn't traumatise them like Oswin would, though. And Clara was still under the impression that they wouldn't even need to teach anything. Their form was Year 11, it wasn't like it was Year 9, just heading into the twisted, hormonal annals of puberty and a pervading sense of inadequacy.

"Okay, first of all," Clara said immediately upon coming into the room, the Doctor trailing after her. Clara went to put her tea down on her desk, "Anybody asks any inappropriate questions, and I'll just sit here and read you Bible passages about abstinence for two hours. Understood?" That was the thing about having to teach alongside her wife, who knew absolutely everything about her and had spent almost every hour of every day in her company for five decades, she had this penchant for undermining Clara's authority. Probably why kids that were taught by both of them had the nerve to act up sometimes. At Clara's comment about the Bible, the Doctor snorted.

"You've never touched a Bible in your life, if you even tried to pick one up you'd probably give it a rash," Thirteen said. The kids laughed. Of course they laughed. Clara had figured out a while ago that they preferred the Doctor to her, but then, the Doctor was just one of those people. With charisma and charm and a billion quirks and interesting stories. They'd probably like her even more if they figured out she was a space alien, but the Alpha Twelfth Doctor was, so far, doing a far better job than the Beta Twelfth Doctor of keeping her true nature a close-guarded secret. Even if she did say pretty odd things sometimes. But Clara thought they were on purpose, like when she mentioned their 'cruise.' She remembered that vividly, because Clara could not remember them ever going on a cruise. It was only after some extensive questioning that she realised the Doctor was referring to the time they had been stranded in a rowing boat in the Pacific Ocean for four days, TARDIS unable to land and fetch them until they washed up on a deserted island. Not fond memories.

"And if I get one more smart comment from you, I'll be giving you some divorce papers," Clara threatened. Thirteen beamed.

"Oh, really? You know, I've never read divorce papers before. How soon can you have them ready?" she retorted. Then she sipped some of her coffee for added effect. According to the Doctor, that was her ninth cup of coffee that day. When she told Clara that on their way back from lunch, Clara had told her she had a problem. Then the Doctor had responded that she'd stop drinking coffee if Clara stopped smoking, specifically saying it would be a 'fun couple activity,' 'like a cleanse.' After that Clara had dropped it, and had lurked down the road to get her nicotine fix. She didn't even smoke that much...

"…Unbelievable…" Clara muttered, because she was too mature to think of a comeback. Also, she couldn't think of one. The Doctor smiled at her. Clara had to fight the urge to tell Thirteen she hated her.

"Are you gonna teach us sex education, miss?" a boy who wasn't in Clara's English class, Joshua, asked her. They had form in Clara's classroom. To her annoyance, the Doctor slunk over to steal the chair behind her desk. There wasn't another chair. Women, she thought resentfully to herself.

"Right, do any of you actually want to do sex education, or do you want to watch a film and lie to Mr McWatt about it and pretend you learnt lots of things about contraception?" Clara questioned them, going to sit on the desk.

"Aren't you gonna teach us how to put a condom on a banana, miss?" Rita, who was in her English and was a real troublemaker most of the time. She usually behaved for Clara. Clara liked to think that was because Rita was fond of her, but who knew for sure? It was usually Maths she got kicked out of, and Clara always thought, who needed maths, anyway? She had the Doctor for all that stuff. Arithmetic. Blech.

"I'd hate to know where you're putting a banana that means you'd need to put a condom on it," Clara remarked.

"It's safe sex, innit."

"Right… well, I… suppose…"

"They clearly already know plenty of things about sheaths and whatnot," Thirteen said. Clara looked around and stared at her.

"Sorry, did you just say 'sheath'? Are you from the dark ages?"

"Is that not what the proper name for them is...?" Wow. She seemed to be actually asking.

"I think you ought to just shut up for the next two hours, to be honest."

"I did say that you should talk to them. Just ask if they have any questions – do you guys have any questions?" Yeah, Clara thought, just invite the teenagers to ask the queer couple whatever questions about sex they like. What a phenomenally fantastic idea. "Oh, wait, we should have, like, a no-judgement, nothing-leave-this-room, anything goes policy."

"That's the worst idea you've ever had," Clara said, "Apart from the one about getting a bouncy castle to put in the garden."

"Well they need to know these things!"

"But you don't know these things to tell them. I don't want to be on the receiving end of this."

"Have you been on the receiving end a lot, miss?" Rita asked.

"Detention!" Clara shouted at her.

"You already gave me a detention this week."

"Well you can have another."

"That's not fair, I just said anything goes," Thirteen told her.

"You can field the questions then. Go on, move, out of my chair," Clara ordered. The Doctor had her feet up on the desk, but moved them and got up when Clara swatted at her legs. This was definitely going well. Part of her thought they must be being filmed, or something.

One of the things she didn't like about working with her wife was the fact that they bickered. They always bickered, and made comments, and were sarcastic, and had been like that for a very long time without ever needing to put a lid on it. And now they did need to put a lid on it. And they were, suffice it to say, not very good at it. Though the kids seemed to enjoy when they made digs at one another, unless it got particularly severe and people worried they might actually be serious. Of course Clara would never do anything to jeopardise her marriage on purpose, neither of them would.

"Okay, bring on the questions."

"You are digging your own grave, Doctor," Clara warned. She got shushed. Don't say I didn't warn you, she thought.

"Why do you like Miss Oswald?" Joshua asked.

"Wow. Jeez. Right in at the deep end there, aren't you?" Thirteen was taken aback. Told you so, Clara thought. Clara just waited to see if she would answer, the Doctor taking her place leaning against the desk with her arms crossed. She just thought. "Hang on, what's that got to do with safe sex? This whole thing is to limit teen pregnancy, learning about us does nothing to that effect."

"I agree," Clara mumbled, "Although, I'm kind of interested to hear your answer now."

"Oh, fine. Give me a second to think of something school-appropriate… uh… I mean, she's really nice," Thirteen said.

"No she isn't," Rita argued.

"Oi!" Clara protested.

"You just gave me two detentions! And you give us too many mock exams."

"I do not give you too many mock exams. And my mock exams are entirely irrelevant to what she's saying because I don't give her mock exams," Clara said, taking another sip of tea.

"Don't you give her oral exams?" she asked, and Clara nearly spat out her drink. But Thirteen laughed.

"Good one," she said, then Clara, trying not to choke, glared at her, and her smile vanished straight away, "I mean, that was highly inappropriate. Obviously. And now you have a detention from me now as well as two from her."

"That's not fair!"

"It's very fair, and I have half a mind to tell your head of year," Clara threatened, their head of year being Celia Frost. Then Thirteen got them (sort of) back on track.

"Okay, I've thought of something. I guess it's kind of like, when you're with someone every day, you can't help but become fond of them, even if you say you hate them – not that I hate you," she added to Clara at the side, "They become a part of you, and you don't want to lose them, like if you get a kidney removed. You don't want to get rid of that kidney, which is why you take it and you put it in a semi-translucent jar of formaldehyde and pickle it on the mantelpiece so that you can never be away from it and its amazing urine filtering capabilities, because in the end it was super loyal to you for at least half a century. Then it becomes a killer dinner party anecdote." Everybody stared at her. Including Clara, who had never heard this vile analogy before. She wasn't even sure what it meant.

"If you got a kidney removed you are not pickling it on the mantelpiece," Clara told her, "…Or me, if I died, for that matter, it's a bit Norman Bates."

"I'll have you know that my friend Roald Dahl kept bits of his spine that needed to be removed in a jar in his shed," Thirteen told her sharply.

"...Yes, because the shed isn't in the living room. We eat in the living room."

"You eat in the living room, and I wish you wouldn't, because you get mess all over the rug and I have to clean it," she remarked.

"Alright, crumbs in the living room bother you, but a pickled kidney in a jar wouldn't?" Clara questioned. Of course the kids were very interested in this incredibly weird exchange between the married couple who taught them. It really didn't do anything for her authority to have her wife around saying creepy stuff like that every day. It was a bit of a frequent occasion. When they'd lived on the TARDIS, Clara had gotten used to it, because there hadn't been anyone around to listen apart from their immediate relations. But the Doctor had all these… thoughts and opinions… influencing impressionable children. It wasn't a good mix. The Doctor in short bursts caused enough of a lasting effect, god knew what these kids would be like in ten years.

"If you spilled the kidney onto the rug like you did that salad you were eating last week, then yeah, it would, especially because that salad was ninety percent mayonnaise."

"Are you saying your kidneys are ninety percent mayonnaise?"

"Of course I'm not, that's ridiculous."

"But keeping a kidney in a jar isn't ridiculous?"

"This clearly isn't going anywhere," Thirteen told her. She rolled her eyes and sunk back down in her chair with her tea. Pickled kidneys weren't really anything to do with safe sex and contraception, but she was going to have to have serious words with her other half when they were alone about how not to treat failed organs.

"Are you doing anything for Valentine's Day?" a girl whom the Doctor took for History, Tia, asked. Probably desiring to get off the topic of organ jars, though the Doctor could easily argue that this was relevant, because it was kind of like the Egyptians, and she was a History teacher.

"What an excellent question. I don't know, Oswald, are we doing anything for Valentine's Day?" the Doctor turned to question Clara. Yet the children were there waiting with baited breath to see what their answers to these Valentine's Day questions were. Clara had been painted into a corner, though.

"Don't bully me. We have an anti-bullying policy, you know. Are there any questions that aren't about us and are actually about sex education?"

"How do you have safe sex if you're a lesbian?" Joshua asked.

"Make sure you have a wash," Clara said. The Doctor cleared her throat.

"I kind of think that one warrants a legitimate answer…"

"Dental dams. Which you can actually make out of condoms, they have many uses. Anything to add, Doctor?" The Doctor paused for a long while then. Clara still wasn't over 'sheath.' It was like living in medieval England.

"…Probably just listen to my wife… I mean, to Mrs Oswald. Or google it. I hear Google's pretty useful in this century. Maybe we should just put on a film…." She looked to Clara to see if she would get support in this, but before Clara could answer, Ethan from Clara's English asked another question.

"How come you never have pudding with breakfast, but you do with every other meal?" he asked.

"That's not really about sex," Clara told him.

"Are you obsessed with sex, miss?" Rita questioned. Thirteen made a noise that Clara knew from experience was a suppressed laugh she turned into a chesty cough. Clara tried not to have a reaction to it.

"Breakfast is interesting," the Doctor began saying, "Because this morning, we had pancakes, and that's kind of pudding on its own, you know?"

"Then why do they say breakfast is the healthiest meal of the day, if it's pudding? How come some people get pancakes and others have to have Weetabix?" Ethan continued to question.

"Weetabix is good for you," Clara told him.

"Only boring people like Weetabix," Rita said.

"Okay, back to the sex ed," the Doctor interjected, before Rita could add that Clara was boring, which was obviously where she was going, "The thing is, Mr McWatt is very worried about this school's teen pregnancy rates, because there were two just last year – one of them was a girl in your year, remember? And now she doesn't have any GCSEs."

"But there were three the year before, Doctor," Joshua pointed out.

"That's what Miss Stark said in briefing… Anyway, let's get it down to zero, shall we? With, uh, birth control. That stuff," she turned to Clara, "Don't they usually, like, give out condoms, or something? I would, but we don't have any."

"We do, actually," Clara said, "Because my sister brought loads of them over three months ago when she wanted to have a water balloon fight in the garden, and I confiscated them. Forgot to throw them away."

"How old's your sister?" Rita questioned.

"Same age as me, we're twins," Clara said.

"Identical twins?" Joshua asked.

"Yeah."

"So she could pretend to be you?"

"She could try, but she wouldn't do a very good job of it, she only has one leg."

"Is she a lesbian too?"

"I'm not even a lesbian. And answering personal questions about myself is one thing, I'm not going to start slagging off my sister to you lot," Clara said.

"How do you get pregnant?" Tia asked.

"You're sixteen, I'm pretty sure you know how to get pregnant," Clara remarked.

"Maybe. Shall I try and see?"

"No! Don't do that. Just do nothing at all, with anyone, or use protection. Go get the injection, go to a clinic and get put on the pill, remember that the morning after pill exists, if you go to a sex clinic they'll definitely just give you free condoms, or – you know, I'm pretty sure you all learn this in RE anyway," Clara said.

"Yeah, come to think of it, Mr Vaughn definitely showed me an RE paper before where there was an eight-mark question about the religious controversy surrounding contraception," the Doctor said, "Can you please just try not to get pregnant, okay? It reflects badly on us. And if you do get pregnant, please remember to tell anyone who asks that we definitely did discourage getting pregnant while you're a teenager."

"Isn't teen pregnancy really bad in America? There are more teenagers that get pregnant in America than here," Rita pointed out to Thirteen, personally attacking her for her accent. It happened a lot, come to think of it.

"In fairness there are just a lot more teenagers in America to get pregnant," she said, "And I really don't know, I, uh… moved here a long time ago. Just didn't lose the accent."

"What do you actually think of America, miss?" Joshua questioned.

"Kind of complicated. I guess I'd have to give it ten out of ten for concept, but only three out of ten for execution. And zero out of ten for sales pitch – I mean, it was totally a waste of tea when they threw it all into the Boston Harbor. Can't have been good for the fish, either. But I guess you can't blame them for not wanting to be ruled by the British, the British are notoriously awful," she said, "No offence. Anyone going on to do A Level History here in September, just be prepared to learn about the British Empire and the myriad of genocides and subjugations of probably millions of innocent native peoples."

"Is that true?" Ethan asked Clara, to Clara's surprise.

"Oh, yeah. The British are terrible, that's why everybody else in the world hates us. Well, it's mostly the English they hate."

"The rest of the world doesn't hate us," Rita said.

"Yes they do, why do you think we always lose Eurovision? We only get to the final because we give money to the competition. Actually, last year I think we were second to last," Clara continued to say.

"Then they're racist," Rita argued.

"Well, not really, we do deserve it, for forcibly taking over a third of the world and enslaving and killing loads of people, and stealing all their stuff."

"She's right," Thirteen said, "Like, if I were to ask you guys who the greatest British prime minister is, I bet you'd all say Churchill, but the hilarious – and by hilarious I mean awful and totally not hilarious at all – thing is, Churchill was responsible for the murder of three million Indian people, and he built concentration camps in Kenya, and campaigned to 'keep Britain white.'" Again, Thirteen proved that though she wasn't actually qualified to teach history, she was very good at it. And this was why they frequently did collaborative lessons.

"People complain about American imperialism these days, but America wouldn't exist without the oppressive rule of Great Britain back in the day," Clara said.

"You should teach History," the Doctor told her jokingly.

"This country hasn't done anything remotely 'great' since it won the Second World War, and even then it wasn't like it was a lone effort, we definitely wouldn't have won if the Americans hadn't joined. After that, America and Britain started their 'special relationship,'" Clara said, doing inverted speech marks with the hand that wasn't holding her tea, "And now everyone hates both of us. With good reason."

A knock on the door preceded the entry of Douglas McWatt, who didn't have a tutor group to be teaching the birds and the bees to because he was too busy with his deputy head duties, and now his interim headmaster duties while he replaced Elaine. Clara supposed he was just prowling the corridors to make sure everybody was doing okay. Unless he was just checking up on them specifically, and Clara wouldn't put it past him to do so. He was very in favour of them 'keeping [their] relationship out of school time.' As if they went around making out in store cupboards and taking breaks for quickies in the staff toilets – neither of those had ever happened. Well, the first one had. But only twice. Though they had only been caught once, and that was the important thing; if you weren't caught, you technically hadn't done anything wrong. The law and rules dictated right and wrong, but they couldn't dictate anything if they were kept in the dark.

"What's going on in here?" he asked, like they were up to something.

"We were explaining about the special relationship between Britain and America," Thirteen informed him, and then realised he had walked in on a sex education class and not one of her History lessons and tried to cover for herself and spluttered a bit. Of course, the act of her trying to hide this made him assume some pretty unpleasant things about what was really going on.

"Because she's British and you're a yank?" he asked the Doctor, nodding at Clara, "Don't teach them about lesbianism. Nobody cares about your 'special relationship.'"

"Lesbianism is an excellent way to stop teen pregnancy," Clara pointed out coolly, "Though, I'm not entirely sure anybody calls it 'lesbianism.'"

"They do behind your back," McWatt assured her. Oh, wonderful, she thought.

"It sounds like a religion," Thirteen said, then added wistfully, "I kind of wish it was. Then I'd definitely go to church more often than I do now. Which is never. Not a fan of organised religion."

"Like William Blake?" Ethan interjected.

"Yes!" Clara said to him proudly, "Exactly like William Blake, remember that for your literature exam, this argument about lesbianism." McWatt then looked at her like she'd been rude. "What?" she asked him, "Blake was a key poet of the Romantic period, it's important. And I said the mock exams are useful."

"You've been telling them all about your 'special relationship' and reading them romantic poetry?" McWatt questioned.

"What? God, no! The Romantic period was a movement in popular literature and art that started in the Eighteenth Century, the word 'romantic' didn't mean what it means now, it meant-"

"I don't care, Clara," McWatt told her. That was a thing he liked to do, call the teachers he didn't like by their first names in front of the kids to demean them. It worked very well. He never did it to the Doctor, either because her fake first name was just too weird, or because he actually liked her. Probably the latter. Everybody liked Clara's wife. It got a bit annoying sometimes, but it wasn't like Clara was any good at finding reasons to dislike her, even if she sometimes got very motivated to do so, like when they had to mingle at functions – which happened more often than one might believe.

"Well then, we'll be all too happy to get back to the topic of vaginas and penises now, so we'll be seeing you, Douglas?" the Doctor said to him, fake-smiling. Clara smiled at him too, but her smile was genuine because she was more or less swooning over the Doctor very slyly coming to her aid and giving McWatt a taste of his own medicine. Nobody usually dared call him Douglas in front of the kids.

"Abstinence," he grumbled to himself, slinking away and pulling the door closed.

"Or lesbianism! Don't forget the lesbianism! Or any of the gays, for that matter. Or, you know, just any couple who can't biologically reproduce on accident, of which there are many. Gender is a spectrum just like sexuality!" she called after him, but then he was gone.

Clara turned to address the class, "Right, after that catastrophe, you really better not get pregnant or get anybody else pregnant. We'd get in loads of trouble if you did now."

"Didn't McWatt kill Norris?" Joshua asked, "Everybody says he did, they say he killed her with a hammer and put it back in the DT classroom."

"That is absolutely not true," the Doctor said, "The poor woman died of a brain aneurysm, her head was not bashed in, she was not chopped up, or sawed up, or stabbed, it was an aneurysm and you cannot murder someone with an aneurysm. It was an open casket funeral, she had not been mutilated, okay? These rumours are bad for Mr McWatt's reputation and for the school."

"Now the lot of you are going to shut up, use birth control and condoms, and watch Dead Poets Society for the rest of the day," Clara told them, "And if any of you tell Mr McWatt that this wasn't the best sex education seminar you've ever had, I'll make a seating plan for form." They groaned unanimously.

"Y'know," Thirteen said quietly to her as a few of the kids began to talk among themselves and Clara dug out the DVD from the recesses of her desk. She'd not watched anything on DVD for the longest time, "Sometimes when we teach like this, I feel a real good cop bad cop kind of vibe."

"Just put the film on."