Invasive Species

1

"Are you sure you want to go out tonight?" the Doctor asked wryly, wrapping her arms around Clara's waist from behind. Clara was leaning down towards the mirror of their dressing table trying to apply mascara, which was not easy when there was a grown woman attached to her like a limpet. The Doctor kissed her cheek, then rested her chin on Clara's shoulder and met her eyes in the reflection. "The weather forecast says it's going to be cold."

"Going out tonight was your idea," Clara reminded her, "You expressly told me we have to go out and see this 'once in a lifetime' thing. Though, given the contexts of, like, our entire lives, I do question what 'once in a lifetime' means to you."

"Yeah, I know that, but… maybe we should be doing some other 'once in a lifetime' thing…"

"Mm, and when you say that, you presumably mean sex, which is the exact opposite of 'once in a lifetime', it's rarely even once in a day," Clara told her, trying to get even closer to the mirror, "Could you stay still? I'm concentrating." The Doctor did make the effort to stay still, though she didn't relinquish Clara.

"All I'm saying is it's literally our last night of freedom. Before we're shackled to the daily grind of capitalist hegemony, trapped longingly on opposite sides of a metaphorical prison."

"We're just going back to school, sweetheart," Clara dismissed her, "It's not the end of the world. If you want us to schedule when we're going to-"

"No! We shouldn't have to schedule anything. It should be spontaneous. Off the cuff. And at every opportunity. You know what they say, Coo. Carpe diem."

"Sounds like you need to go away and have a very cold shower while I decide what colour lipstick to wear…" Clara said, fumbling about on their messy dressing table, where it was absolutely impossible to find anything. The Doctor was still clinging to her like a needy puppy.

"I can't have a shower now, I've already done my hair," she said.

"And we both know how long that took you…"

"But does my hair look great, or does my hair look great?"

"Hmm…" Clara feigned confusion as she searched the dressing table.

"Wait, does it not look great?" she was instantly worried. Clara didn't answer, it took all of her attention to try and find something in their bedroom. "Coo? …Clara? Does it not look great? …Clara."

"Oh my god, be quiet. You're fine. What colour lipstick do you think?"

"I don't care, it's going to be dark anyway – just 'fine'? You think my hair is fine?"

"If it's 'going to be dark anyway' why do you care about your hair?" Clara said, deciding on a colour without her wife's opinion. The first one she could find that wasn't basically finished, as it happened.

"That's not the point."

"Then why did you say it about my lipstick?"

"Where's the hairspray?" she let go of Clara and started searching around on the dressing table, "Urgh! I can't find anything in here! What's wrong with us? Why are we so gross?" Clara glanced around at the room and realised the Doctor was right, it was terribly messy. Every surface that could be covered in clothes was covered in clothes, clothes and tissues and dust and so many old, empty beauty products it was a wonder they ever knew which things they needed to buy more of. "It's such a cliché," Thirteen began, finding the hairspray and touching up her hair in the mirror; Clara worried about the flammability of the Doctor's head. "People say that boys are the messy ones and girls are clean, but it's a lie. There's two of us and look at all this."

"Tell you what's cliché – you going mental about your bloody hair…" Clara muttered, mostly to herself. And then the worst happened. While fumbling about trying to perfect her hair, the Doctor knocked Clara's arm with her elbow while Clara was trying to put her lipstick on. It streaked off across the side of her face and she gawked. "You absolute…"

"Huh? Oh…" Thirteen realised what she had done as Clara glared at her. And then, not understanding the enormity of the situation, she laughed. "You kinda look like a clown."

"A clown!?" Clara exclaimed. Then she reached over and aggressively tousled the Doctor's hair, which was like straw because of all the hairspray, and messed it up as best she could.

"Clara! Why did you do that!?"

"You messed up my lipstick!"

"By accident! This is my hair!"

"Get over yourself."

"Get over myself!?"

"Yes! This is my lipstick, I look stupid now, but you…"

"What? What about me?"

"You're gorgeous no matter how much time you spend on your hair." For a second, Thirteen just stood there huffily, Clara satisfied in her lack of snappy response that she had won this time. And then, without any shred of warning, the Doctor was kissing her, and she didn't care at all who'd won what argument. She barely cared about the fact they were supposed to be going out, and began to think with what little brain power she had left that maybe the Doctor's proposition that they forget all about their plans and just spend the entire evening in bed, skipping dinner, was a phenomenally brilliant idea, and her wife was a bona fide genius.

If they'd been living on their own, they probably would have forgotten about what they were meant to be doing, but annoyingly enough they no longer had the privilege. They had returned to a world filled with rude interruptions from people they happened to live with – one person, in fact: Matilda Smith-Jones.

She knocked loudly on their bedroom door. Or maybe she kicked it.

"We're gonna miss it!"

"No, we're not," Clara called back firmly, pushing the Doctor away from her, though the Doctor just laughed and kept trying to tease her, "I'm just sorting out my lipstick, we'll only be a minute." The Doctor tried to kiss her again, "No, no. Leave me alone. Go hose yourself down and put some shoes on."

"Urgh, fine. Be boring."

"You act like we're going to be out all night – we'll literally be back by about ten. Or earlier. Calm down, and stop bothering me while I find the makeup wipes…"

"So that's what am to you now? Just a bother? An annoyance?"

"At this exact moment, yes," said Clara. The Doctor scoffed.

"Well it's nice to know you care."

"Likewise. Now, please, go away. I'll see you in a minute."

"Unbelievable…" the Doctor grumbled, shaking her head and finally braving the mess of their carpet to get to the bedroom door, tiptoeing around all the junk strewn about. She couldn't rightly remember the last time they'd actually properly cleaned their room… they'd both gotten much too cosy having the TARDIS around to pick up after them for so long. Matilda was sitting on the thin flight of stairs leading up to the attic, already dressed and ready to go see the meteor shower the Doctor had been obsessing about for the last week or so. "She's just gotta fix her face. She's hideous," Thirteen called back loudly into her bedroom.

"Leave me alone!" Clara shouted, slamming the door on her telekinetically.

The Doctor scoffed and shook her head, "Women. You want my advice? Don't marry a woman."

"I don't have any intention of marrying a woman."

"Good," the Doctor nodded, "As long as I've taught you something. Really, though, I'm sure she won't be long. She hates being late to things… Anyway!" She changed her whole tone, "I've gotta feed Captain Nemo, do you wanna help? I've already taught you all I know about women, so next up, lobsters."

"I'm not sure you've really taught me anything substantial about women," said Matilda, following the Doctor downstairs, "So I dread to think what you've got to say about lobsters. 'Don't marry a lobster'?"

"Well, personally, I wouldn't marry a lobster."

"But you did marry a woman. So you don't take your own advice. So maybe I should marry a lobster, is that what you're saying?" Mattie persisted. "If I should just, do the opposite of you?"

"How are you feeling about tomorrow?" the Doctor changed the subject completely as she jumped down the rest of the stairs back into the living room with Mattie at her heals. "You sure you don't wanna stay in and mentally prepare yourself for the toils of a western education system?"

"No, I want to see the meteor shower, now you've hyped it up so much."

"Yeah, but, if you don't want to go-"

"Don't try to make this about me," Mattie said, "You should've thought about how much you want to stay in and screw Clara before you got everybody excited about the meteors."

"That is not appropriate," the Doctor said indignantly, "You're too young to make jokes like that."

"I'm fifty. And it's true. I know it's true because I heard what you were talking about in your room just now."

"You shouldn't eavesdrop on married couples. Don't make me… ground you, or something," the Doctor warned, unsure about what, exactly, grounding Matilda would consist of. Matilda wasn't in the habit of going out anywhere and didn't yet have any friends in Brighton, so the threat of being grounded was worth practically nothing.

The Doctor just decided to drop the whole thing in favour of turning her attention to Captain Nemo, the other member of a technically inferior species she had to take care of. Only, Captain Nemo didn't answer back. He was halfway through a meaningful expedition from one end of his fifty-gallon tank to the other. "How're you doing, buddy? Oh, gosh… chopped Squidward's head off again – you've been a busy little menace, haven't you? Gonna have to glue that back on the next time I break out the chainmail gloves." The little plastic fish tank ornament of Squidward sat in two halves like the wreckage of the Titanic. The lobster didn't do anything in response to her looming next to the glass, just wandered around with his beady, black eyes. "I saved him from a restaurant, you know. How about some bloodworms for you?" She picked up the can of freeze-dried bloodworms on the shelf above the tank and carefully opened the lid.

"Why is he called Captain Nemo and not just 'Nemo'?" Matilda asked.

"He's not named after the movie, he's named after the character in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Clara insisted she name him if we were keeping him, has to be a literary reference because she's pretentious like that," Thirteen rolled her eyes at this anecdote fondly, "I wanted to give him a cool name. Like King Prawn. Or Sir Kill-a-Lot, like Robot Wars. Or Clawmancer."

"I like Clawmancer," said Matilda.

"Thank you! Anyway, Captain Nemo's the guy who built and operates the Nautilus, the advanced submarine. I think we've got a copy of it somewhere, but it's in French," she explained as she shook the dry bloodworms into the tank. They slowly sank, and Captain Nemo became active for once, going after his food. "Gotta keep an eye on him, he's a little Houdini. Do you know that a lobster with one claw missing is called a cull, and with both claws missing is called a bullet?"

"How do they lose their claws? Do they get, like, prosthetic claws?"

"No, they grow them back, like lizards, or Deadpool. Or my wife." Captain Nemo waddled in the general direction of the bloodworms as the Doctor finished with the tub and put it back on the shelf, taking extra care to make sure she closed the tank properly. Suffice it to say, Captain Nemo had a bit of a track record as the most notorious escapologist of the lobster world – so she had to double check the lid was well-fastened. She sighed and looked at the ornaments again. "Poor Squidward. Now who's going to take the orders at the Krusty Krab?" The little decorative Krusty Krab sat in the corner of the tank collecting algae. "Scooby-Doo might have to do it." Scooby-Doo had also been maimed on multiple occasions by the lobster. There was also a blue police box gathering green stuff in the corner, one which she had made herself, out of clay, and painted, as well as a crashed submarine. She loved buying new ornaments for the fish tank.

"Why don't you have pirate ship?" Mattie asked, "You should get a pirate ship and then cover it in glow-in-the-dark paint, so it looks like a ghost ship. Do ghost ships actually exist?"

"What an excellent idea and an even more excellent question you should ask my better half when she comes downstairs. She's the expert, and though I could answer you right here right now, I'd hate to steal her thunder."

"What about the Bermuda Triangle?"

"What about it?"

"Does it pull ships down?"

"It's a big, crashed spaceship under the sea, full of Cybermen," the Doctor said, "Oswin went there, she helped them gain sentience, they were abducting ships and planes from the surface in order to fix theirs. These scavengers were manipulating them into being slaves and eventually Oswin managed to give them autonomy on Nios's advice. It's an ethically complex situation, but I suppose they haven't tried to take over the world, so we oughtn't begrudge them the opportunity to create their own robo-communist underwater utopia."

"Sounds cool. How long's Clara gonna be?" Mattie bounced up and down on her heels agitatedly, not wanting to be late to witness the 'event of the century', as the Doctor had described it.

"She had a mishap and got a big streak of lipstick across her face she needs to fix. Shouldn't be too long…" As luck would have it, the sound of footsteps from on high punctuated the end of the Doctor's sentence, as Clara finally quit their bedroom to join them downstairs. "Speak of the devil, and the devil shall appear."

"As long as we don't miss the meteor shower."

"We won't miss it, I promise."

"What are you promising now?" Clara asked when she appeared on the stairs, jumping down them.

"That we'll see the meteors in time, so hurry up."

"Me? You were the one distracting me earlier," said Clara loudly from the hallway, then she came into the living room carrying a pair of boots to put on.

"I was doing no such thing," said the Doctor.

"You still don't have any shoes on," Clara pointed out.

"I'm in mourning."

"Of who?"

"Squidward's dead."

"Oh, really?" Clara looked up at her then pouted, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine, thanks. I'm coping. It's gonna be difficult."

"Are you going to glue his head back on or shall we bury him in a matchbox in the rose bed and have a little funeral?" Clara asked, "Like you made us do for that butterfly you accidentally stepped on?"

"I'm still sad about that, Clara – why did you have to bring it back up?"

"Put your shoes on."

"Oh my god, it's like living with a dictator," she complained, glancing around the room to find where she had thrown whatever pair of Converse she had worn last. The ones with the stars and stripes on them, of course, the ones which annoyed Clara most of all.

"Yes, I'm sure it's exactly like that." Matilda was looking at the lobster tank and Captain Nemo eating his bloodworms, and Squidward's decorative corpse lying in the algae-covered gravel at the bottom of the tank.

"Could an octopus survive being decapitated?" she asked.

"Squidward is a squid, sweetheart," Clara said absently, distracted because the zip on the side of her boot was stuck.

"He's an octopus, he has eight arms and no tentacles. Squid have eight arms and two tentacles," said Matilda.

"Is there a difference?"

"How do you get an MA in occult mythology and write a paper on krakens and you don't know the anatomical nuances which separate squid and octopuses?" Thirteen questioned while she did her laces, "Tentacles are way longer than arms. And they have thingies on the ends."

"Thingies?"

"Don't they have thingies, Matts?"

"They're called clubs," said Matilda.

"See, Clara? They're called clubs," said the Doctor. Clara frowned at Matilda.

"How do you know that?"

"A lot of my education comes from Wikipedia. But could an octopus survive being decapitated?"

"If he's an octopus, why is he called 'Squidward Tentacles'?" Clara persisted.

"If Spongebob is a sponge why does he have a brain and speak English and make burgers in a fast food restaurant?" Thirteen challenged, "Your logic is inherently flawed. And also, I think they probably would die if you cut their head off. Even I would die if someone cut my head off. No regeneration for that."

"What!?" she exclaimed, "Nobody ever told me that! That's something I should know. I'll have to be extra-careful not to get my head cut off."

"Were you not doing that already?" Clara asked.

"Not with any commitment. This ruins my plans."

"What plans…?"

"To get myself decapitated. To see what it feels like, because nobody knows. If I want to study injuries-"

"Surgery and studying injuries isn't the same thing," said Clara, "If you tell people you want to study injuries, they're going to think you're the one inflicting the injuries."

"But I would be. I'd be the one cutting people open and sticking stuff inside them. Are you sure I can't cut my head off?"

"I think Martha would not be happy with us if we let you cut your head off, okay?" said Thirteen, finishing fixing her shoes, which were in covered in spots of mud and desperately needed cleaning. Maybe she would clean the lobster tank and her shoes all in one day, block out a good few hours for cleaning.

"What about Esther?" she questioned as the Doctor stood up.

"I don't think Esther would very much enjoy it if you cut her head off," Thirteen advised, "Although, hypothetically, since she decomposed in a grave for four years, she probably sustained a similar amount of damage-"

"Right!?" exclaimed Matilda, "If she could regrow a whole jaw and skin and fingernails and all of her mushy, internal organs repaired themselves, maybe she could, like, be the answer to all of my problems. You know? Are you ready to go yet? See the meteors? Also, does anyone have any pictures of Esther when she was undead?"

"She still is undead, she's just cute so you can't tell," said Clara, also standing up after finally fixing the zip on her boots. "Not to mention she wears that ridiculous costume half the time…" She then added, offhand, to the Doctor, "Did you get the stuff for s'mores out of the kitchen?" The Doctor disappeared away to retrieve the items – biscuits, marshmallows, the works. "Don't ask Esther any invasive questions, she doesn't like talking about when she was dead and all her fingernails fell off. Ask her about how she's finally achieved her childhood dream of becoming a superhero instead, she'll talk your ear off about that." As she talked she dragged on her coat and picked up her house keys from the floor. "Matts, do you think we're messy?" she said, removing a handful of long, stray hairs from the keys and the carpet. When did they last hoover?

"Yeah," said Matilda. Clara was alarmed.

"Really? You know what – I give up."

"Give what up?" the Doctor asked her.

"The thing about the Roomba. I think we should get one." The Doctor had been trying to convince her to buy a Roomba for months, but Clara had been very against it because she was old-fashioned. Or, the Doctor told her she was old-fashioned, wanting to do things for herself and not relying on machines (not that that had stopped them getting Helix installed in the house as their 'house AI', in order to blend in with everybody else in the future who all had computers helping them with every little thing.)

"What!? You're sure? So no more hoovering?" the Doctor asked, since she was the one who did the hoovering. She did the hoovering and all the cooking, Clara attended to the dishwasher and the laundry. Everything else they took turns with. It had become Mattie's responsibility to take the bins out over the last few, recent weeks, but that was her only chore. "This is a game-changer. I'm gonna have so much free time…"

"Uh-huh… have you fed the lobster?"

"Yes."

"I'm only checking," said Clara as she went to unlock the front door, dimly aware of Mattie hanging around behind her. The Doctor needed to check her hair in the mirror one last time, during which Clara rolled her eyes and opened the door, letting in a gust of cold air.

"I can't wait until you have other people to boss around again, so you don't have to bother me," the Doctor complained, "And no smoking in the new van, you'll ruin the upholstery."

"And I'm the bossy one," Clara quipped. "I'll have you know I'm quitting."

"Starting when?"

"Starting… tomorrow," said Clara, "Once we go back to school. I have to be a good role model. This isn't 1995 anymore where you can just smoke wherever you like."

"Were you smoking a lot in 1995?" Mattie asked.

"Well, I was seven, so I was on about forty a day," said Clara sarcastically, climbing into the driver's seat of the old VW camper van the Doctor had spent the entire summer refurbishing. It was now painted shiny, TARDIS blue with white, leather seats the Doctor thought were a bit too loud – but she had given the Doctor permission to do whatever she liked as long as they got a working, road-legal vehicle at the end of it. She'd also had to strip out the engine and all the other machinery to comply with some legislation from the 2030s outright banning cars that didn't run on renewable energy; in the 2060s, everything was electric. Its crowning glory, however – at least, in the Doctor's eyes – was that it could play cassettes and CDs. She also had a record player in the back, but had a real thing about cassettes at the moment. Clara had given up arguing with her wife about music a very long time ago, however, so she was resigned to her fate when the Doctor put on a decrepit Feeder tape and My Perfect Day came crackling out ("The crackling is part of the aesthetic," she always said.) At least she'd been sensible enough to put in extra seats in the back; it wasn't quite optimised for actually camping anywhere, and lacked any kind of bed, but Clara couldn't say she minded particularly. Not when they had a house as well.

"Are you really not allowed to smoke?" Matilda asked as she fastened her seatbelt.

"It's, uh… Lorna's advised against it. Ms Moore, I mean. The headmistress. Don't call her 'Lorna.' Because I'm a department head, there's even more pressure for me to be a good role model than there was before… I could get away with smoking before."

"Under the bus shelter, with the kids," the Doctor quipped.

"It's been illegal to smoke underneath bus shelters for a long time," Clara said.

"Where do the kids smoke, then?"

"Not that I've ever smoked with any teenagers," said Clara as she started the engine, "But they sneak through the broken fence at the bottom of the school field and lurk down there. Don't you remember? In March? There was that fire, from the stubs?"

"So, it's like, a dodgy school?" Matilda questioned from the backseat.

"No, it's just a normal school. It's just teenagers, sweetheart, they're always like that," Clara said, "No matter what kind of a façade they want to put on for Ofsted, teenagers are always going to be shits. And when you grow up, you'll learn that so are adults." She explained this as she reversed them out of the driveway, the sun just about to set above. It was nearing eight o'clock; the meteors were due in some forty minutes, after it was dark enough to see them.

"Ain't that the truth," said the Doctor.

"But don't tell anyone we said that. We're professionals."

"You're asking me to lie for you? An authority figure, asking a young, impressionable girl, to lie on her behalf?"

"Yes, precisely," said Clara, ignoring her bait. "You're not worried about if the school is rough, are you?"

"I don't know. What if I get in a fight? Or beaten up? That happens in schools, doesn't it?"

"Not nearly as often as the media would have you believe," said Clara.

"I used to get in fights at school," said the Doctor, "Always in trouble, never listening. Never learnt how to regenerate properly, never learnt how to fly a TARDIS…"

"What she means," Clara began, "Is she's a terrible influence, and don't listen to anything she says. Or you'll end up like her."

"What do you mean, 'like me'?"

"Trapped in a dead-end job and a dead-end marriage."

"Oh, yeah. That's a good point, you don't wanna end up like me," the Doctor nodded, then stage-whispered to Matilda, "Between you and I, my drafted divorce papers are coming along swimmingly."

"You two are weird, you know," she told them, "Are you always this mean to each other, or is it just when you're around other people?"

"Always," they answered at the same time.

"Hey, Clara?"

"Mm?"

"Have you ever seen a ghost ship?"

"A real one or a fake one?"

"A… what do you mean?"

"Tell her about Blackbeard," the Doctor coaxed.

"Well it wasn't actually Blackbeard, it was some actor," said Clara as she drove, "We saw a ship someone tried to trick us into thinking was a real ghost ship. It was really just covered in this glow-in-the-dark paint. I've never seen a proper ghost ship. Sally and Esther saw a ghost train once, though, something to do with… different dimensions, I don't know. It was ages ago. Why do you ask?"

"It's just something I was saying about the fish tank," said Matilda, "Where does that come from? Like, ghost vehicles? Because… well, a person's got a brain and a consciousness, but objects don't. I mean, I know we saw a ghost house, but… They don't have, like, souls, or… well, where does the superstition come from?"

"The 1700s."

"There's no ghost ships before then? But it's not like ships were just invented then. They had ships in Ancient Greece. Are there no Ancient Greek ghost ships?"

"Ancient Greek ghost ships? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any. But there's very little paraphernalia from Ancient Greece that survives," Clara explained, "Outside of pirated stuff the Doctor's copied from antique scrolls."

"Don't act like you didn't join in. We spent a whole weekend in Alexandria transcribing things from the library," the Doctor argued, "It was very romantic."

"When I say the 1700s, Matts, I don't mean the ships date to the 1700s, I mean the sightings do. I think what you've really got to think about when you're looking at this area of spectrality studies is the commercialisation of popular literature, right? We didn't even have an efficient way to print until the end of the medieval period, and it takes a few more centuries for everybody in the country to become basically literate. Do you know novels didn't even really exist until the 1700s? So suddenly you've got accessible stories that aren't just, like, poems or plays – bearing in mind not everybody has access to a theatre, no matter how cheap Shakespeare actually was – and people need something to write about.

"Or, alternatively, these stories have always existed and it's just that nobody thought to write them down extensively until our methods for written communication got more efficient. You've got to think that most of these sailors are going to be working class and probably illiterate, not interested in writing an account of what they've seen. And it's a dangerous job, maybe a lot of them who saw ghost ships died."

"Killed by the ghosts," said the Doctor, "I hear they can be vengeful."

"What ghosts are you talking about?"

"Hamlet's dad. Banquo. Caesar."

"Oh, sorry, I forgot that Shakespeare invented ghosts."

"Maybe he did, all this schtick you're giving us about the 1700s."

"Shakespeare wrote in the 1500s, which you know full well. And also, there are ghosts in the Odyssey, which is vastly older than Julius Caesar. In fact, it's older than the actual Julius Caesar that Julius Caesar is about. And in the Divine Comedy, with Virgil. Maybe everyone just went collectively mental in the 18th Century and started imaging there are dead people everywhere."

"Y'know, Coo, I'm surprised you can't give her a more concise answer."

"First of all, I'm driving, so apologies if my attention lies elsewhere," she said, keeping very focused on the road in spite of all this as Mattie eavesdropped from the backseat, "Second of all, since I work in a purely academic context, when it comes to writing an actual thesis I have to stick to real, published work for my citations. I can't very well put, 'I have no actual evidence for this, but my wife has a time machine so I went back and asked a bunch of pirates if they'd ever seen a ghost, and one bloke told me he had seen a ghost, which is the crux of my following argument.'"

"Academia is severely limited in that regard, then," the Doctor muttered, "But if you wanna go look for ghost ships I'm more than willing to be your enabler. I'm a bad influence like that."

"…Maybe. One day."

"Can I come?" Mattie asked.

"Depends if we ever actually go."

"We will go," the Doctor assured Mattie, "Clara will have to fix her wounded reputation as the one, true ghostbuster of higher education."

"That's an atrocious thing to say," Clara told her, annoyed, "I weep. And I think we're here, anyway." They pulled up onto an expanse of grass just a little way outside of Brighton, a beach that wasn't very large and too far away from anything to be of interest to the tourists – but which was almost entirely deserted that evening. "You never know, Matts, look out at the sea long enough and you might see a ghost ship as well as some meteors."

"I went on a ship with a lot of ghosts once," said Thirteen wistfully, getting out of the van and still carrying with her everything so that they could build a small fire on the beach and roast marshmallows, "It was the, uh… oh… y'know, the big one. The museum. Hotel California."

"Queen Mary?" Clara asked.

"That's the one. Super haunted. Went a very long time ago. They thought I was a hypnotist, or something… Anyway! Moving on! Time for space rocks and sugar! I. Am. Hyped. If there's one thing I can't get enough of, it's worthless calories." She left the door open and went off to find some sticks for them to burn, leaving Clara to lock up the van.

"Is it legal to start a fire on a beach?"

"It's fine, as long as we don't damage anything. I think. The kids who started that fire with their cigarette stubs didn't get charged with anything," Clara said, watching the Doctor wandering up and down the shore collecting driftwood. "Although, I'm not completely convinced that any of that wood will actually burn…" Speaking of burning, she remembered her promise to quit smoking tomorrow – meaning she still had a handful of cigarettes to get through until she'd run out completely. And the Doctor would need to use her lighter to get the fire going, anyway, so she decided to light up.

"They stink, you know," Matilda said, "I can't wait for you to quit. Can't you go to AA for it, or something?"

"I'm quitting smoking, not nicotine," said Clara, "I'll still have patches and gum. And the e-cigarette."

"Do you ever wish you'd never started in the first place?"

"Every time I light one, yeah," Clara sighed, breathing out smoke, "How are you really feeling? About going to school? Excited, scared?"

"Both. What if I get bullied?"

"We've got anti-bullying measures," said Clara.

"What if I get bullied because I live with two teachers?"

"I don't think you will," said Clara, "People like the Doctor."

"Do they not like you?"

"Uh… well. Let's not get into that."

"What if people think I'm weird?"

"Most teenagers are weird," said Clara.

"Are you gonna be embarrassing?"

"Am I usually embarrassing…?"

"Sometimes."

"Look at these sticks!" the Doctor shouted at them from the beach, arms full of twigs, which she proceeded to drop at her feet in a big clump while grinning. Clara held her cigarette between her teeth and gave the Doctor a thumbs up.

"Brilliant!" she said, encouraging the Doctor's ardent enthusiasm.

"Will there be any cool trips?"

"I heard a rumour about a trip to the Somme you'd have to ask my wife about, but if you're not doing History you won't be able to go on it. And she won't be going on it without me there, anyway."

"You wouldn't let her go on a school trip without you?"

"It's not that – she wouldn't want to go," Clara said, walking down to the beach now the Doctor had sat down, arranging her twigs into the optimum cone shape. "Would you, sweetheart?"

"Would I what?"

"Go on that trip to the Somme."

"Oh, I mean, I've been to the Somme numerous times. Plus, I'm really concerned about what kind of discourse Nick wants to surround this trip in – like, are we glorifying the Second World War now, or what? I said we should go on a trip to Scotland, learn about someone cool. Like William Wallace. Everybody hates the English, right? Or, we could go to India and learn about how the British destroyed it."

"I think you'd have visa troubles," Clara told her, sitting down on the sand next to the makeshift campfire. Mattie sat next to her.

"Why don't you go to America?" Mattie suggested.

"Been there, done that, Kerouac-style. Fourth honeymoon, always my favourite – hitchhiking. Then again, might be cool to take the kids to Gettysburg… or Wall Street. To learn about the evils of capitalism and how it'll be the ruination of your so-called 'society.'"

"Is there no English department trip?" Mattie asked Clara now.

"Oh, we just go to the Globe," Clara said, "See whatever Shakespeare we choose to do. This year's Much Ado, I can't wait."

"You finally got Tom to back down, then?"

"Sweetheart, he wanted to do The Winter's Tale. I mean, seriously."

"Oh, no. How awful."

"I'm still fighting him about Tennessee Williams. He's desperate to do Streetcar."

"And what do you want to do?"

"Orpheus. It's chronically underrated. Anyway, I'm in charge, not Tom."

"Do you not like him?" Mattie pressed, probably dying to get her hands on some gossip before school began.

"Tom's great," said Clara, "We just have differing opinions when it comes to… everything."

"She says that," the Doctor interjected, "But they're both modernists, meaning they're both jerks. Only jerks are modernists."

"I don't know what that means."

"You don't want to," the Doctor said knowingly, "It starts innocently enough with Virginia Woolf, but then suddenly you find yourself knee-deep in Finnegans Wake and you're like, how did it ever come to this?" But she had lost Mattie's attention. "Are any staff from other departments allowed to come and see Much Ado at the Globe, by any chance? I know they weren't allowed when you went to see Macbeth last year – but that was when Rhonda was still in charge, before she retired."

"Oh, I see, so you think just because you're married to the head of English, you can sneak your way onto a trip to the Globe? That's nepotism at its finest."

"It's not nepotism."

"Favouritism?"

"I like the play, jeez, bite me."

"If you want to come that badly, I'll look into it – but you have to sort out cover with Nick yourself," Clara told her, "Anything to avoid dealing with Ritter on my own. That woman is… urgh."

"Will I be in your classes?"

"Almost definitely not."

"Thank god."

"Excuse me?"

"I'd get sick of you," she said honestly. The Doctor snickered to herself. Clara picked up a twig and threw it at her.

"Hey! That's my fire!" Thirteen protested, "Why do you gotta ruin everything you touch?" Clara rolled her eyes. "This is the problem with women."

"Of course it is," Clara dismissed her, shaking her head.

"When do I find out, like, my timetable? Don't they post them beforehand?"

"No."

"What if I get lost?"

"You'll be alright," Clara assured her, "You'll know your way around within a few days." The Doctor wordlessly held out her hand towards Clara, prompting Clara to hand over her silver cigarette lighter so that she could light the fire.

"Don't you know how to light a fire by rubbing sticks together?" Mattie questioned.

"I-"

"No, she doesn't," said Clara, "She spent three hours trying to light a fire like that once. Really ruined her threat of destroying my Playboy collection." Mattie raised her eyebrows and Clara stammered to fix what she'd set. "Not that – erm – not that I'd ever… you know, it's wrong to objectify women. Pornography is traditionally misogynistic and, uh… don't, um… you should treat women with, you know, respect."

"And you say you're a teacher?" Mattie jibed.

"Shut up," Clara said. The Doctor finally got her twigs to light, and the little stack was engulfed in flame quite quickly.

"Ha! If only I had your Playboys now, they'd be going up in smoke."

"They're very valuable collectibles. And they have literary merit. Nabokov published short stories in them. Nabokov, darling."

"Yeah, yeah… where're the marshmallows?" The marshmallows were right next to her, as Mattie pointed out, and they finally stopped bickering for long enough to roast them and make sandwiches out of chocolate Digestives. Not quite the traditional s'more, but they weren't the most traditional things to begin with.

"Here you are, subjecting us to your faux-American culture," Clara criticised.

"And what would we be eating if we left it to you? Sausage rolls with a side-helping of scurvy? That's British cuisine for you." Clara laughed. "Oh, sh- look! Check it out! Meteors!" The Doctor dropped her marshmallow in the fire to point straight up at the sky.

The event was just beginning, right on time; the sky littered with more shooting stars than Matilda had ever seen before. It was as if the heavens themselves were moving, asteroids flying through the atmosphere, glittering, disintegrating on their way to Earth's surface.

"Wish my parents were here to see this," said Matilda sadly.

"Oh, your parents wouldn't want to see any boring meteors, Matts," said the Doctor, "They spent their lives out there in the stars."

"Some people believe that when you die you become a star," said Clara.

"Which," the Doctor continued, "While scientifically absurd, is a nice idea. If I die one day, I can think of a much worse fate than becoming a star. Although…" her eyes strayed to the ether above.

"What?" asked Clara. The Doctor frowned, then pointed again.

"Did you-?" They followed her gaze, the vivid meteors arcing across their horizon. The Doctor could have sworn that for a second they moved in a different way to just abiding by the laws of gravity, dancing in a much more literal way. The volume of shooting stars was also quite a bit higher than she'd expected but dimmed again to the ordinary amount. "Nothing. Probably nothing."

"Are you sure? You're the expert when it comes to strange things falling from the sky."

"Yeah, no, I… I'll talk to Helix. Just seems there's more meteors than I thought there'd be. Could just be debris, though…" She smiled at Clara and Matilda, "Never mind me. Let's just enjoy it. Our last night of freedom."

"Except for weekends and holidays," Clara added.

"Yeah. But aside from that, our last night of freedom…"