Christmas in Cardiff

Given the last episode, this story couldn't happen. Hope you enjoy it anyway!

Cardiff—every sodding time! Cardiff—that veritable junkyard of time and space where everything turned up given enough time and inconvenience. The fact had to be faced—puppies were never going to come through that rift. There would never be a shower of flower petals or spontaneous rainbows or an outbreak pretty, pink hearts. Oh, no. Only the bad stuff came through at Cardiff—only the terrifying and malignant—only monsters and murderers. Bloody Cardiff.

And of course—Christmas. Like he didn't have enough problems. Throw Christmas into the mix and you were just asking for trouble. Peace on earth and good will towards men—not bloody likely… What was it about hope and love—the two brightest human emotions in the whole neon-colored spectrum—that drew malevolent forces to planet Earth like meteors to a magnetized hull? The one day set aside for kindness just kept turning into carnage.

That's what he got for trying to reconnect and spend Christmas Eve with an old friend—just about the only old friend he still had. He'd been moping around the TARDIS, feeling sorry for himself—a brief, but by no means rare condition, when he had a thought: Jack. Of course, Jack. Jack was always happy to see him. Of course his intentions were a bit suspect, but a few centuries had tempered that sex drive into something of a controllable force, and the Doctor wasn't shy about calling the good Captain on his shenanigans. "Stop it…"

Just one Christmas—the one Christmas he'd actually wanted to spend with an old mate, a bottle of brandy, and a slightly browning tree—he would like the time of peace and joy to live up to its name.

He'd meant to land in the present—on a Christmas Jack was likely to spend in a predictable place, but of course the dates got a little mixed up. Christmas in Cardiff, yeah? Nothing like it. And since it'd be daft to try again with luck, fate, and coincidence arrayed against him, he faced a tough decision. Interfere with personal time lines or spend the night all on his lonesome? Tough choices. Rule-breaking, time-splitting choices. But what's the point of hopping through time and space if you can't bend a few of your own rules and the universe's as well? Besides, Jack would cope. Circular time was a simple concept for a man who couldn't die and couldn't seem to help mucking about in his own past.

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS and even before his trainers touched the tarmac, he felt it. Something was terribly wrong—wrong like Jack was wrong and Donna was wrong—wrong like it was never meant to be.

It was Christmas in Cardiff. All Christmases in all Cardiffs. Every blasted one. They stretched on for eons—from near savages ripping meat off the bone to robots pulling crackers and complaining about the one last ball bearing in their stockings. All of them gliding past each other in the night. Gotta love Cardiff.

"I hate Cardiff!" Jack shouted at him while the Torchwood tower swayed in the time storm and the rift machine sparked behind him. "The whole fucking place. Blow it up—that's my vote. Put it out of my misery!"

"No, you can't blow up the rift," the Doctor chastised calmly. "You have no idea how much worse it'd be around here. Anyway, no one's keeping you here. You could be out there wrecking havoc in any old corner of the universe if you wanted to, but no—you stay here. Why is that?"

The Captain sighed, rolling his selves up to his elbows with greater concentration than was strictly required. "You don't think I've tried? I've skipped out on this place so many times…I'd tell you the stories, but I can think of better ways to spend eternity with you." He winked suggestively.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "There'll be none of that Jack Harkness. I came to spend the night with a friend since I haven't got a family, so just you keep those comments to yourself."

"Jonesing for family? That's not like you."

"I've had a rough year."

"You're telling me. Where are you? Two—three years in my past? Hell of a year. For both of us."

"How could you tell?"

Jack smirked. "Let's just say there've been a few changes around here."

"What? Oh—no." The Doctor stamped his foot like a child and stuck his hands in his pockets. "Regeneration? I thought we'd sorted that out the last time. New teeth—doesn't bear thinking about. Just tell me—am I ginger at least?"

Jack opened his mouth to answer but the Doctor held up a hand to stop him. "No, never mind. Spoilers. This is what you get for mucking about on someone's timeline."

Jack shrugged, nonplused. "I guess we won't talk about that night in Paris then."

"What?!"

Jack laughed at his friend's shocked expression. "You'll just have to wait and find out."

The Doctor spluttered. "Oh, now—you—you—"

"Did you miss me?" Jack teased.

The Time Lord stared at him for a moment, at a loss for words, before turning away with an exasperated shrug. "Well...it's certainly a lot more interesting when you're around, I'll give you that."

Jack smiled a little, his attention returning to the sparking machinery around him. "Like this Christmas situation we've got?"

"Well, yeah. Perpetual time loop—beauty, too. I've never seen one run so smoothly." The Doctor slid on his brainy specs and peered at a computer monitor. "Look at that! None of them colliding, nothing slipping through, just all of them co-existing. It's brilliant. How'd this happen?"

Jack looked around from the Rift Manipulator, arms crossed. "Near as I can tell, Tosh was working on this before she died. You wouldn't believe the things we've got hanging around from her. I think she wanted to step through backwards and spend one Christmas with her mother, but I can't be sure. We had a surge of rift activity through here last night and the computer went a bit haywire. Started dragging up all sorts of half-finished programs. We're lucky this seems to be the only one that was fit to run. The others weren't as…nice."

The Doctor sifted through a few of the files and gave a low-whistle. "Phew-ee! Have you seen the stuff you've got down here under defense? That's just a blatant lie! Oh—now, look at that—just look. You'd need three arms to fire that. What are you going to—start sprouting extra appendages? You'd look pretty funny with three arms—that's all I'm going to say…"

Another horrifying item caught his eye. "Oh, come now—there's no call for that." He pressed the delete button very deliberately and with great relish. "I leave you folks alone for a second and you go directly for the knee caps. Don't know why I bother turning up at all…"

Jack watched him fuss with amusement. "You know we can recover just about anything from that computer, right?"

The Doctor glared at him for a moment before pulling out his sonic screwdriver and pointing at the controls. "Wanna bet?" There were a few sparks, but the computer itself remained intact. Jack doubted the same could be said for its files.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow at Jack who sighed, resigned to the Doctor's double standard on destruction. Jack turned back to the Rift Manipulator. "I don't suppose you could sonic our way out of this mess?"

"What do you want me to do? Me with this itsy-bitsy screwdriver and you with a whole multiverse of carolers, gravy, and bad Baby Jesus plays on your hands? What do you think I am—a miracle worker? Well, you won't be getting any of that water to wine stuff out of me. Humans—always have to sensationalize things…"

Jack ignored the rant with good humor and bent back to his work at the controls. "If I could just figure out where all the energy maintaining the loop is coming from, I could shut it off and put a stop to this circus."

The Doctor walked around the machine, eyeing it up as an opponent. When that had no effect, he tried studying it as an engineer and scientist. Hell-o.

"Ah, Jack?"

"Yeah?"

"You don't suppose this rift machine of yours could power itself by, say, feeding into a loop of all the past and future energy so that the supply never ran out? A lot like this Christmas problem you seem to be having tonight."

Jack looked up, surprised in spite of himself. After all these years, the Doctor was still amazing him. "How did you work that out?"

The Doctor took off his glasses, grinning manically. "I'm the Doctor—I'm brilliant! And I'm literate, too. There's a very foreboding looking lever over here labeled 'Energy Loop: On/Off.' Bit anti-climatic, really."

Jack rushed around to the Doctor's side. "God, that's embarrassing. All the years I've been here and I never noticed."

The Doctor shrugged. "Looks fairly new. Maybe Tosh threw in this improvement while she was at it. Smart girl."

Jack smiled a little sadly. "She was that. I supposed it's time to close this party down. Last call."

Maybe it was Jack's words—maybe it was fate or luck or whatever it was that seemed to stalk the Doctor's steps across the universe, but whatever it was, something made him pause and actually look at the years swirling around him. With the aid of software and sensors and who knows what else, Jack could tell what was going on. He could understand there was trouble with the rift; he could fix it—even faster with a little help from the Doctor. But Jack Harkness couldn't actually see them—every Christmas swirling around and around, not mixing, not dissipating, just dancing around each other's edges like some bizarre ballet.

The Doctor could. They stretched out around him in every direction—beautiful and mad and marvelous. He could feel them all, step into any one he chose, spend Christmas anywhere he wanted to. Or where he really wanted to—with her.

All Christmases in all Cardiffs. Even parallel ones.

He placed a hand on Jack's arm to stop him pulling the lever down. "Rose is out there."

Jack blinked at him. "Could be."

"No, Jack. She's out there. Just one Christmas, but she's here—I can feel it."

Jack stared at him for one moment—afraid that after the pressures of the last year his mentor and friend had gone a bit barmy. Understandable considering, but still a little unsettling. But then Jack shook his head. This was the Doctor. The Doctor didn't do barmy unless the world was in danger, and while the world was certainly stranger than it had been before the surge, it wasn't exactly in dire peril either. Jack had seen the end of the world. Several times. This wasn't it.

"All right," he said, releasing the lever.

The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Some guardian you are. I say Rose is out there and you're perfectly willing to just let the rift go to hell."

Jack shrugged. "It's not going anywhere. No one's going to notice away from the center. You've got time."

"Time?"

"How often do you think worlds are going to collide like this, Doctor?"

"More often than you'd think."

"Can you really afford to let this one slip by? Go see her. We'll flip the switch tomorrow."

The Doctor bit his lip, torn once again between duty and desire. He should shut down the loop, but he wanted to spend Christmas with Rose. It was such a wonderfully selfish impulse—to hang the rift and the consequences and strike off where no being, least of all a Time Lord was meant to go. Dimension hopping—like some teenager—or like the rebel he always professed himself to be. All that running. He was bound to end up somewhere—bound to cross a few lines.

Only now there was no one to catch him. No one to shake their heads and tisk their disapproval at his recklessness. No one to put it right if it everything went suddenly and inexplicably wrong. He was the authority now—the only one left to mind the lines and sort out the mess. He watched with disapproval while others broke the rules to follow their impulses, and then he set the world back to rights as best he could.

Of course, there were other considerations. "I can't, Jack. She's moved on—with me. The other me. They probably have a house and a mortgage and kids. Kids, Jack!"

Jack snorted at the horror in the Doctor's voice. "Well, you said you wanted family for the holiday. Does it get much closer than Rose Tyler and kids?"

"No."

"There you go. Merry Christmas, Doctor."

When the Doctor still looked unconvinced, Jack sighed again. Time for drastic measures. "And, spoiler alert: you're not going to look like this for much longer. You want to see her again without her wondering who the hell you are, you're going to have to do it now."

"You know, you really haven't got a grasp of this personal timeline stuff—"

Jack turned him toward the door and gave him a push to start him off. "Go. Go have one pleasant Christmas for a change."

"In Cardiff?" the Doctor asked incredulously.

It was strange the way he could still sense her after all this time. Not anything definite—no handy arrows saying "This way to Rose Tyler," but still, there was a certain air—tinged pink and scented with yellow sunlight—that led him all the way to a street full of twinkle lights like stars and snow like nebulous gases. Real snow—for the first time since he'd been in the vicinity of Rose Tyler there was real snow. It was beautiful.

He wandered her street, wondering whether the house would jump out at him or whether he would be reduced to knocking on doors at random. He really wasn't above that anymore. If bothering the unsuspecting inhabitants of an alternate Earth was what it took, he'd find her.

In the end all it took was a little observation. The front window shone blue; the star at the top of the tree was lit from behind with what he recognized as his missing sonic screwdriver. Cheeky bugger.

He made his way up the walk, dread, anticipation, and doom intensifying with every step. Of course the universe wasn't going to end if they met again. This was safe—it had to be. But it might, a little voice whispered at the back of his head. This moment might be The End. After all, he'd never met Rose Tyler under peaceful circumstances; he was conditioned to expect doom when he approached her door.

But what was the point of being a Time Lord if you couldn't enjoy the perks? Jack couldn't just walk out of the hub into whatever Christmas he wanted—not without doing irrevocable damage to every time he encountered, anyway. It was a damn good thing Toshiko Sato never got the chance to use her invention, because the only one it could work for without puncturing time and space was currently staring at Rose Tyler's front door, finger poised and frozen over the bell.

The door opened of its own volition, revealing two young children. He wasn't that surprised—trapped together on a parallel world? It was bound to happen. Humans—about as much restraint as rabbits.

The kids stared at him in the doorway, mouths forming perfect, tiny 'o's.

The boy regained his voice first. "How did you do that?"

The girl—a few years older and a few thought processes faster than her brother—reached out to poke the aberration on her doorstep. "You couldn't have. You're not Dad." She poked him again for good measure.

The Doctor favored her with a wry smile. "You have no idea what an astute observation that is."

"Oi—you two, who's at the door? Is it the carolers again?" Her head popped around the door frame at the end of the hall. Their eyes met; hers grew wide. She glanced over her shoulder and then back at him.

He gave her a little wave. "I could carol, if you like."

She stepped out into the hall, calling back to the kitchen. "Um, honey? Could you come out here when you get a sec?"

She came up to rest her hands on her children's head. "Why don't you two go help your father clear up in the kitchen? Tell him we could use a consult when he's finished."

The kids left, still peering back at him with interest until they turned the corner. The Doctor and Rose stared at each other in the hall.

She was lovely—she was always lovely. She was older now, maybe wiser, but when she looked at him and that grin began to play out on her lips—the face-splitting one he'd remember in every life to come—she was still his.

She raised one eyebrow at him. "Always knew you couldn't stay away. Miss me, did you?"

He smiled back sheepishly. "Yeah. Could say that."

"How long's it been for you?"

He shrugged. "Year—year and a half? You know me—never quite got the hang of linear time."

She laughed. "You don't have to tell me. The scrapes we ended up in because of you…"

"Oh, now—I got us out of them, too. Ok, that one time—ok, two times, but still…"

She shook her head at him, grief warring with amusement and threatening to win. She changed the subject.

"It's been nine years for us."

"Yeah—yeah, I saw. Little whosit and whatsit. You've been busy."

"Well, we had to fill the days somehow. Whosit is Donna Presley and whatsit is John Michael."

"I think there's an article of the Geneva Convention prohibiting that sort of cruelty."

"If it's any consolation , we call them Pres and Mickey."

"It's not—wait. Oh, no—yes! Oh, no—no, no, no, no! Not Mickey the idiot!"

She bit her tongue teasingly. "Yep. Mickey the marvelous idiot. Sorry you left us up to our own devices?"

Suddenly he was very serious. "You can't even begin to understand how much."

Their eyes locked, pain and heat transmitting across the ether, and then the door at the end of the hall swung open as a very familiar face poked around the frame.

"You called?" he asked before catching sight of his mirror image at the end of the hall. "Oh…"

Rose stepped back and turned sideways to smile brightly at her boys. "Should I leave the two of you alone?"

The one by the front door shook his head. "Nope."

"We're good," the other agreed.

There was muffled whispering in the kitchen. The Doctor at the end of the hall pushed the kitchen door open and drew his children out into the hall where they blinked silently at their father's twin.

"Come meet your uncle. Pres, your hair is not a lolly. Mickey, you've got a little something just there." He brushed his own cheek to show his son the location of the offending smudge, and when that failed he bent down, licked his thumb, and wiped it clean himself.

The Doctor by Rose watched silently, eyes widening in horror. Rose snorted at him. "Bit scarier than a mortgage, isn't it?"

He swallowed painfully. "Terrifying."

"Well, go on." Rose nudged him playfully. "They don't bite."

"Well, Mickey doesn't anyway," her husband amended. "Put a plate of chips in front of Pres, and there's no telling what she'll do. Like her mother, that one."

"Oi!" Rose protested. "Chips are no small matter. Someone once tried to take over the universe with chips." She made her way down the hall and picked up her son, bouncing Mickey a little to settle him on her hip.

"John Michael, meet the other Doctor."

"Not Dad?"

"No, darling. Not Dad." The Doctor by the front door winced, feeling every syllable stab somewhere between his two hearts.

He smiled anyway, charmed despite himself by the little brown haired boy gazing up at him with his mother's eyes. "Hello. Aren't you beautiful?"

"He gets that a lot," she said, laughing a little in the new found wonder in his eyes. She set Mickey back on his feet and called to his sister. "Pres, come take your brother into the living room. You get to open one present each on Christmas Eve, so make it count."

The children went squealing into the next room to debate their decisions. When they were gone the Time Lord raised his eyebrows at her. "Look at you. Disciplinarian, is it? Never thought I'd see the day."

She shrugged. "Kids. They change you."

Her husband came to stand at her side. "Just what are you doing here anyway?" A thought occurred and he looked to Rose. "Rude again?"

She nodded, resigned.

His two-hearted counterpart was unfazed. "Well—it's Cardiff, isn't it?" He shrugged. "And Christmas, too. I'm just glad the Daleks seem to have missed the invitation."

"The rift again?"

He nodded. "I'm a little surprised you two haven't noticed. All Christmases are out there on a perpetual time loop, and you're on holiday with the kids."

Rose did not look chastised. "If we ran into the office every time the rift hiccupped, our kids would think Jackie was their mother."

He looked a little annoyed. "How—"

"Domestic? Yeah, well, it happens. You should have thought of that before."

Her husband stepped in as a small voice of reason. "Again, if the universe is in jeopardy, what are you doing here?"

The Doctor looked away with embarrassment and mumbled incoherently.

Rose's eyes sparkled; she enjoyed watching his discomfort. "What was that?"

"I said Jack has it under control. A feedback loop—well, of sorts. You can only tell if you're actually standing on the damn thing. Or if you're a Time Lord."

"I resent that."

"Oi—no fighting, you two," she said, conveniently forgetting the fact that she'd been the one picking fights only moments before. "It's Christmas." She looked at her Time Lord Doctor in shock, realization dawning. "That's it, isn't it? It's Christmas, and you don't know what to do with yourself."

He looked away, rubbing the back of his neck. "Well, I was going to spend the night with Jack, but he was getting a bit frisky and well, I thought—well…"

The thought trailed into awkward silence as the three took in the direction of that sentence. Rose swallowed. "Right, then." She turned to her husband with an air of finality. "Honey, would you go help the kids with their presents, please?" She leveled her steady gaze back at the Doctor. "You, come with me."

Both looked like they wanted to protest, but years of experience with the will of Rose Tyler had taught them to know better. They did as they were told.

The Doctor followed Rose into the kitchen where the counters were covered with inexpertly frosted cookies and millions of tiny, smudged hand prints. Copper pots hung from hooks in the ceiling, and the sink was piled high with clean, drying dishes. Paper snowflakes in every stage of synthesis covered the kitchen table in an inch thick mass that threatened to lose its precarious hold on the wood work and go tumbling off to dust the linoleum floor.

In the middle of the chaos, Rose spun before him, her arms outstretched. Her hair whipped around behind her in small circles, dazzling him with reflected twinkle lights. Her grin spread wide, and for a moment he saw her—the little London shop girl he'd told to run and whose hand his own still ached for on its continuing journey's throughout the stars.

Her circles slowed until she faced him again, still grinning, but now the small brackets around her lips reminded him that the girl of his memory was gone. She was a woman now—a wife—a mother. She wasn't his Rose; she was so much more.

She raised one eyebrow to meet his stare before twirling in a semicircle to reassess the room. "I had to work today," she said. "Guess who did all this? Look at this." She held out a small cake to him with a smile. "Edible ball bearings. He made them." She held up a paper snowflake, infinitely fine in its pattern and almost gossamer in its intricacy. "He did this." She pointed to the dishes in the sink. "He washed those." To the cookies. "He baked those and mixed the frosting for the kids to go nuts with." She ran a finger over the sticky counter and shook her head slightly. "And he will be washing this later, believe me," she muttered to herself.

She looked back up at her returned Doctor and sighed. "He's a good man. He makes cookies with his kids and cleans up the kitchen afterward. He's here when I leave in the morning and when I get home at night. He saves the world in his spare time." She smiled sadly. "He's you, but he's so much more. And he's mine."

He swallowed carefully. "I know. That's why I left you here together. So you could be—human—together. It's just—I just…"

"Say it. If you're going to keep popping into our lives unexpectedly, you better get used to saying it. That's you're only ticket into this house from now on. Man up, Time Lord."

He swallowed again, wondering if he could claim ignorance and get out of her kitchen alive. The look in her eyes did not make him feel especially confident. "Rose Tyler—" He stopped, frozen by the reality of the situation.

"We've been here before," she said, exasperated.

He tried again. "Rose Tyler."

"Yes?"

"I love you."

She grinned—that grin that made his two hearts do the jitterbug in his chest. "Quite right, too."

He blinked at her, relieved and apprehensive at the same time. "That's it?"

"That's all I got."

"Rose—I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry."

She rested her palm against his cheek and smiled softly. "I know. You are forgiven. Thank you for stranding me here. With you. I love you."

She kissed his cheek and he held on to her for one long moment, tightening his grip on her waist because soon he would have to let go—he would say forever, but that word just doesn't have the same ring of finality it once did.

She pulled back in his arms and wiped a little at the corners of her eyes. "Com'on. They'll be opening the presents without us." She pulled him from the room. He was submissive now that she'd finally dragged that confession out of him. She led him into the living room and sat him on the couch before settling Mickey onto his lap. Pres snuggled into the cushions next to him, squeezed between him and her father. Rose stood back and smiled at the picture: her children bookended by the men she loved. "Welcome to the family, Doctor."

In the morning the world went pear shaped. The Doctor woke on the couch, all his inner alarm bells going haywire. Time to go. Again.

Rose met him at the door with a cup of tea, tightening the belt of her robe against the cold. She offered him a sip, which he accepted gratefully. She smiled up at him, eyes blurry with sleep, hair in disarray from her pillow. "Go on then. Save the universe and kiss Jack for me."

He grinned before leaning down to kiss her lips gently. "Look after me, Rose Tyler."

"I always do."

When he arrived back at the hub, Jack was cursing loudly and using all his strength to keep the lever from switching off.

"What did you do?"

"Me? You've been gone God knows how long, and you want to blame me? It's all I could do to keep the loop open long enough to let you back through!"

"Jack, you can let go now." When that message seemed to go unheard, the Doctor reiterated. "Jack—let go!"

Jack heard that time and ended up sprawled on the floor as the lever came swinging down with a heavy thud.

The Doctor leaned over to help Jack to his feet. "No way did that thing kick off on its own."

"It started on its own."

"Jack." The Doctor's tone held a note of warning.

Jack let out a breath. "It was Ianto. Ghosts from Christmas past and future have been wandering through here all night, but then Ianto staggered in—drunk and wreathed in tinsel and, well—humanity got the better of me…"

The Doctor laughed outright. "Well at least reality almost disintegrated in pursuit of a worthy cause."

Jack grinned. "Very worthy."

"Rose wanted me to pass something on."

"Yeah? Am I going to like this something?" The Doctor answered him with a light kiss. "Oh—oh yes, I am…"

The Doctor shook his head. "Merry Christmas, Captain. Thank you. I hate to save the universe and run, but…"

"That's what you do best." Jack smiled. "We'll always have Cardiff."

The Doctor grimaced. "That's what I'm afraid of, Jack."

A/N: Hope you enjoyed it! Let me know by Reviewing :)