Invasive Species

8

Matilda had left to go and get dressed as soon as Clara and the Doctor had disappeared on their underground adventure. Trying not to worry about whether or not they would actually return from this escapade – as seasoned as they were, she could not help it – she took the time to get ready like it was just a regular day. When she returned, no more than twenty minutes later, she found Stefani in the living room examining every object she could get her hands on.

The novelty of the lobster tank was one thing, with his SpongeBob decorations and tiny, Scooby-Doo action figure, but there were many more oddities. And the things in the living room weren't even close to the strangest things the Oswalds owned, those were relegated to the transdimensional library upstairs. There were all kinds of relics stashed up there: alien books, ancient tomes, all of Clara's fragile, first editions; an enormous grand piano Clara said had been gifted to her by Chopin; a graffiti painting they claimed was a genuine Banksy he had given to them as a wedding gift, though Mattie was not privy to the whole story (yet); and then all the machines the Doctor spent her nights tinkering with when she wasn't in their bedroom. The strangest thing was probably the 'ghost in a jar' up there, which they said had been recovered by Sally Sparrow and Esther many years ago and held Marilyn Monroe's tormented spirit. Matilda had never witnessed a manifestation of Marilyn Monroe, much as she would like to, so wasn't sure how much truth there was in the story – though she was forbidden from watching old MGM films in the house, in case it 'agitated the ghost.' That was a shame.

But that was upstairs. Steph was, thankfully, downstairs, and crouching on the floor in front of the television examining the Doctor's VCR. On top of it was a stack of cryptically labelled tapes. Mattie knew from asking her about them earlier in the week that they were mainly just very rare recordings of old cartoons, and the Doctor had been watching a Batfink one repeatedly claiming to be looking for subliminal messages (she had yet to discover any.) There was a DVD player down there too – she knew it had a copy of Paris is Burning in it belonging to Clara. In the library was an incredibly old projector 'acquired' from a 1930s cinema, but they hadn't told her the details of how it had come into their possession (it was almost definitely stolen.)

"Are these, like, videos?" asked Steph. Mattie wasn't surprised she'd never seen them before – she had barely seen them before, she'd been born in 2014. Steph, on the other hand, must have only been born in 2058, since she kept reminding Clara how she was sixteen in October.

"The Doctor's really into, like, vintage media equipment," Matilda explained, "In the van they have a tape deck. She has a phonograph upstairs somewhere, a proper antique one."

"Should sell it, she'd be rich," said Steph, picking up the video on top of the pile and sitting down on the floor. The TV above her was on but was muted and only playing the news coverage of Brighton's tree invasion. It was a series of overhead, helicopter shots. Mattie couldn't believe how bad it had gotten overnight, all of the roads were completely blocked. The caption written on the video Steph held was: Walter Reuther Sucks. "Who's Walter Reuther?"

"He's, um…" she tried to remember what the Doctor had said when she had asked the very same question a few nights ago, "Like, an activist, or something? From a hundred years ago."

"And this is a video of him?"

"No, it's an old episode of Batfink – she's looking for anti-Reuther propaganda she heard is hidden in it," she struggled to remember, "The Doctor likes Reuther. He marched with Martin Luther King. She'll get mad at you if you play the tape, though, I think it's fragile. The footage is all wobbly." Steph put the tape back down.

"This is totally not how I imagined their house would look… I thought it would be, like, normal. But, I mean, that's an egg chair." It was an egg chair, sitting next to the lobster tank, though it wasn't suspended from the ceiling. There were also mountains of books everywhere. The entire house was full to bursting with books. Every shelf had books on it, there were piles of them on the carpets, a stack on the coffee table, next to the lobster tank, stray books under the sofa, a book propping up the kitchen table, books on top of the microwave, half-obscuring most of the windows – there was not a single surface that didn't have a book on it. "Or, normal to an extent."

"What extent?"

"Well, I thought they'd have sex stuff everywhere. Like a swing, right in the living room."

"Uh… they don't even have a swing in their bedroom. Not that I've seen, anyway."

"What? You've been in their room?" Steph was enthralled by this information.

"I guess."

"What's it like?"

"Locked."

"Yeah, but, really. What's in there?"

"Mess?" Mattie suggested, "They're kind of gross, I don't know, it's not very exciting." It was also full of sex toys and pornography, but she thought she oughtn't to mention that to Steph.

"Really? I never would've guessed that… it's clean in here. Apart from the books. Have they read all these?"

"I don't know. Clara's always reading something," Mattie shrugged. It was very rare to not see Clara with her head in a book. Steph picked up a nearby book to examine it, a book with an illegible title.

"This is in Russian," she said, and then she read the title out loud, though Matilda couldn't comprehend the words. "Brat'ya Karamazovy."

"I thought you're Polish?"

"I'm British. It's my parents who are Polish. But I can speak Russian."

"You can speak Russian?" Mattie asked, "So you speak, what? Three languages?"

Steph laughed and put the book down, "No, I speak four fluently, and some Hebrew. And I'm learning Hungarian."

"What's the fourth?"

"Yiddish. I like languages. Jake's useless, he doesn't know any Yiddish. He forgets words in English sometimes…" Steph trailed off midsentence. "I really don't know what I'm gonna do if he's… I couldn't imagine him not being here… he's always here… do you have any siblings?"

"No. Clara does, though, she has a sister."

"Is her sister hot?"

"I mean, they're twins."

"What!?" Steph exclaimed, apparently forgetting about her missing brother, "You don't mean – they're not identical, though? Surely, they're not identical? There aren't two people with that same face?" Matilda was so amused by this she very nearly told Steph there were a lot more than two people who shared Clara's face.

"They are identical, actually." Steph appeared to have gone into shock at this revelation. "Her sister's not gonna go out with you either, though." If there were ever two people in the universe who should never meet under any circumstances, they were Stefani Kaczmarek and Oswin Oswald.

"Do people get them mixed up? Has Dr Oswald ever, like, got off with the wrong one?"

"Quite hard to get them mixed up, since Oswin's in a wheelchair most of the time, and Clara's got, you know, the scar," Matilda said, "And no, before you ask, I don't know why she's in a wheelchair, and I don't know what happened to Clara's arm."

"Really? They won't tell you?"

"I don't think they're very happy stories they want to relive," said Matilda. It was true, she did not know the details of what had happened to Oswin's legs or Clara's arm – she knew Esther was responsible for the injury but didn't know what had occurred to force Esther to act. Esther definitely wouldn't electrocute someone without a good reason. It had never seemed to affect their friendship, though.

"They should really have let the army deal with these trees," Steph changed the subject once her attention was brought back to the television and the overhead shots. "They're teachers, what're they gonna do? It's stupid… what if they don't come back? We're just left here?" In that case, Mattie would call Rose and she supposed Steph would find out about, well, everything, which was definitely a better outcome than being murdered by vampire trees.

"I think they'll be alright," she said. What else was she supposed to say? She did think they'd be alright, but she couldn't tell Steph they'd be alright because one of them was a super-intelligent alien and the other a powerful Manifest. If worse came to worst, she was sure they had teleporters on them – though that might not do Jakub and the kidnapped animals much good.

"Why do you live with them?"

"Because my parents died two months ago, and they named the Oswalds my legal guardians," Mattie explained as concisely as she could, not wanting to talk about her parents. Not to Steph.

"I thought you have a godmother?"

"Yeah, I do – she just travels a lot, doesn't really have a proper home."

"Is she hot?"

"Uh…" Mattie glanced around the walls at the pictures, searching for one that had Rose in it. None of them seemed to, though; they were nearly all wedding photos and a big collage of polaroids from various times and places above the upright piano. "I couldn't say. There's no pictures of her here." Mattie thought she might have some in her own photos upstairs but really didn't want to go traipsing off to find a photo album just so that Steph could judge whether or not Rose Tyler was attractive. Unless it would take her mind off everything going on with the trees?

"Is something wrong with your eye?" Steph asked abruptly. Mattie immediately grew very self-conscious and looked away.

"It's just – it's lazy. I have a squint. And I'm short-sighted." The eye with the squint was actually much more short-sighted than the other one, meaning one lens was almost twice as thick. This annoyingly made her glasses a little crooked most of the time. "When I was a toddler I had to wear an eyepatch."

"Matilda," Steph began mock-seriously, "That is the single most adorable thing I've ever heard."

"Thanks…"

"Speaking of adorable things, Hannah actually lives on this street. Garland Avenue. Can you believe that? All this time I've been sneaking into her bedroom and I had no idea the Hotswalds were just down the road. Everyone lives in Fiveways except me and Jake, it's bullshit. But that was always the problem with Hannah…"

"What?"

"That she lives in Fiveways. Her parents hate me, is the thing, and they're super protective. They check on her when they go to bed, and stuff, it's totally weird." Mattie didn't think it was particularly weird for the Becketts to check on their daughter. "So I can never stay over, because of them looking in and then trying to chuck me out. But now – I could just come here, instead of having to, like, worry about getting back to Hanover at one in the morning. Mrs Oswald would totally just drive me back." Matilda knew Clara almost definitely would just drive Steph home if this occurred, but couldn't say she was thrilled with the idea of Steph using the house as a secret sex hideaway for every time she wanted to pollute Hannah.

"But you broke up with her, very publicly, and then she slapped you. Seems like her parents are right to hate you."

"Ouch. They just think I'm a bad influence."

"Are you?"

"Who knows? Jake agrees with them, and you – had a go at me for dumping her. And then so did Mrs Oswald. Basically everybody."

"It was messed up. She was crying." Steph quietened, thinking.

"Shall I go apologise? Walk down the road, sneak in now? Her bedroom is on the ground floor, in a converted garage. It's so easy to sneak in, and Hannah will forgive me."

"You're sure about that?" Mattie asked incredulously.

"Oh, yeah. She's had a crush on me for years. I'm her white whale."

"You shouldn't take advantage of her. Like, you dumped her in public, and then just assume she'll still want to see you?"

"She won't let me go that easily," said Steph, which wasn't much of a defence of her behaviour. She seemed uncomfortable talking about her dabblings with Hannah, probably because she knew it was morally wrong to just use her like that. Besides, Mattie would rather not get involved in Steph's personal life, it already looked bad enough from the outside. "Why a lobster?" Steph nodded at the tank. "Why not get, like, a dog?"

"Clara doesn't like pets," Mattie said, "She doesn't even really like Captain Nemo. The Doctor stole him from a restaurant because he's blue." Captain Nemo stood in the middle of his tank minding his own business. He had absolutely no idea that the city was being invaded by monsters from another planet.

"Kind of boring, though. I mean, what does he do? Just stand there?"

"Basically. Sometimes he walks from one side of the tank to the other. The Doctor really wants a dog, but Clara won't let her."

"I can't believe you're just allowed to call her 'Clara.'"

"It's her name."

"But you don't call the Doctor by her name? Whatever it is – I don't even know."

"Everybody calls her 'the Doctor,'" said Mattie, "That's just how it is. One of those nicknames that stick, I guess."

"What is her name?"

"It's, um…" Mattie strained to think, trying to remember the Doctor's human alias she was using, since obviously she couldn't apply for a job and say her name is 'the Doctor' (she could try, but Mattie was sure Clara was more sensible than that.) "It's… Dora, I think. It's short for Theodora, Theodora Oswald, I guess." She thought it was an uncommon name, but she didn't know the story behind it. "I wouldn't call her that, though, she never answers to it."

"So, you're telling me that Mrs Oswald never calls her wife by her actual name?" Mattie had to stop herself from making a joke about how the Doctor was just as guilty, more likely to call Clara 'Coo' than anything else, but did not think they would forgive her if she let slip to Steph what the Doctor's private pet-name for Clara was. "They are super weird." You have no idea, Matilda thought to herself.

She decided she was tired of looking at trees on TV, so found the remote and switched to a different channel, searching for other news items. Of course, the other major thing being reported on was the earthquake in San Francisco, which had happened some seven hours ago. The coverage for this was also reels of overhead shots, but these ones were vastly more interesting because they were primarily action-replays of Lightning Girl sightings. Blurs of blue and white light in the city streets, leading the rescuers to people trapped in buildings very quickly.

"You know what we should do?" Steph asked, looking at the screen. She was still sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of it. "We should, like, tweet the Lightning Girl. This tree thing is way more urgent than some earthquake. Like, they should really have been expecting an earthquake if they all insist on living in California, right? At least they're not being kidnapped off the streets." That idea was not actually half-bad – surely it couldn't hurt to get Esther involved?

"I don't know," Mattie said unsurely, though she was taking out her phone, "Who says she'll even respond? Have you ever tweeted her before?" She had a string of messages from Aki still panicking about Hiro the missing dog, including sending Matilda some very cute pictures just in case she saw him on the street, but was forced to ignore them in favour of finding her message thread with Esther. Her conversations with Esther were rare and usually limited to talking about horror films.

With Steph paying attention to the television, she managed to send a text without being noticed: Crazy carnivorous trees killing people in Brighton. Clara & the Doctor might need help. She was debating asking Rose for help, too, just to make sure they were doubly safe, but Steph interrupted.

"This is depressing. The news, I mean. Don't you have anything else to watch? Apart from antique videos? This is just making me worry about Jake."

"I've got a lot of horror films upstairs?" Mattie suggested.

"Horror films? That's what you're into?"

"I guess. Gory ones are the best."

"I would never have guessed that about you."

"Well, I make special effects stuff, when I'm bored," she said. Steph stared at her. "What?"

"You mean, like, wounds and stuff?"

"Yeah. Peeling skin, fake blood, gangrene – anything gross."

"Is that what you want to do when you're older? Make special effects?"

"God, no, it's just for fun. I want to be a surgeon."

"That deeply concerns me. Somebody obsessed with gore becoming a healthcare professional."

"I'm not obsessed – I just – I think it'd be fun to cut people open."

"If I need surgery in ten years' time, I'm staying well away from you."

"Do you want to watch a movie, though? I've got a projector and a screen up on the wall in my room."

"An invitation to your room? Are you sure you're not into me? I can't pretend it wouldn't be even more convenient if my drop-bys at Hannah's could be changed for one-stop-shops at the Hotswalds'." Mattie grimaced. "I'm kidding, wow. Just trying to, I don't know, forget about how Jake's…"

"I really do think they'll all be okay," she said, though she wasn't able to shake the nagging feeling that she might be unwittingly lying. Her phone buzzed.

"Who's that?"

"Aki," Mattie said, and this time she was wittingly lying because it was actually Esther.

I'll check it out ASAP, read the message. She felt better knowing the Lightning Girl was going to do her due diligence and help them.

"She's just worried about her dog."

"…I guess horror movies could be kind of distracting."

"Yeah. They'll pass the time, until-"

"Until these fucking trees try to kill us, too. We're on borrowed time. How sturdy do you think those windows are?" she asked. Mattie knew the windows were made of a type of glass from the future they used to make space station viewing platforms, densi or something, so they could probably keep out a few trees.

"Come on, then," Mattie said, getting up, turning the TV off. It would be good to get away from the news coverage. Steph stood up to follow her. The stairs themselves also had books stacked on them, as well as pairs of shoes. It was always tricky not to trip. "Careful on all this crap," she warned. On the upstairs landing windowsill, a few plants were kept with odd, blue leaves – Mattie had forgotten about those.

"What are those?" Steph stared at them. Mattie only knew they were alien.

"They're fake," she said quickly, "Just for show. Add some colour." Steph believed this, thankfully, and her attention changed towards the four doors on the first floor. "My room's in the attic…" Mattie said, but Steph had a different goal in mind: trying to break into Clara and the Doctor's bedroom. She tried the door closest to the window first. "That's the library." It was also locked.

"You've got a library?"

"Well, it's really just a room with books in it, it's nothing fancy." More lies, it was very fancy, transdimensional, possessing objects the likes of which Steph could hardly imagine. "The next door is their bedroom, but it's gonna be locked too, so there's no point-" Steph completely ignored her and tried the door anyway, but as predicted, it was locked.

"What're the other rooms?" Steph asked, "None of them yours?"

"No, that's the bathroom," she pointed at the door directly at the top of the stairs, "And that's the guest bedroom. It's tiny, though, it's literally just got a bed in it, and even that barely fits. More of a cupboard."

"That's where I'll be sleeping, then. You know, when I go to Hannah's and then come here to hide from the wrath of her parents. On the same floor as the Hotswalds, too, maybe I'll be able to hear them doing it."

"I doubt that," said Matilda, leading her upstairs.

"Why?"

"Well, I've never heard them."

"Do they not do it?"

"No, I know from their conversations that they do it constantly. But, like, super quietly, I guess. Unless they have soundproofing? Maybe they do. But I do think they're also really quiet."

"That's crazy. How can anyone stay quiet?"

"Practice…? I'd really rather not think about it, to be honest with you."

"I find it hard not to think about it."

"You could be more respectful," said Mattie, opening the door to her bedroom, "I mean, they're out there risking their lives right now looking for your brother, you don't have to be so creepy."

"Ouch. Did things just get real, or what?" Steph said, stepping inside as Mattie held the door open. "Side note – holy shit, this room is huge. This is legitimately the entire attic."

"It's a conversion. They were like, 'we think you need your own space.' I'm not gonna argue with them," she shrugged. It was a large room. "It's bigger than their bedroom."

"That's crazy. They should've switched rooms, taken the attic."

"The rest of the entire house is theirs, to be fair," she closed the door. She hadn't tidied, though her room was notably cleaner than Clara's. The desk underneath the skylight was covered in clutter, paper and homework, and she hadn't made the bed. There was a bean bag thrown into a corner, and elsewhere was a large collection of her SFX stuff. All the things she used to make wounds when she got bored. She was currently working on a way to make it look like her jaw had been ripped off, but it required better artistry than she was capable of – maybe Aki would help. "What do you want to watch?"

"I don't know. Anything. Your room is cool, by the way. Mine's probably more like the 'cupboard' downstairs. Jake's is a bit bigger. They made us share until we were, like, eleven, then moved me into the smaller one," she said.

"Well, I've got this rare director's cut of the original Dawn of the Dead I was planning on watching at some point, so, I guess if you like zombies?" she suggested. It was actually Esther's rare copy of Dawn of the Dead she had leant Matilda. "It's, like, the ultimate zombie flick. Literally defined the entire zombie genre."

"Sure. As long as it doesn't have any trees in it. If you suggested Blair Witch, I'd probably kill myself."

"Yeah, that is a tree-heavy film," she said, thinking. "The Oswalds love Blair Witch, they watch it every Halloween."

"They must have shit taste in films then because it's boring as fuck." Mattie went to switch on her projector, feeling that the entire situation – namely her having a sort-of friend over to hang out with – was hopelessly surreal, the kind of thing she only thought happened in high school films. "Go on, then. Hit me with these zombies. And it better be saturated with gore. It wouldn't be a proper trip to the Hotswalds without my poor, teenage brain being addled by gratuitously violent media. It's this or I go find some porn, I'm sure they've got porn somewhere." She sat down on the floor in front of the bed.

"Well, it's from 1978, it's not exactly Saw," said Mattie, "Although I thought Saw XXV was a let-down. They've just run out of interesting ways to torture people."

"Oh, sure. I'm sure it's still fine. Bring it on."

"You know, you didn't have to lie and pretend you're not squeamish," said Mattie. Stefani's pallor had changed dramatically throughout their viewing of Dawn of the Dead, which really wasn't even that gory, Mattie didn't think. Like she'd said, the thing was from 1978. "Could've shown you, like Cannibal Holocaust. Or Antichrist. Or Irreversible – there's this whole scene where they beat a guy to death with a fire extinguish and the camera never cuts, it's so cool, like, for the special effects. Martyrs is kind of horrific."

"I'm officially regretting trying to befriend you."

"Are you sure? You don't want to watch Antichrist?"

"What happens in it that's so bad…?"

"She tries to cut off her, like, labia, with nail scissors." Steph stared at her. "What?"

"Who lets you watch these?"

"I used to watch them with my dad," she said. It was many years ago that her parents had finally started losing in arguments with her about what films she should be allowed to watch. Maybe she was still a teenager, but she had been a teenager for a very long time and there was no way she was waiting until she was sixty to watch Romero. "Mum watched them sometimes, but she doesn't like gore fests."

"Is she squeamish, too? Not that I'm squeamish."

"My mum?" Mattie nearly laughed. "No, she was an ER doctor, she could never help pointing out all the inaccuracies and how unrealistic they are."

"Your parents sound cool."

"Yeah… yeah, they were… they-"

A crash downstairs interrupted them right as the credits for Dawn of the Dead began to roll. Mattie's stomach sank, and she began to feel just as sick as Stefani looked, worried that the trees had actually managed to break into the house. But then she heard shouting, shouting she recognised distinctly. Steph took off first to go after news of her brother, Mattie following in her wake. It sounded like a lot of arguing was going on, though.

When they reached the stairs down to the ground floor, they saw the chaos in the hall; two cats and a dog unleashed into the house, undoubtedly Aki's husky and Sarah Pickman's tabbies, while Clara was half-carrying an unconscious Jakub into the living room.

"Jake!" Steph exclaimed, jumping the bottom few steps to go accost Clara and check on his wellbeing. She didn't even notice the Lightning Girl standing next to the Doctor in the doorway, who was trying to wrangle the animals while Clara complained about having them in the house. Like Mattie had been saying, Clara wasn't a big fan of animals. Steph started saying unintelligible things in Polish to try and rouse Jake.

"What happened?" Mattie asked the Doctor and Esther quietly, lowering her voice. Steph was too focused on Jake to pay them any mind for the time being. "Also, your costume is, like, way cooler in person."

"Thanks," said Esther, "But, uh, secret identity."

"Yeah, I know."

"What happened is somebody had a brain aneurysm telekinetically ripping root-arteries out of a giant tree-heart-thing," explained the Doctor, "Sparky showed up at the last possible moment."

"Hey, I saved you from being crushed to death by a falling rock."

"I said she was phasing."

"She was unconscious," said Esther, her voice sounding robotic as it was filtered through the mask. "Good thing you texted me since these two are obviously too proud."

"We were handling it," said the Doctor, shaking her head, "Long story short, everything's fine now. The new leader of UNIT might be a weirdo with an alien parasite attached to her arm harbouring a very stalker-ish crush on me, but they've got their soldiers doing the legwork freeing all the people down there. They should all survive, provided they get blood transfusions pretty soon."

"Oh. Will they be able to?"

"They clone blood cells for medical purposes now," Esther said, "Sally's always talking about it, but she says the cloned blood doesn't taste as good."

"Gross."

"Yeah. Well, uh, I should probably-"

"You're the Lightning Girl!" Steph appeared in the living room doorway. So she had noticed Esther.

"Saved all our lives," said the Doctor, "Gotta love that Lightning Girl, taking time out of her busy earthquake schedule to rescue a couple of nobodies like us."

"I always have time for nobodies like you," said Esther, "Besides, it's California, they should know there's an earthquake risk when they move there."

"That's what I said!" Steph exclaimed.

"Are you alright?" Clara interjected, leaving the living room. She was talking to Steph. "You look a bit grey, are you ill?"

"No."

"She's squeamish," Mattie said, "We were watching Dawn of the Dead."

"A classic! Basically the foundation for every subsequent piece of zombie media," said Esther, "Shopping malls, cabin fever, biting people to spread contagion – all Romero's brainchild. Get it? Brain-child?"

"Hilarious," said the Doctor dryly.

"C'mon, that was great," Esther was the only person amused by her own joke, but she had never been very good at telling jokes, "Do you know it's only a critique of consumerism by complete coincidence? And then Night of the Living Dead has that whole accidental race angle. He just makes all these uber symbolic media, like, by complete chance."

"A bit like how it must be complete chance that a total nerd decides to become a superhero," said the Doctor. They were definitely acting chummy enough for it to be suspicious to Steph, or it would be, were she not so preoccupied with the euphoria of Jakub not being dead.

"…Anyway…" Esther began, "I should be going. I could help clear some of these trees, probably." The trees weren't gone, not by a longshot, but already looked noticeably dead.

"Wait, actually," Mattie said, "I have a friend who thinks you – the Lightning Girl – are, like, the coolest person in the world, and that's her missing dog. It'd mean the world if you were the one who took the dog back to her."

"Oh. Sure thing!" said Esther brightly, "I like dogs. What's his name?"

"Hiro."

"Hiro? That's awesome."

"Are you taking these animals away? I'll drive you," Clara offered.

"She's the Lightning Girl, she doesn't need to be driven anywhere," said Steph.

"Actually, while I can turn into electricity and travel through cabling and the air, I'm not able to turn any other living things into electricity. So a drive would be a big help."

"Anything for our trusty, neighbourhood safety hazard," said Clara. Was she okay to drive? If she'd just had an aneurysm? Mattie could still see blood around her nose that hadn't been fully cleaned off. "You stay here and watch these teenagers," she told the Doctor.

"Sure, sure…" she said, picking up one of the cats from where it had lain down on the steps, "Are you Louis or Marie? Which one of you are we going to behead first?"

"Sweetheart, don't tell the cats you're going to behead them," said Clara, shaking her head, picking up the other one. The two of them left while the Doctor continued to express her distaste over the names of Sarah Pickman's cats to put them in the van. Esther whistled to get Hiro to leave the kitchen and follow her. He bounded after her, seemingly no worse for wear after being kidnapped.

"Is Jake okay?" Mattie asked Steph while the adults fussed around with the Volkswagen in the drive.

"How are they planning on driving that through the streets with all the trees?" Presumably by turning it intangible and just driving straight through them.

"Pfft," Mattie shrugged, "Haven't a clue. She did say she might be able to clear the roads, so."

"Huh… Mrs Oswald says he's asleep."

"That's good."

"How did you know they'd all be alright?"

"I didn't, I just trust them," she said. The Doctor returned promptly, leaving Esther and Clara in charge of taking the animals back to their rightful owners.

"Can I get you girls anything to eat, then?" she asked, "There's a whole lot of bacon left."

"Jake and I don't eat bacon," said Steph.

"Do you eat cheese? I could do toasties on the grill."

"I'm not hungry…" said Steph, "Those zombies really do know how to rip out a person's most vital organs…"

"Fair enough. Romero can be a ride for the unenlightened. I'll get you some water. How about you, Matts?"

"I wouldn't say no to a cheese toastie."

"If you try to put Nutella on it, I'm kicking you out," she said, heading off towards the kitchen.

"But Nutella and cheese go great together."

"You put Nutella on a cheese toastie?" Steph asked, disgusted.

"It's not that bad," Mattie followed the Doctor, "At least I'm not the kind of freak who'd wash out an empty yoghurt tub and then fill it with mayonnaise, then eat the mayonnaise with a spoon while tricking people into thinking it's actually yoghurt."

"What the fuck?" Steph asked.

"I'd just like to make it clear that I don't support my wife in any capacity when she does that," said the Doctor, fetching cheese from the fridge and taking out the sandwich toaster, "Which is saying something, because I've just had to prove that I'm super supportive of her. The thing with the mayonnaise and the yoghurts is weird. Are you sure you don't want anything, Steph? A drink? A snack?"

"I'll just… get a glass of water…"

"Oh, I'll do it, just sit down. It's been a long day. First the thing with the trees, then Matilda subjects you to her horror films. She didn't start talking about Antichrist again, did she?" The Doctor went to wash her hands and then get Steph some water.

"Hey!" Mattie argued, "It's a good film."

"It's actually not, at all. Lucky we got back before you made her watch Irreversible. There's only so many times you can watch a guy beaten to death with a fire extinguisher."

"That scene is flawless," said Mattie.

"Yeah, apart from its subject matter. Not to mention the ten-minute rape scene after that. You have absolutely no taste. I mean, your father – god rest his soul – he did not instil in you the values necessary to judge whether a movie is good or not. He liked Mars Attacks way too much."

"Mars Attacks is great," said Mattie, "It's not like media has to condone the things it portrays."

"This is what I mean," she said, slicing the cheese, "What's your favourite movie, Steph?"

"The Graduate." Both Matilda and the Doctor groaned in response, though Mattie had a feeling Steph was kidding.

"I should've guessed," the Doctor muttered, "You're worse than her dad. And he once tried to get me to marathon every episode of The Wire."

"Did he?"

"It was a long time ago. You should ask Rose about it. She always used to say, 'Don't get Mickey started on The Wire.'" Matilda had seen every episode of The Wire with her father, who had always been quite enthusiastic about it. Perhaps she should watch it again. "Still. It sure beats being made to watch Don't Tell the Bride on a loop every weekend. I guess that's women for you."

"Don't you make her watch SpongeBob, though?" Mattie asked, knowing that the Doctor was complaining indirectly about Clara's television habits.

"SpongeBob has depth. And she's already married, there's no reason for her to be so interested in weddings. How much cheese do you want?"

"More than that. Please," said Mattie.

"So, you two were okay here on your own today? You didn't, uh… go snooping?"

"Your bedroom door was locked," said Mattie.

"Oi!" Steph protested, "I did not try to get into the bedroom. I wouldn't do that."

"A good thing it was locked. I'm gonna have to convince her to help me clean it…" She put the bread into the grill and set it off cooking. "Jakub should wake up soon. The trees were anaesthetising people and then drinking their blood. From what I can gather with my very limited expertise, as a history teacher." She was not very convincing. "That's what the soldiers said."

"Are the trees… like, alien trees?"

"Probably," said the Doctor. The existence of aliens was no longer a secret to Earth's population, not after so many attempted invasions, but there still weren't any species they had open lines of communication with. Aliens were known about but misunderstood and feared, which was why the Doctor had to pretend she wasn't one. "An invasive species come to push the humans out. I mean, us humans. Like when they introduced the American grey squirrels to Britain and killed all the red squirrels. Or when American crayfish were released into lakes in Africa and killed all the native fish. Or when American settlers went across to New England and tried to wipe out all the First Nations people."

"Aren't you American?" Steph pointed out.

"Eurgh. Don't remind me."

"Surely the settlers were technically English, though," Mattie said.

"Maybe I'm generalising too much, instead of 'Americans' I ought to be saying western imperialists with a knack for committing genocide. If history teaches us anything, it's that you should not trust Europeans."

"Or white people," said Mattie.

"Well, exactly," agreed the Doctor.

"I'm gonna go check on Jake," said Steph after a pause. Neither of them stopped her from leaving the room. Once she was gone and relatively out of earshot, the Doctor finished making Mattie her toastie and brought it over.

"What was in the tube, then?" Mattie whispered, "Really?"

"Tube's completely overrun," she explained, also as quietly as possible, sitting in the chair at the kitchen table next to Matilda, "They were keeping the people wired into the walls of these tunnels and sucking their blood very slowly. But I was right, there was a central locus, a giant ball of blood, huge – Clara destroyed it, then Esther showed up, then UNIT."

"You said the leader of UNIT is stalking you?"

"Oh. My. God. She was dressed like me. Not me-me, but other, past versions of me – totally freaky. Like looking in a funhouse mirror. And they've got her in charge of the planet's primo alien-intelligence organisation, when she literally has a Scek – which is an alien parasite sort of like a Symbiote – latched onto her arm. The damn thing is keeping her young while probably having untold effects on her mind. Honestly, I dread to think where that's all gonna lead. Nowhere good. Letting a Scek attach itself to you is like making a deal with the devil. Anything can happen."

"Can I really not put any Nutella on this?"

"You're unbelievable. Nutella and cheddar – that's even too gross for me."

"I heard you used to eat fish fingers and custard."

"It was a dark time." They heard voices in the next room; Jake had woken up. Both of them proceeded to investigate and found Steph hugging him as he groggily tried to work out where he was. He muttered something in Polish.

"It's the Oswalds' house," Steph explained, "They went and got you."

"Got me from where…?"

"The tube tunnels," said the Doctor, "You were kidnapped by some alien trees. Or so I'm told. But you're okay now, you'll just need to rest up. You've suffered minor blood loss. I heard. Mrs Oswald will take you home once she gets back. Do you want anything to eat, drink? Although, I'm honestly not sure how much of our food is kosher."

"You don't have to, um…" Jake was very confused by the situation.

"Are you sure?" Jake squinted at her. "You know what – don't worry about it. But shout if you need anything." Steph said something else to Jake in Polish but was interrupted by the Doctor, who was suddenly offended. "There is nothing weird about my videos, Stefani." Steph was shocked.

"Do you speak Polish?"

"Enough," she said, "What's your beef with my VHS tapes?"

"Why do you have them?"

"For the aesthetic. The grain, the bad audio, the fuzzy images, it all contributes to that elusive, 1980s zeitgeist."

"So what are the videos?" Steph persisted, "Who's Walter Reuther?"

"A prominent unionist erased from history by bourgeois academics," said the Doctor, "He marched with Martin Luther King, at Selma."

"I said that," said Mattie.

"So you really do listen to me. He created the United Automobile Workers union to really stick it to Henry Ford. A leftist who survived two assassinations and supported civil rights in the golden era of social progress – the Sixties. The video is a recording of an episode of Batfink from 1967 – do you guys know Batfink?" They shook their heads. "Well, it's a kids' cartoon about a bat superhero, very offensive because of its use of racist, East Asian stereotypes – we have a friend who used to have a cat named after Batfink, though – anyway, this episode is alleged to contain a hidden, anti-Reuther political message, saying Reuther and the organised labour movement is the biggest threat to America. Only, I haven't been able to find any evidence of the message from watching the video."

"What are the other videos?" Steph asked, not particularly interested in subliminal messages from a hundred years ago about people she'd never heard of. The Doctor walked over to her stack of videos to examine them.

"There's Batfink, this one is the Kennedy assassination, uh… Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, an underrated classic easily able to match Romero… Raiders of the Lost Ark, also a classic, and something labelled 'wedding video' I don't recall the details of. Could be anybody's wedding video. Clara probably knows." She put the videos back down on top of the ancient VCR. "Somewhere I have a very rare recording of The Scooby-Doo Project."

"The what?" Mattie asked.

"Have I never told you about that? It's great. It was aired on Halloween, 1999, as a special made to capitalise on the success of The Blair Witch Project – they call it the first movie to ever go viral and say what you like about it, but the marketing campaign was genius. So they did this crossover on Cartoon Network where the Scooby-Doo gang go to the woods looking for the Blair Witch, and they aired it in chunks during commercial breaks during a big Scooby-Doo Halloween marathon. But the best part is that it was so traumatic for the kids watching that it was never re-aired, never released on video, or DVD. Only way to see it is if someone happened to record it when it was on, and then spliced together the footage to see the complete package," she explained. Mattie could hardly believe that was a real thing, but also that she didn't already know about it. "You can find it online now, but I love the authenticity of a bootleg videotape. That's why The Ring is so powerful." Mattie's phone buzzed just when Jakub asked the Doctor to explain why, exactly, she had a tape of the Kennedy assassination in the living room.

She received about a dozen messages in a row from Aki, some with Japanese characters mixed in, all expressing a hereby unseen level of joy at meeting the Lightning Girl in the flesh, and getting her missing dog returned. Esther even had the courtesy to stop for a selfie. She showed the Doctor.

"It was good of you to tell her to take the dog back personally," said the Doctor, "I'm sure it means the world to Akiko." Mattie smiled to herself and typed a response, while the Doctor clapped her hands. "Okay, I won't have the two of you in my house shirking my famous hospitality – I'm making hot chocolate with extra whipped cream for everybody, and I won't take no for an answer. It's been a long week and the sugar is well-earned. We also have some cake that needs eating, so you're all getting some, no arguments." She went back into the kitchen.

"So you really do live with them?" Jakub asked Matilda.

"Yeah," she said, smiling a little sadly, "I really do…"