DAY 18,200

Inhuman Footprints

Clara

Was it wrong of her to be annoyed that, at present, her wife was in their house, serving food that Clara had cooked, to a man she was not married to? While she herself lurked, alone, in the chilly garden shed smoking a cigarette? At least in the shed, she thought resentfully, she could have proper cigarettes, not those electronic jobs she was forced to vape with in the house because the Doctor hated the smell. The Doctor would just have to put up with all of her shed-junk stinking of tobacco.

At least, she thought resentfully, most of her resent directed towards herself, the idea of Thirteen miraculously falling for Cole Campbell and his 'charms' had been shot in the foot very early on. Clara heard it over the earpiece; heard the Doctor invite Campbell through the living room and then heard Campbell ask if Captain Nemo was what they were having for dinner. Clara could almost picture Captain Nemo's horrified little lobster face. But it was still only almost, because Captain Nemo couldn't change his facial expression. Lobsters didn't feel emotions, or pain, they didn't have the brain capacity. Not that that stopped the Doctor from being abominably outraged.

Clara sat with a long-range scanning device in her lap, aimed vaguely towards the house, waiting for it to do its thing. Unfortunately, 'its thing' took a lot of time to do, so she had a lot of time to kill, a lot of time to spend listening to her wife try and flirt with some weirdo. And Thirteen was not very good at flirting, Clara had quickly learnt while listening. She could flirt with Clara no problem, but anybody else? She became a train wreck. It was kind of amusing.

Sometimes, Clara dropped a line for the Doctor to say to try and schmooze Campbell, whenever she drew a painful blank, but for the most part Clara stayed quiet on the earpiece. Mostly because, while supervising Clara's latest foray into the world of 'cooking' (it was debatable if pouring baked beans over microwave noodles constituted as much), the Doctor had begged for her not to be a pain, which she argued was more than fair since Clara's being-a-pain was what had gotten them into this mess to begin with. Besides, she was so irritated at herself and had grown so uncharacteristically melancholy as a result of this, she could hardly bring herself to make snide quips. So she just moped and smoked and watched the scanner languidly.

"You have a lot of books," Campbell commented. He had nothing interesting to say, which was a shame considering so many of actions were 'interesting' to say the least.

"Oh, most of them are Clara's," Thirteen said, then Clara heard her cough and splutter, "Clara's that she leant me, is what I mean, and I keep forgetting to give them back to her. My friend." Smooth, Clara thought dryly to herself. It was a lot of this. Wasn't as thrilling as it had initially seemed. Sometimes she heard the chink of cutlery on plates, but nothing all that captivating.

"Have I mentioned how boring this is?" she complained a minute later, "Ask him if he likes wasps."

"Do you like wasps?" the Doctor repeated to Clara's surprise. She had been kidding, but obviously Thirteen was bored as well. Then again, she didn't have Clara Oswald's sterling company, so why wouldn't she be bored?

"What are wasps?" said Campbell.

"Nothing important," Thirteen said unsurely, Clara frowning in the shed, glancing at the house like that might shed some light on this.

"Can I use your toilet?" Campbell asked quite abruptly. Clara heard Thirteen taken by surprise, pausing briefly before giving him the directions upstairs to the bathroom. Lucky they had locked all the other doors, and their fancy medicine cabinet above the sink. All their other stuff had been stashed in the attic; just a few hours ago they had had an argument about whether the photo of them in front of the Statue of Liberty needed to be put away. Thirteen said of course it did, because you could see the damned Eiffel Tower in the background, what with that photo being taken in Paris in 1886 when Lady Liberty was still under construction.

"Have you found anything on the scanner yet?" Thirteen asked, and Clara didn't answer because she was still thinking about them bickering over which of their possessions needed to be hidden away out of sight. "Clara?" she hissed.

"What? Oh. No. I don't think it's working, I'm too far away."

"I told you, if you didn't break our stealth field generator two months ago, you could have just sat in here with that thing," the Doctor complained.

"Yeah, I know, so you keep saying, but it doesn't change the fact that it did get broken."

"By you!"

"I mean, I don't really remember what happened, to be honest," Clara lied. The stealth field inhibitor was just a device that made the user invisible, a little metal ball, smaller than a tennis ball, one held in their hand. Clara had dropped it, it had smashed, the Doctor had been unable to repair it. It got brought up quite often. "Well, if the scanner won't work, what am I supposed to do? He doesn't know what a wasp is, and he ate one, he's obviously… something." No response. "Doctor?"

"You should come inside," Thirteen said seriously.

"But he'll see me," Clara pointed out, though she did drop her cigarette on the floor and stamp it out with her foot.

"Just get in here, that doesn't matter anymore, hurry up. Bring the scanner." Clara sighed but stood up from her chair, scanner in hand, and phased right through the wall of the shed to cross the dark, frosty garden, eyes brushing over her dead rose brush she had planted for her mother by the fence on the left. She phased through the wall at the back of the house as well, keeping an eye out for Campbell.

He wasn't there, though. Instead she walked in to find the Doctor crouched down on the floor examining something, though her body hid what it was from Clara's view.

"What?" Clara asked. Somebody else may have jumped at her practically appearing out of thin air, but the Doctor was very used to it.

"C'mere," the Doctor said, jerking her head to indicate the same thing. Clara trudged over to look over her shoulder and saw there, on the floor, a pool of goo, about the shape and size as a large man's shoe.

"What is that?" Clara asked. Thirteen didn't answer, she stood up and grabbed a knife from the table, then returned to stick the knife into the stuff on the floor and lift it up. It had the consistency of honey, and stretched and dripped from the tip of the silver knife back onto their tiles.

"Morphic residue," she answered, "Ran into a Vespiform with Donna a few centuries ago that left the same stuff behind when it transformed."

"What's a Vespiform?" Clara asked, crouching down next to the Doctor.

"A giant wasp," Thirteen said, "But if Cole Campbell turns into a giant wasp, you would have thought he wouldn't eat a little one. Millions of species leave stuff like this behind. Even humans lose skin all the time, the cons of growing old. Give me that scanner." Clara did give her it, and she held it above the stuff. "I used to have a species identifier, but I made the thing into a mirror that works on vampires and gave it to Jenny – god – decades ago. It sure would be useful right about now."

"So he's definitely an alien?"

"He likes your cooking, Coo, of course he is."

"You're an alien and you don't like my cooking," Clara pointed out sharply.

"But I like everything else about you, so it equals out," the Doctor said distantly, not paying all that much attention to Clara, her efforts mainly focused on scanning the morphic residue.

"So he's an alien, and he's gone to our bathroom dripping this stuff? He wasn't traipsing any goop around earlier," Clara pointed out, and Thirteen paused.

"No, he wasn't… he's transforming…"

"Into what? Why?"

The service bell attached to the scanner dinged to indicate it was 'done,' the little screen on it flashing green. Thirteen glanced down at it to read what it said, Clara waiting to be told the information second hand in a moment's time.

"He's a Khaolu," the Doctor said.

"What's that?"

"Uh, sort of like a big ball, covered in tentacles; they consume other lifeforms to assimilate their shape. Like a Plasmavore, but it's a full, physical change," Thirteen said, standing up, "Which means there used to be a real Cole Campbell, and now he's dead."

"So why is a Khaolu trying to get you to go on a date with him?" Clara pressed.

"How should I know!? Maybe he's lost and he can tell I'm not a human, too, and just wants our help," she shrugged, "Or maybe I'm just a catch. You and I aren't the same species either, remember."

"How could I forget."

They were interrupted, right as Clara was about to ask her wife what they ought to do about the alleged tentacle-alien presently morphing in their upstairs bathroom, by squelching sounds from above. They didn't need to exchange a single word; a mere, worried glance between them was all it took for them to be fully on the same page, and Thirteen left the scanner on the kitchen table as the pair of them crept through their living room, strangers in their own home all of a sudden, to investigate Campbell the Khaolu.

The creature – for it was much more a creature than a man at that point – came galumphing and slithering along the landing and heaved its many-armed self down their stairs. There was a shine to it, and a glistening coat of excretion was left on the carpet. It really was just as the Doctor had described it, a big ball covered in tentacles, sickly green in colour, and it practically rolled as it moved, throwing itself back down the stairs like an oaf. And then, when it reached the bottom and was there opposite the both of them, all semblance of their earlier ruse lost, it lifted itself on four of its many tentacles to be towering above the Doctor and Clara Oswald.

"It's taken me seventy-four years to find you, Doctor," Campbell said, "I didn't think it would be so easy to corner you." Oh, fantastic, yet again they had tried to be clever and had played right into the hands – or suckers – of some unknown, scheming adversary. Was there even any point trying to make plans?

"Corner me? Why? What have I ever done to you? I've never had any issue with the Khaolu," Thirteen said, "I've never even been to your planet. What are you doing on Earth? And what happened in 1948?"

"1948?" Clara asked, and Thirteen gave her an irritated look.

"He said seventy-four years, Coo."

"But it's 2022."

"Yeah."

"But 2022 minus seventy-four is…" she paused, briefly tried to count on her fingers, frowned, probably looked a bit like a computer when it crashed.

"1948. It's 1948," Thirteen said, and Clara gave up. She'd had her telepathic link to Oswin as a mathematical crutch for two-thirds of her life, and when Oswin wasn't there, the Doctor was, or Adam Mitchell. Always somebody.

"It's not what you did," Campbell said in a very guttural, slimy-sounding voice, like his throat was full of phlegm. If he had a throat. She supposed that to eat people and take on their shape, he must, somewhere in his boneless mass, "Your daughter murdered my mother in cold blood." And that had done it. Any chance of courtesy was thrown out of the window when Jenny's character was brought into question – the Doctor would defend her daughter more ardently than she would defend even Clara, or herself.

"Jenny would never murder anybody in cold blood," Thirteen said.

"I'm not here to argue. I'm here to do the same thing to her that she did to me. Even Time Lords won't regenerate from being consumed by a Khaolu," Campbell said. Of course it was a murder plot. It was always a murder plot. It looked like McWatt was going to be doing even more interviews to fill Boyd's old post, now that it turned out his new hire was an alien. An alien who didn't know what they were talking about, she should specify. Unlike her good wife.

"No, you should explain," Thirteen argued, "Jenny wouldn't do a thing like that, what was your mother doing in 1948? Where was she?" Of course Campbell wouldn't listen to reason though. It struck Clara that she was seventy-five years old, and that Campbell had been looking to wreak his revenge on the Doctor for nearly the same amount of time that she had been alive. That was a lot of time to build up a grudge. A tentacle lashed out with the same tenacity as the tongue of a chameleon and would have struck Thirteen's head had Clara not wrenched her out of the way. The woman had a habit of slow-reflexes. So many times it was Clara who acted to save the pair of them just because Thirteen had too much faith in people not to attack her, or because she wasn't paying attention.

"I think we're beyond the point of trying to reason with him!" Clara said, pulling the Doctor into the living room. But the Khaolu was fast, and had suckers, and could stick to walls and ceilings to pursue them through their really quite small house. If Clara had listened to the Doctor's suggestion that they get an enormous mansion (or a castle), then escaping an alien invader would probably be a damn sight easier.

"I'll kill you!" Campbell yelled, "For my mother! You and your wife – let your daughter lose both of her parents." Clara was almost disgusted by that.

"I'm not her bloody parent!" she shouted, sticking her head out for a brief second around the edge of the armchair she had forced Thirteen to join her in cowering behind. A mistake. A tentacle lashed for her and struck her around the side of the face, throwing her to the ground with her cheek hot and soaked with blood from where its spiny suckers had slashed her skin.

"Are you okay!?" the Doctor asked, trying to lift Clara's head with her hand.

"I'm fine," she said, and she was. She would be. It was all surface injuries, aesthetic damage, but now Campbell was gaining on them and clambering over their coffee table and their chairs. The Doctor grabbed Clara's elbow and pulled her into the kitchen, ordering her to push the table over to give them another brief barricade as the thing dragged itself towards them in hot pursuit. "So what are we supposed to do!?"

"Well I'm not going to let it hurt my family," Thirteen said decisively, "You think he'll stop with me? No, he'll try and kill you, and revenge never satisfies anyone, so he'll just move on to someone else. I am not letting anybody try and kill my daughter, even if she can fend for herself perfectly adequately." Campbell's dark green tentacles came flying for the table, lashing it to splinters behind them.

"Of course I appreciate the sentiment and everything, sweetheart, but he's kind of about to kill us and I'd really like to know what you plan to do to stop him, you know, killing us," Clara hissed at her.

"Oh, right," the Doctor said, then paused. A tentacle whipped through the air between them, grabbing around the table so that the Khaolu could pull itself right over to them. Clara wrenched Thirteen out of the way again just as the Khaolu appeared over the top of the table, and with the Doctor in tow she made a beeline for the hallway and the front door, but Thirteen held her back, "We can't go out there, we have to go upstairs."

"We can't go upstairs! There's no way out from upstairs!"

"Come on," the Doctor dragged them towards the stairs with Campbell coming right after them. Clara gave up fighting, desperately hoping Thirteen knew what she was doing, tentacles wrapping themselves around the banisters so that the Khaolu could force itself to follow.

"Haven't you ever seen a horror film!? When people go upstairs, they die!"

"Shut up!" Thirteen ordered. A tentacle slashed for Clara's foot, but her reflexes were fast enough that she managed to stamp on it with the heel of her shoe. Her lapse as she did, however, meant that when the Doctor kept forcing her upstairs she stumbled and nearly fell over, the Khaolu always right behind them.

Clara trusted the Doctor to lead her and so had her eyes trained on the Khaolu, when her line of vision was abruptly cut off by a bright white something slipping between them. This thing, it turned out, was the bathroom door being slammed shut by Thirteen after she dragged the both of them into the toilet, dropping Clara's hand and hastening to lock the door.

"What good'll that do!?"

"Hold it off!" Thirteen ordered.

"What!? How!?"

"You're telekinetic!" Thirteen shouted, leaving Clara to fend off Campbell on the other side of the door, hearing him slither about up the stairs, the squelching easy to identify even through the barrier. The Doctor ran over to the cabinets against the other wall, the large one underneath the sink and the other one above it (they had a plastic step, the kind children used, so that they could reach the top shelf of the cupboard), pulling out all sorts of brightly coloured bottles full of cleaning solutions, some of Earth origin, most from 'elsewhere.'

Clara divided her attention between her wife and Campbell, glancing backwards and forwards, trying to keep a forcefield generating across the door. She had never been all that good at forcefields though, and most definitely not when she couldn't even see what she was trying to ward off.

"What are you doing?" Clara asked, watching the Doctor push the plug into the sink and begin emptying bottles into it, muttering at them to pour out their chemicals faster.

"I'm improvising," she answered, then the Khaolu punched a tentacle through the wall right at Clara's head, and she barely managed to duck, and now it was flailing one of its arms around trying to break a bigger hole in the door. "I told you to hold him off!"

"Well I can't see where he is!"

"For god's sake – you've had that power for fifty years and you still can't use it properly!" Thirteen shouted back at her, pulling out a very small bottle from one of their cupboards that was some ridiculously powerful alien bleach. It was so powerful you were meant to use the pipet-style lid to deliver tiny drops of it into large batches of hot water, and the water would be transformed into something strong enough to scrub away even black mould. Whatever she was concocting in their bathroom sink, it was going to be lethal. "If you're not going to stop him then get over here and help me." Clara did what was requested, coming over and taking a bottle that was thrust into her hands, turning it upside down and wincing when she got splashed by the fluids in the mixture, her skin burning instantly. They really ought to be wearing hazmat suits, or something, but time was of the essence.

Then she felt her foot set on fire and she nearly screamed, jumping away and seeing some of the potion – which was, by this point, a highly volatile acid – drip down from beneath the sink and dissolve its way right through her shoe onto her skin. The Doctor's eyes widened and they both looked down to see that the stuff had been burning through the actual porcelain basin of the sink itself.

While this had been going on, the Khaolu had made dangerous progress in its bid to destroy their bathroom door (and a lot of their house, by this point), and as Clara reeled from the pain in her foot from the stuff in the sink, Cole Campbell in his true form came crashing through into the room, tearing the door and chunks of plaster from the walls apart. Debris was scattered everywhere and the floor was going to start dissolving any second if they didn't do something about their devastating creation.

"Help me with the sink," Thirteen said.

"What?"

"The sink, Clara! Telekinesis! You're terrible under pressure, you know!"

Clara didn't really think through what she did next. In retrospect, the Doctor probably meant to undo the bolts and screws keeping the porcelain basin attached to the plumbing system, but that wasn't what she did. No. She used all of her psychokinetic strength, as much of it as she could muster (which was a lot) to tear the whole sink off the wall, ripping at and some of the piping away, sending it hurtling for Campbell. The missile and its fatal contents struck the Khaolu, and what happened next was rather like a time lapsed video of the process by which a grape was turned into a raisin. Rather than disintegrate, the Khaolu curled up, shrivelled, like how a spider curled its legs around onto itself when it died. She didn't know what kind of a reaction that amalgam of alien chemicals would induce in a great, tentacle beast when it was drenched in them, but she hadn't quite been expecting it to suck itself together so tightly that it imploded.

But it did.

The Khaolu crushed flesh into flesh and at the last second it let loose and popped like a cherry. At least this neutralised the chemicals, otherwise she didn't even want to think of what might have happened to their bathroom. It wasn't just any old bathroom, it had a lot of incredibly fancy and expensive fixtures courtesy of Adam Mitchell (the bathroom was a house warming present), and Clara would not be happy if they were all reduced to bubbling piles of acidic by-product.

Dark green viscera burst out of the Khaolu's skin, ripping it apart and splattering the white walls and floor and the two women with a heavy coat of gunk. It dripped like snot off every visible surface, sickeningly warm and tingly on Clara's skin as she stood there, cringing all over, clenching and unclenching her fists.

"I mean," Thirteen began unsurely, "You were telling me a few weeks ago about how you wanted to paint the walls a different colour…" The glare Clara turned on her when she said that didn't even bear description. "I'll go fetch the marigolds from downstairs…"

AN: To the guest who asked if I would ever write about Adwin and Clarenny in the time jumps: I might do a future Clarenny storyline because I had an idea for one but there will probably never be a future Adwin storyline. A present Adwin storyline, yes. Probably not in the future though.