Doctor Who!-but not. :) This is AU, but it's a canon AU, if that makes sense. It's following the adventures of Rose and human!Doctor, but my story primarily has to do with their children, the twins Grace and Jamey. Have fun!

He first met the twins in 2114.

He'd been stranded on the floating cliffs of Hasfar, courtesy of his captain, who did not take kindly to Joran's particular brand of humor. He'd been tossed cliff-side shortly after making the statement "At least I didn't get your daughter pregnant, yeah?" No, the captain didn't think Joran was funny at all.

Under most circumstances, Joran would have been ecstatic at having escaped the corps without being court martialed or killed, but under most circumstances, he wasn't a thousand feet in the air, sitting on dry, arid rock that supported no life whatsoever thanks to its highly acidic mineral content. He had a pistol, but the energy cell were all but drained, and while he had materialization gear on him, he'd only downloaded patterns for things like weaponry, clothes, and decks of cards. Only last week he'd thought that perhaps it might be prudent to add a few nutritional patterns, but until then, he'd never had a need for them.

So—basically—Joran was stranded, utterly stranded, without food or shelter, and thought it very likely indeed that he'd die soon.

A few hours passed, and as Hasfar's three suns shifted towards a sunset that only happened every five Earth days, a sound filled the air. It was the sound of engines, of that he was sure, but of what kind he couldn't tell. He'd never heard anything like them. It sounded almost as if the engines were fading in an out of existence.

Some fifty yards from where he was standing, a box had appeared, and when the engine noise stopped, it solidified; it began as blue, but then faded to a color very like the stone it rested on, and the initially smooth surface roughened until the box was almost indistinguishable from the rocks around it. It was remarkable technology; Joran had only heard stories of it, and even then, it was only theories.

The surface of the box grew a seam, and opened outward as a door. Out of it came two people, humanoid, one male and one female, with faces too similar to be accidental. Either their race was one of clone-like similarities, or they were related.

"Oh, look," the female said, as she tied her brown hair back into a ponytail. "Hasfar. That's wonderful. Or it would be, if we were on the surface. I told you we landed too soon."

"Shut it," said the male. "The view is better."

"Coincidence," she retorted, and he ran a hand through his blond hair irritably, making it stick up even more. They stopped abruptly when they caught sight of Joran, who was leaning against a boulder with his arms folded across his chest. He knew that he cut an impressive figure, with the green and purple light from the sunset blazing across his face and highlighting every inch of his muscular, corps-fit body. The tightly cut uniform hid very little.

"Hello," Joran said mildly.

"Hello," the male said back. He had shifted so that he stood in front of the woman, just a little, but neither of them seemed to notice. "Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Joran of the Soladan Quadrant," said Joran, and gave him a snappy salute. "Alpha Colony of the Second Earth Dynasty, to be exact."

"Oh, goody," said the woman. "A human."

"Metahuman, thanks," said Joran. "Who're you?"

"I'm Jamey, and this is my twin sister, Grace," said Jamey, and flicked his fingers against his forehead in a sloppy copy of Joran's salute.

"Origin?" asked Joran.

Jamey pursed his lips, exchanging a look with his sister. It was she who said, "Earth."

"Pull the other one," Joran said, straightening. Neither one of them looked like they were joking, which was incredible, because a trip from Earth to the Soladan Quadrant was at least thirty years—in stasis. Awake, the speed would have to be reduced, and that would easily add on another ten years. There was no way they could be from Earth and look as young as they did. Suspicious, he asked, "Where on Earth?"

"London," they answered, together.

"Hah!" said Joran. "There's no country on Earth called London! Where are you really from, huh? The Besdina System? Tolisiog?"

"London's a city, moron," Grace said, with an expression of such disgust that Joran believed her. "As in London, England."

Joran's eyes squinted. "England?"

"We should have checked the database," Jamey said to Grace, in a very put-upon tone. "Are we the British Empire or the English Federation here?"

"Unified Countries of Europe," said Grace. "Hopefully."

"You don't even know?" Joran snapped. "It's the Kingdom of Ireland now. England fell five centuries ago."

"Whoops," said Jamey. He didn't look as if he cared.

"Every time," said Grace. "Every blessed time. Can't you ever fly straight? We wanted the seventh year of the UCE, not fifth century Kingdom of Ireland. No wonder the light's greenish. We've gone past the pollution dumps."

"If you hadn't fried the yearometer—"

"Oh, right, it's my fault!" Grace said hotly, her cheeks growing red. It was then that Joran caught on. They weren't just travelers: they were time travelers. The last he'd heard, time travel had been categorically banned. It was too destructive, too dangerous to attempt. But they'd landed just fine, and so far as he could tell, Hasfar hadn't erupted into flames.

"I'm sure it's a big deal, this yearometer," Joran said, "but look, I'm kind of stranded here. Notice the lack of ship. If it's not too much trouble, I could really use a ride."

The twins stared at him.

"No way," said Grace.

"Why not?" Jamey and Joran demanded of her simultaneously.

"Dad's already going to kill us when we get back," Grace pointed out. "And Mum too, probably, now that we've gone too bloody far and can't even fetch her one of those Hasfarian roses."

"Oh, c'mon," Jamey protested. "It's not like we're going to take him home. They wouldn't even know."

Grace's lips pressed together, but then so did Jamey's, and they glared at one another in silent argument until finally Grace heaved a sigh. "Yeah, whatever, fine," she grumbled, stomping back to the box. Joran hurried forward to fall into step with Jamey, who he now considered to be his savior. He held out his hand, and Jamey obligingly shook it.

"I really appreciate this," Joran told him. "There's not a blessed thing to eat on these cliffs, you know."

"Thank the Irish for that one," said Jamey. Ahead of them, Grace had opened the box's door and stepped inside, leaving the barest crack of the interior visible—a massive room, brilliant and shining, the colors shifting slowly from one to the other like a bubble in slow motion. Jamey walked in, leaving Joran standing in the doorway, open-mouthed.

The inside of the box rose breathtakingly high, a meandering cathedral with a ceiling that twisted like a conch shell. The curls of the shell came down into supports, and in the center of these were the controls, a circular hodge-podge of levers and buttons and cogs that boggled the mind. If someone had asked Joran to pilot the thing, he wouldn't have known where to begin. At the center of the controls was a tall crystalline spire, driving straight upward into the ceiling, and where it touched the controls the pale surface turned opaque and merged seamlessly with the yellow-brown center console.

"Might as well go back a few centuries and see if we can't find some roses," said Grace, who was already monkeying with the controls, twisting and pulling and jerking things that looked, to Joran, like the contents of someone's trash heap. "What would it hurt to try?"

"You'll miss," said Jamey. "We always miss."

"No small wonder," Joran broke in, aghast, as he took his first few steps inside. The doors snapped shut behind him. "Look at it! It was designed by a madman!"

Grace grinned at him from the other side of the controls. "No, it was grown by a madman. Hold onto your hat!"

"I haven't got a hat," said Joran, and a second later he was thrown unceremoniously to the floor as the entire contraption bucked. He thought, for a moment, that everything would fall apart—it shook awfully—but after only a few terrible moments, it stilled, and the engines stopped their shrill whining. "What kind of ship is this?" he demanded.

"It's a TARDIS," Grace told him. She seemed far more cheerful now, running around her ship's controls, than she had out on the cliffs. "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space."

"Time travel is outlawed," Joran said, moving to grip the pale steel railings that surrounded the controls. "It's supposed to be too dangerous. It's supposed to put holes in the fabric of the universe."

"Yeah," said Jamey. "If you're daft."

Grace laughed aloud. "Be nice, Jamey."

"Who are you people?" Joran asked, feeling something suspiciously like fear creep up his spine. He couldn't say that it was anything they did, exactly. Certainly their general carelessness with horrifically advanced technology was unsettling, but they looked like regular people, just two strangers traveling the stars, nothing strange at all. But the longer he was around them, the more and more unnerved he was, until he was seriously beginning to wonder if they were even human.

"We told you," said Grace. "I'm Grace, he's Jamey."

"It's not what he means, though," commented Jamey, lounging on the pilot's seat. His long arms and legs went in every which direction, and it struck Joran suddenly that they were just teenagers. Very smart, very advanced teenagers with a time machine that didn't destroy whole universes.

"Grace and Jamey Smith," Grace said. "That's our names."

"It's not what you are," said Joran.

"Oh, true," agreed Jamey. "Very true. Nice observation there, lieutenant. We weren't lying, we really are from Earth. Our father immigrated there some years ago."

Joran caught on. "Immigrated from where?"

"Everywhere," said Grace, and threw a lever. It looked like a hand brake. "Not this dimension, though. This is his ship, you see."

"Your father is a time traveler? An alien time traveler?"

"He's half-human," Jamey said defensively. "Or three-quarters, I'm not sure. Human enough. So." He clapped his hands. "Now that we've got that bit done and over with, it's time to move on. Tell me we've landed in the right spot, Grace."

"Ninety-five percent sure," she answered, and crossed over to the doors. She opened the doors a crack and peeked out. "Jackpot," she said, and vanished.

Joran sat on the edge of the floating cliffs, legs hanging off the side and his fingers tapping restlessly on his knees. Beside him, Jamey was stretched out, hands folded on his stomach, and though at first the younger man looked calm, every so often his jaw muscles would clench so hard as to betray the true extent of his irritation. They'd landed hours ago. The suns had long since set, and Grace worked down by the light escaping from the TARDIS's doors, peering closely at each and every specimen she gathered.

It was apparently very important to get just the right rose.

They looked all the same to Joran, though Jamey had looked at him like he was crazy when he suggested it. Well, sure, maybe some of them had slightly different coloring, but they were all still roses. Just roses. But in one thing Joran and Jamey were completely in agreement: it did not take quite that long to pick out a damned flower.

"What's the rose for, anyway?" Joran asked, watching the winds blow through the forests below. The trees moved in silver ripples along the hills, though from so high, they looked more like grass. If he hadn't been to the surface and looked up at the hundred-foot high trees, he might not have believed it. "Can't you just materialize one for your mum?"

"You can't fake a Hasfarian rose," Jamey murmured, eyes closed.

"Exactly so," Grace agreed. "They're really rare, as well. They're our Mum's favorite flower, you know. Dad goes out and fetches one for her whenever he's been bad. Ah! There you are, you sly bugger!"

"Did you find one?" asked Joran.

"Not one. It. I found it." Grace brought it over for them to see, cupped gently between her palms. "It's the always the same rose, don't you see? Dad tried to explain it once—genetic ghosts, I think he said—but that's why this rose means so much. It's Mum's rose."

"I wondered about that," said Jamey, eyes finally opening. He looked the rose over for a bit, scrutinizing it, before rolling neatly to his feet. "Well! Mission accomplished. Where do you want to be dropped off, Joran me lad?"

"Not so fast," Grace interrupted. "I have to sever it first."

"You cut it off its branch," said Joran. "How much more severed can you get?"

"Oh no," said Jamey.

"Oh yes," answered Grace, and raised the sonic screwdriver.

The air split with a shrill scream of rage, and all around them, the floating cliffs began to quiver and shake. The entire island seemed to flex, as if it were getting ready to do something truly awful, but the twins weren't staying around to find out, and Joran wasn't far behind. They ran back to the TARDIS as fast as they could.

No sooner had the doors shut than gravity dropped away. The TARDIS had been flung straight off the cliffs, but Jamey hadn't been fast enough at the controls, and now they were falling instead of flying. The wind whistled past, louder and louder, and within the depths of the TARDIS it sounded like crying.

"Hover mode, put it in hover mode!" Grace yelled at her brother, and he obligingly leapt for a lever, yanking on it hard. The feeling of being on a roller coaster abruptly stopped, and outside, there was nothing but silence. Grace glared at Jamey overtop the fragile Hasfarian rose. "What the hell was that?"

"Mistook the gyroscopic stabilizer for the automatic drift control," Jamey snapped, running back around to fiddle with something else.

"Automatic drift control," Grace repeated.

"Yeah. Automatic drift control."

Grace's expression was livid. "That would've been brilliant if we were in space, you nimrod! Did you even read the manual? You skimmed it, I bet."

"Oh, yeah, because you're so brilliant at piloting," he retorted, face growing red. "If I remember correctly, it was you who got us into this mess to begin with. Tinkering with the wiring, oh, that's a great idea, and then you go and fry the fast return switch as well. How long were we stranded on Teladrongo Three, again?"

"Don't be such a child," snapped Grace. "It was only a few weeks. Be glad I fixed it at all!"

"Time out," said Joran, and the twins turned together to glare at him. He stood his ground. "Someone needs to tell me what the hell just happened back there."

"The roses are neural extensions of the floating cliffs," said Grace. Her voice was calm, but her cheeks were still glowing with suppressed rage. "Like feelers. Really, really sensitive feelers. Severing the neural connection hurts a bit, like someone snapping you with a rubber band."

"It sounded like it hurt a little more than that," Joran said in disbelief.

"No, she's right," said Jamey. "It's just a twinge."

"But how do you know?"

Jamey's eyebrows came up. "Because Dad asked, of course."

"So what you're saying is," Joran said, "not only is a hunk of rock alive, but it has little flowers that are actually neural extensions, and you know this because your dad is a time traveler who can speak to rock."

"No, we know this because of the TARDIS's translation circuit, which translates any alien language into our native language," Grace corrected. "But everything else, pretty much, yeah."

"You're nuts," Joran told them.

Jamey grinned. "It has been said."

The TARDIS, Joran soon found, was a little more than a big control room: there were rooms, tons of them, linked by hallways and ladders and mirror-transports (which, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with actual mirror-transport technology, but was just a clever way of saying the door looked like a mirror until you went through; really it was a perception filter of a very ingenious kind). There were rooms for reading, rooms for dressing, and rooms for food, swimming, and target practice. He'd been very excited about the target practice room until he found that while there were indeed targets, the only allowable weapon inside was a rubber band. ("I'm quite good," said Jamey, to which Grace said, "But Uncle Tony is better.")

There were some rooms that were cordoned off, and some that could only be entered on Wednesdays, and so on until Joran was dizzy with it.

"It is rather daunting," Grace said to him, leading him back to the control room. "Dad's been talking about cutting out the dimensional control unit, to make it smaller, you know."

"Terrible idea," said Jamey. "I love the complexity."

"You love the sports pub," replied Grace, "and that would be the first to go."

They were heading for a space port, officially categorized as Subsection Theta, but known to its patrons as Sub-Nine, where Joran was hoping to catch a transport. There were freelancers who frequented Sub-Nine who might like the idea of having a former lieutenant of the corps, given the intensive training one had to undergo. He might even get paid.

Grace worked the navigational controls while Jamey engaged the engines, and a few moments later (Joran still couldn't get over that—time travel! In a box!) everything quieted. He went to the doors and pulled them open, a smile already on his face, but where the main street of Sub-Nine should be, there was only dust.

"Huh," said Jamey, right behind him. "I imagined it a little more—populated."

Joran walked out onto the asteroid's surface, boots making little puffs of interstellar dust rise into the generated air. He could still see the shields above his head, making the stars blur and warp but keeping in the air, which meant that somewhere there was a generator working. It wasn't a comforting thought, however. The generators were burrowed into the heart of the asteroid to protect against attack and were set to run on autopilot for centuries.

"Something's wrong," he said, and turned slowly in place. Sub-Nine was gone. Utterly gone. He stopped facing the TARDIS, which now boasted a grey, pocked-marked exterior, with two curious twin heads emerging from an awkward-shaped door. "Did you mess up the year again? Did we go too far?"

"We double-checked it," said Jamey. "It's the right year, mate. Sorry."

Joran shook his head stubbornly. "No. No. That would mean that an entire space port has been destroyed! How can that be? Look at it, it's just—gone! No rubble, no craters, nothing! That's impossible."

"Impossible is a four-letter word," said Grace. "There's no such thing. Now, look, I'm really sorry about your space port, but this flower won't last much longer. I have to get it to Mum before it withers. We'll just give you a ride after, yeah?"

"Are you daft?" said Jamey incredulously. "We can't take him home! We'll be grounded for a year! For ten years!"

"We can't leave him on an empty asteroid, either. Suck it up, brother."

The twins looked at one another, brown eyes having a conversation Joran wasn't privy to—it looked serious, as if they were debating just how dead they were about to be—but in the end, Jamey conceded the point and nodded. They all piled back into the TARDIS. Joran was last, lingering at the door, looking at the space port he had visited not even three months past. It had been a bright, cheerful place then, full of two things: astrolighting and alcohol. Perfect.

"Next stop, home," murmured Grace, to no one in particular, though Joran, who was gently closing the TARDIS's doors, had an idea that she was actually talking to the TARDIS itself. The engines kicked in, the TARDIS lurched, and away they went.

Joran stared into a pair of darkly livid brown eyes and felt, deep in the pit of his stomach, a violent kick of fear.

"I'm the Doctor," said a voice, normal enough, which seemed to belong to the eyes. Joran didn't know for sure because he still hadn't looked away. He felt as if he were staring down a cobra. "Move aside."

"Yessir," Joran said, automatically, and stepped neatly to the side. Jamey tumbled out first, pushed by his sister, who was bearing the sonic screwdriver jauntily in one pocket, the blue tip visible out the top. There was a woman, Joran realized, standing behind the Doctor; she was blond and had a sweet face, and she was smiling at Joran like they were sharing a joke, though he wasn't yet quite sure what the joke was.

"You stole the TARDIS," the Doctor growled. Joran clenched his hands to keep them from shaking. This fellow was alien—clearly alien—and powerful, as well, if his ship was such a brilliantly advanced piece of machinery. Joran didn't want to be anywhere near an alien of that caliber, much less a cranky one.

"Accidentally," said Jamey.

The Doctor scowled. The woman behind him had effected a stern frown, but every so often she'd look at Joran and a little twinkle would show up, as if on the inside, she was still smiling.

"It was dangerous," said the Doctor.

"Yeah," agreed Jamey.

They looked at one another, having another brown-eyed conversation, very like the one Jamey and Grace had had earlier. It ended with a mischievous smile creeping up the Doctor's lips. "But it was great, wasn't it?"

Weird. This family was weird.

"It was brilliant!" cried Grace, entering the conversation once the danger was past, which Joran felt was a strategically smart move on her part. "We went to Teladrongo Three, and a half dozen others—it took us a bit to learn how to steer properly—but eventually we got the hang of it. Guess where we went last, Mum?"

"Second to last," corrected Jamey.

"Guess where we went second-to-last, Mum?"

"Where did you go second-to-last, Gracie?"

Grace, with all the timing and precision of a magician, brought the rose out of nowhere and presented it to her mother. In the yellow sunlight drifting in from outside, the rose took on a spectacular, shifting hue, very much like the inside of the TARDIS; Joran thought it was far more beautiful on Earth than it ever was on Hasfar. The twins' mother gasped and took the rose, holding it as if it might fall to pieces.

"Look at that," she said. "It's my rose, Doctor!"

"Well done," said the Doctor, clearly impressed. And that was that. The TARDIS's doors were shut and they all (with Joran tagging along behind, unsure what else to do) went out of the garage and into the house. There was no talk of perpetual groundings or mass killings. Instead, besides some passing remarks on the beauty of the rose, all that was said was, "Tea, anyone?"

Joran thought they were all insane.

Their mother, as it happened, was named Rose, which brought new significance to their frantic search for the rose on Hasfar. The twins' grandmother was called Jackie, their grandfather was Pete, and the Smith family, when they weren't flying in the TARDIS, worked at a place called Torchwood. It wasn't just the parents, either; the twins worked there too, though as far as Joran could tell, they didn't do much. The TARDIS now looked like a police box, this wasn't Rose's or the Doctor's home dimension (how did that work?), and Smith wasn't actually their surname.

"Dad doesn't have a last name," Jamey informed him, working on his car, which he seemed to be outfitting with thrusters. "Or if he does, he hasn't told us. Smith is just an alias. But it's on the marriage license, so that's what we are. Smith."

"Is that a warp drive?" asked Joran.

"Oh, heavens no," said Jamey. "It's a spatial flux accelerator."

Joran's eyebrows drew steadily upward. "On a car?"

"It's not illegal or anything," Jamey protested.

Joran took in the elaborate wiring and welding job going on just to retrofit the spatial flux accelerator to the native engine, a little incredulous, and said, "Not yet."

"Don't tell Mum," said Jamey.

There was a very pressing need for bread ("Baguette! Why is there never baguette?" the Doctor howled) which necessitated a trip to the bakery, which was some distance from the house. It was decided that Grace would go, and that Joran would accompany her. Joran, quite frankly, just wanted to be rid of the lot of them, but no one seemed particularly inclined to give him a quick spin in the TARDIS.

"I don't want to go to some rubbish bakery," Joran said to Grace, nonetheless following her out to the sidewalk. "I want to find out what happened to the space port. Something that big just doesn't vanish out of the skies, Grace. Someone's behind this and I'm going to find out who."

"Oh," said Grace. "Careful there. That's cliché. We Smiths try to steer clear of clichés, unless they're particularly relevant."

"You're not even listening to me!" snapped Joran. He stopped in the street to glare at her. "There were thousands of people on that space port! Can't you even bring yourself to care?"

Something in her eyes changed, very slightly, but enough that suddenly she looked very much like her father. There was no smile on her face now, none at all, and her posture, before careless and blasé, was stiff and erect. "Listen to me very carefully," she said, in a voice that he would not have immediately recognized as Grace's if she hadn't been standing directly before him. "No one—and I mean no one—is going to go rushing out into the fray until my father's had a chance to look over the data we collected. That space port wasn't destroyed, it was transported, and there are precious few races in the universe who can manage a thing like that. That means this is big leagues, and you, my friend, are nothing even resembling big leagues."

Joran was aware that he should answer, but he couldn't seem to get his mouth to work. He thought—he wasn't sure—that he was afraid. Then she smiled, a great big lovely smile, and she looked like a teenager again. "Come on," she said cheerfully. "That baguette won't fetch itself."

It was a long walk to the bakery, and it gave Joran time to think. He put them all in order and came up with this:

One. The Smiths were, without a doubt, aliens. He didn't care what percentage of them was human or quasi-human blood, they are all of them aliens, even Rose.

Two. They knew more—much more—about the universe than he did.

Three. He was walking down the street in a tight-fitting uniform and none of the passersby seemed to even care. (Perhaps persistent exposure to the freasish Smiths had rendered them insensitive to things like space-corps uniforms.)

Four. The twins gave him the willies, just a bit, when they weren't making him feel stupid.

Five. Lastly but most importantly, the point that really stuck in his craw, the bit that twisted his gut and ruined his appetite, was this: he was, for the foreseeable future, stuck with the lot of them.

Wonderful.