AN: So I've finished all my essays a week and a half early but basically, even when term isn't on, the days where I literally had no other commitments apart from this fic are gone now I have to be doing reading and revision and writing scripts for Nexus (subscribe on YouTube if you like top 10 videos about relatively obscure facts), so as much as I'd like to swap back to doing daily updates, I don't think I will. Plus, ever since I came back off break after "Omegaverse" I've made the chapters way longer; instead of being 1200-3500 words they're now more like 2200-5000 words, and it's pretty arduous to write all that every day. So I'm gonna stick with the thrice-weekly, Monday/Wednesday/Saturday schedule, which is good because it means I don't get so overwhelmed that I have to be taking breaks all the time.

Decomposition: A Lengthy Process

Matteusz Andrzejewski

"Do you often sit alone in school canteens to eat?" Matteusz asked the blonde girl, Jenny, feeling distinctly like he was interrupting something. She had been sitting there, phone in hand, absently eating food from a large mountain she had. Almost the whole canteen was empty, aside from other sixth-formers who came to dinner early. Matteusz didn't often hang around in there, but he had seen her, alone, through the doorway, and had come to pry. She looked up from her phone immediately.

"I was investigating the kitchen," she said, "The Doctor is prodding dead animals to see if he can get anything from them; I'm not too into autopsies. Every living thing has to eat eventually, so I thought I'd nose around the kitchens. I didn't find anything, but they gave me some free food because I'm nice and they like me." She smiled and waved at one of the dinner ladies then, who smiled and waved back like the pair of them were old friends.

"Can I sit down?" he asked. This puzzled her.

"Why shouldn't you? It's your school," she shrugged, "Feel free. It's a big table, I don't have a monopoly on it." So Matteusz did sit down, opposite her, at one end of the rectangular table. Then he marvelled at the amount of food on her plate – it was three entire cheeseburgers atop a mountain of chips with two flapjacks waiting for her for pudding when she finished all that. "Matteusz, right?" she asked when he was about to speak. He nodded. "Where're you from? I'm horrible with accents."

"Poland," he answered.

"I wonder if I can do Polish…" she mused.

"How do you mean, 'do Polish?'"

"Like, uh, it's a party trick, I was showing it off just this week to, um…" she paused, "Just say something to me in Polish, anything, it's tricky at first."

"Something like what?" he asked, though he never normally spoke Polish when requested.

"Anything – and I can just assimilate the language. Clara thinks it's amazing, I had to yell at these two guys in Italian just the other day," Jenny said in perfect Polish, no trace of a foreign accent at all. She could have been from Warsaw for all Matteusz knew, if he hadn't met her prior.

"I prefer to speak English – Polish reminds me of my parents," he said.

"What's up with your parents?" she asked, dropping it immediately.

"They kicked me out recently," he said, a little guarded.

"Can you not, I don't know, reconcile? I reconciled with the Doctor after I ran off and went to stay with Clara for weeks," Jenny said.

"What did the Doctor do?"

"I don't want to talk about it," she answered, picking up one of her burgers, and biting into it. After chewing and swallowing, she said, "These burgers are great – I've already had two of them."

"You've already had two burgers?" he questioned. There was still ten minutes before lunch officially started, five minutes before kids started showing up as they got out of lessons early.

"My metabolism is out of this world. Literally. Get it?" she asked. It was a bad joke, but it made Matteusz smile a little. "Did you want something? Not that I mind the conversation – you just seemed a bit purposeful when you came over here. You can have a burger if you want, I've got loads of food on my ship." He kind of did want a burger, and she pushed the plate towards him, so he picked one up and unwrapped it from its yellow-coloured paper, yellow so that you knew it had cheese in it.

"Miss Oswald was really a companion of the Doctor?" he asked.

"Yeah, a… while ago," Jenny said, "It's actually been ten years to her, but she's forgotten it all. The only person who can fill in the blanks is this insolent little Viking who really likes being enigmatic and talking in circles."

"I feel as though you are maybe talking in circles," he said, and she laughed.

"I get that a lot."

"She was a friend to me," Matteusz said.

"Who? Clara?"

"Yes, I used to talk to her, about… some personal things. Being who I am."

"Who might that be?"

"A homosexual," he said, and he thought she nearly laughed at his use of the word 'homosexual.' "I don't like the word 'gay.' Teenagers and children, they use it as an insult, I've been called it a lot. There were a lot of rumours about her in the months before… after Mr Pink died." She sighed and put down her semi-eaten burger. He didn't take another bite out of his.

"Clara helped you come to terms with that part of yourself?" Jenny asked quite seriously now.

"I suppose yes, she did, and she died."

"Oh, she died because she's a total cocky idiot," Jenny said, though she spoke in an odd way that was both sad yet fond, "Thought she'd try and be like the Doctor and did something reckless and heroic. She's so kind, but… misguided sometimes."

"She died because she travelled with the Doctor?"

"Lots of people do. He's dangerous."

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Oh, sure," she said. He was worried he was going to be nosey and annoy her, but she smiled so warmly when she talked he didn't know what kind of awful thing he would have to say to do that. He watched the scar on her thumb as she lifted her burger to take another bite from it, waiting for him to talk.

"You have a lot of guns," he said, "Does the Doctor not care? Does Clara not care?"

"Are you not a fan of guns?"

"I hate the things."

"There are a lot of things you can do with a gun that don't involve killing people. I have them for scare tactics," she shrugged, "If scare tactics don't work, you can hit people with them. Then if that doesn't work, shoot them in the joints. I've never missed a shot my whole life."

"And does Miss Oswald not mind you using them?"

"Oh, she hates it. She's always like, 'Jen, don't keep your guns in my house,' and, 'Jen, why is there a hunting rifle under the bed?' and, 'Jen, would you stop cleaning your blood-caked, rusty metal spikes in the shower with my expensive soap I got on two-for-one in Lush?'" Jenny stopped speaking for a moment, and then she said something else in Polish, possibly because some of the kids now flocking into the room had started to take a keen interest in this unusual conversation they could overhear, "I love her a lot, though. I'm lucky to have her and have her be so understanding."

Tacitly agreeing with this decision to stop speaking so that they would be so easily understood by children who didn't have any business listening to this relatively private conversation, Matteusz resigned himself to answering Jenny in his native language.

"Doesn't she ever mention being a teacher here?" he asked.

"I never really ask," she said, "I always figure she'd just get sad if she talked about it, being a teacher was like, her dream job, and she can't do it anymore. What with the whole being-a-vampire-thing. It's not really very safe. You know, if you really like, you can talk to her. She's just at the other end of a phone. I'd take you all to visit, but it's a bit tricky going back-and-forth through the universes."

"You don't need to do that, it'd probably be weird," he said, though he appreciated the offer.

"Are you sure? All she does is sit around all day in a bookshop, I'm sure she'll like the distraction."

"I-"

There was a ghastly, wailing scream, which cut through the idle chatter and the clinking of cutlery and plastic trays and rendered the whole canteen completely silent. There was a brief pause, and then Jenny dropped her food immediately and picked up her bag from the bench by her side. She jumped right over the table as she dashed towards the noise, and Matteusz was too stunned to follow for a moment. He did, though, albeit in a far less athletic way.

Jenny had vanished in the crowds, but Matteusz followed her by going in the opposite direction to the masses of children and teenagers coming towards him. They were all hurrying to get away from something quickly, and in Coal Hill, that something could be anything you could imagine. He broke through them all and stumbled when he did, and then it was just two more corners to go until he found what all the fuss was about.

There was a large group of familiar faces assembled already in one of the corridors lined with lockers; there was Jenny, obviously, and at the other, far end stood Quill and Tanya, with the Doctor and April right in the middle. They were all staring at an object lying on the floor. It had been April who had screamed, and even now she had a hand over her moth and was gawking at the gruesome thing.

It was a head. A decapitated head. And there it lay in a pool of some sort of noxious fluid that was bloody and gooey, skin hanging off its sallow face and milky-white eyes, lips pulled back to reveal black gums, hair matted and falling out in clumps. There was a little nest of maggots in one of the ears. April was horrified, as was Tanya, but Quill, Jenny and the Doctor merely looked perplexed. The Doctor even had his arms crossed, contemplating.

"What's happened here?" Quill asked.

"April told me she could smell something funny in the locker," said the Doctor, "Came to find me to get me to see if it was anything… weird. And look at that! A head! Not what you'd usually expect to find in a locker, I assume. It fell right out after I used the sonic screwdriver to open the door."

"It's amazing how they can keep finding more ways to make a mess even after they die," Quill said, unsympathetic.

"You ought to learn better bedside manners."

"I think we're beyond the stage of bedside manners. Crematorium-side manners, maybe?" she suggested coldly.

"Oh my god, that's Josh Hart," Tanya exclaimed.

"What!?" the Doctor shouted, and then he made to pick it up.

"DON'T do that!" Jenny shouted right back at him, making him freeze. He met her eyes, like he was asking for permission to touch it. If he was, she didn't give it, "Leave it alone."

"But it's in Josh Hart's locker," said April, "That was why I went to get the Doctor, since he seemed so interested."

"Jenny-"

"Don't touch rotting heads," she said sharply at him again, and finally the Doctor withdrew, very sourly.

"Why would his head be in his own locker?" Matteusz asked.

"Yes, it's not normally within the behaviour of heads to open lockers and hide in them," Quill commented, "Why bring a head all the way here and stick it in a locker?" Jenny went and crouched down next to the head, the Doctor staying notably at bay as she did. "It's discoloured. On the cheek. Like it's been bitten by something venomous." There was some funny colouring, but Matteusz thought it just looked like a bruise. Then again, Matteusz didn't know anything about venomous bites.

"Venom? No way," said Jenny, "The head's been torn off the body, like by an animal. But then…" and now she touched the head, to her father's slight annoyance, to push it so that it rolled over onto its other side. Its mouth lolled open, bloated, dry tongue hanging out, and a fly flew out of its ear. She had clearly seen something, so the Doctor came to look over her shoulder.

"Are they-"

"Rattlesnake bites," she said.

"So I was right."

"It's another one of those animals, those hybrids," said the Doctor, "Has to be. A rattlesnake, crossed with… I don't know, a wolf? Lion?"

"How do you know it's a rattlesnake?" Tanya asked.

"When you live in the bayou for thirteen years, you learn what a rattlesnake bite looks like. Diamondback, to be precise," said Jenny, "First that monkey this morning, now a rattlesnake – they're not exactly animals native to the United Kingdom. The adder is the only venomous snake in England."

"Anything could come through the rift," said April.

"Didn't you say there was a break-in at the zoo?" the Doctor turned to ask her, and she faltered, "Was anything taken? Say, a monkey? A rattlesnake?"

"I don't really know, I just saw it in the paper, I didn't read the article," she said. Matteusz took out his phone to look up this recent incident at London Zoo.

"There's energy traces on those corpses," the Doctor said, "Evidence of advanced genetic tampering – they're combination creatures."

"Many animals were stolen," Matteusz said, reading from his phone, "From the zoo. But nothing large. A diamondback rattlesnake, a capuchin monkey, a vampire bat – the list is incomplete, though."

"Convenient," Quill muttered, "Maybe it's just this Hart boy. One of his 'creations' killed him. It's easy enough to believe."

"And then what? The monkey-fish tore his head off and put it in his own locker, do you think? No, no, no. This is strictly human. A cover-up attempt. What better place to put Josh Hart's head than Josh Hart's own locker? Like burying a body in their own garden; bury a body in your own garden and you'll almost definitely take the blame for it if someone ever finds it. If someone put his head in their own locker, they'd be caught immediately. Imagine if you were a teenager," the Doctor began, then paused, "I suppose none of you lot do. Jenny, imagine if you were a teenager – or you, Quill, I know the Quill don't have much by way of childhoods, it's all 'time to eat your own siblings' and then 'time to eat your own mother' and then 'time to eat the bodies of your fallen enemies in combat.'"

"The Quill do not eat our fallen enemies," she argued, but he ignored her.

"Anyway. Adolescence. Picture it. You find a machine just lying there in your school – fallen through a rift in time and space, though you're not to know that – and you discover you can make fantastical creatures like pigeon-rats and monkey-fish and snake-dogs. Wouldn't you tell your friends? Find somebody to share it with?" he said.

"You think Josh Hart's friend killed him? Wouldn't it be easier if it was one of his enemies?"

"A boy like Josh Hart? Inconsequential? Nobody notices when he's gone? No. Anyone who 'deserves' death would probably have quite the reputation, not an anonymous average-achiever like him," the Doctor explained, pulling something out of his pocket. It was that same, crumpled missing poster, "Time to ring the phone number on here, I think. We've got some information about Josh Hart's whereabouts, after all."

"That's the number of his parents, are you crazy? You can't ring that!" Tanya protested. He couldn't ring it, anyway, because he didn't have a phone. He had to ask his daughter for hers. Jenny gave it up to him, and he frowned when he saw the screen.

"Your girlfriend says she loves you," he said.

"Does she?" Jenny smiled, "Aww…"

The Doctor then dialled the number on the poster, put the phone on speaker, and held it out for them all to gather around, and listen. It rang for a whole thirty seconds before cutting to the answerphone.

"This is the Vanderbilt residence," said a sleek, posh, female voice, "We can't take your call right now, so leave a message and our butler will get back to you." It ended. The Doctor hung up without leaving a message, and gave Jenny her phone back.

"Nicholas Vanderbilt," Tanya said, "That's whose house that was."

"Who might he be?" Jenny asked.

"He's in Year 11," April explained, "Rich, poncey – and always hanging around with Josh Hart."