A/N: So this is just a little one shot I wrote for a friend over on DeviantArt for Christmas, but I decided to upload it here as well. Hope you enjoy, and Merry Christmas! :D
A gentle humming rang through the living room of number eleven, Goose Lane. As it was Christmas Eve and therefore, for obvious reasons, unable to sleep, eight year old Jamie Hadrell had taken it upon himself to sit up and wait for Santa Clause to arrive. As he waited patiently in a chair by the long cold fire (for, as he had explained to his rather stressed father, he didn't want Santa to burn his bottom on his way down the chimney), he hummed one of the many Christmassy tunes he had heard over the last month in the lead up to the big day between mouthfuls of one of the cookies his mother had set out on the mantelpiece. Somewhere, in his eight year old mind, he figured that Santa wouldn't mind if he took just one of the many cookies that had been left out for the jolly do-gooder.
Once he had finished his cookie, he checked the clock. One minute to twelve. Excitement ignited in the little boy's chest as he brushed crumbs from the front of his pyjamas and stood up in front of the fireplace.
Thirty seconds. He braced himself for the appearance of his magical hero, practically bristling with a childish excitement.
Ten seconds. Slowly, Jamie closed his eyes and waited as the chimes began to ring, alerting him to the fact that Christmas day had begun. He waited. And waited. And waited.
Finally, frightened that the chimes of the clock on the mantel had stopped an awfully long time ago and he was yet to be in the presence of the man himself, Jamie opened his eyes and peered around to the smartly decorated tree by the bay window. Nothing.
The little boy's bottom lip began to tremble as his worst fear revealed itself. He frantically thought back over the past year in blind hope of remembering when he could possibly have been naughty enough for Santa to deem he be taken off the nice list. Of course, he had smashed the Jenkins' window playing cricket in the street with Tommy Watkins in the summer, but that had been an accident and they had apologised a million times since then. He had also upset Felicity Thompson at school by pretending to be a soldier at playtime, but he hadn't known that her daddy had been killed in Afghanistan two days before his tour was due to end, and when he had found out from Penny Jarvis in the year above he'd given Felicity one of his most special hugs to make her feel better. Could it have been one of these acts that had turned Santa against him?
Silent tears began to fall down the dejected child's face as, heartbroken, he turned away from the fireplace and began making his way back to bed. All he could think about was how disappointed his parents would be of him.
He was just about to switch the living room light off when, quite suddenly, there came a loud thump from the roof. Jamie froze. Could it really be him? Could he still have come even though he had upset Felicity and smashed the Jenkins' window? The little boy looked up, convinced he could hear what could only be described as muffled footsteps and a voice from above him. He grinned and turned back to the fireplace, waiting for the moment when-
"Arghhhhhhhhh!"
The little boy jumped with fear as he heard a scraping noise, a yell and then a muffled bang from outside his front door. Turning quickly away from the living room again and taking cautious, inquisitive steps into the hall, Jamie reached out and unlocked the door before pulling it open. He peered into the night and, as his eyes quickly adjusted to the dark, spotted something large and red lying, face first, in the blanket of fresh snow. The red lump moaned slightly before, as if realising he was laid in freezing cold snow, what Jamie realised was a young man wearing a comically large Santa suit sprang to his feet.
"Are you Santa?" the little boy asked unsurely. The young man with floppy brown hair and a silly shirt and bowtie poking out from under his Santa jacket certainly didn't look like any of the photos he'd seen of jolly old Saint Nick.
"Course I'm not Santa! Do I look like Santa?" the man asked, dusting himself off eccentrically before looking directly at Jamie. "Of course I don't look like Santa. I'm the Doctor- I look like the Doctor."
"You're wearing a Santa costume," Jamie argued, pointing to the man's red jacket, trousers and hat to prove his point.
The Doctor looked down at his attire. "So I am! But it isn't a costume- it's Santa's actual suit."
"Why are you wearing Santa's suit if you say you aren't Santa? Did you steal it from him?"
"No! Of course I didn't! Santa had a bit of an accident a few days ago- I told him that he shouldn't be snowboarding at his age, and certainly not on a tea tray, but he wouldn't listen to me- and now he's not fit enough to deliver all the presents, so I said I'd do it. He usually ends up having to borrow the Tardis for the last couple of countries because he runs out of time anyway, so it's not as if I'm not used to helping him out, but I didn't realise just how high rooftops can be. Or how slippery…"
Jamie stared at the man as he rambled on, not sure if he'd quite understood anything that he'd just been told. What was a Tardis? And why was Santa snowboarding on a tea tray when he should have been supervising the elves making presents?
"…Yours must have been the fifth roof I've fallen off in the last hour. It's a good job there's so much snow about or I could have really hurt myself. Thank God I flipped the gravitational balance switch, or the Tardis would have fallen off as well!" the man said, looking up towards the roof of Jamie's house.
Intrigued, the little boy padded through the snow to stand beside the stranger and followed his line of sight. Sat right on the top of his house, balancing perfectly as promised, was a blue box with the words "police box" written on it.
"How is it staying up there?" Jamie asked in wonder.
"I told you- gravitational balance switch! It fixes her to the nearest solid thing and keeps her there!"
"Like sticky tape?" the little boy asked, looking up at the Santa imposter.
The Doctor couldn't help but smile at the child's analogy. Only an eight year old could compare complex scientific theories to sticky tape. "Yeah; I suppose it is like sticky tape."
"What did you say your name was again?" Jamie asked, turning away from the blue box and back towards the man dressed in red.
"The Doctor," he replied, smiling. "And what's your name?"
"Jamie Hadrell."
"Nice to meet you, Jamie Hadrell." The Doctor held his hand out and the little boy shook it. "So, are you going to invite your honorary Santa inside or are we going to stand out here in the cold all night?"
"You'd better come inside. My mum says you can catch a cold if you stay in wet clothes for too long," the little boy reasoned, nodding towards the Doctor's snow covered front. "Come on."
With that, Jamie took the Doctor's hand and led him back inside, before closing the door again and pulling him into the living room. The Doctor laughed quietly at just how Christmassy the room was. A huge tree in the window covered in tinsel, baubles and fairy lights, stockings hung along the mantelpiece, Christmas cards resting on every surface available and pictures that could only have been drawn by the eight year old pinned all over the walls, wishing people a 'meri crismus'.
"You have a wonderful home," the Doctor commented, flicking one of the baubles on the tree and taking great pleasure in watching it sway backwards and forwards.
"Me and my mummy spent the whole day getting everything ready for Santa," Jamie replied as he began placing logs into the fireplace. "You're going to have to light the fire. Dad says only grownups can touch matches."
The boy held a box of matches out to the Doctor, who stared at them for a moment. "Oh, yes! Yes, I'm a grownup- I can most definitely do this…"
He took the matches from Jamie and bent down beside the fireplace, beginning to try (and fail) to light the fire. The eight year old studied him silently for a few moments, giggling slightly every time the Doctor snapped a match in half, before he spoke. "When I found you in my front garden, at first I thought you'd been sent by Santa to tell me that I hadn't been good enough to get any presents this year."
The Doctor turned round, having finally got a match to light and ignite the fire, and surveyed Jamie's sad expression. "Why? Have you been naughty this year?"
"Yes," the little boy replied truthfully, looking down in shame. "And I bet there's stuff that I've done that I can't even remember that was pretty bad, but I'm sure I would have said sorry for it. I don't mean to be bad- most of the time I don't understand I'm being bad until after I've been bad, and even then I always say sorry."
"Well," the Doctor murmured seriously, staring hard at the little boy for a few moments. "I'm sure Santa will have forgiven you if you said sorry for being bad and really meant it. Did you mean it?"
"Of course!" Jamie gasped, eyes lighting up at this new revelation.
"Well then, I'm sure he won't mind me giving you these…"
The Doctor reached into the pocket of Santa's jacket and from it pulled a huge sack that could only contain dozens of presents. He couldn't help but laugh as Jamie's eyes appeared to pop right out of his head.
"Are they all for me? How did you fit them all in your pocket?"
"In answer to your first question- yes, they are all for you. In answer to your second question- I modified the pockets to make them bigger on the inside. It's much easier than carrying a huge sack on your back all night, believe me."
"How did you make them bigger on the inside? Can you really do that?"
"Of course you can! I won't go into it though- it's wibbly wobbly and complicated and, if I'm being totally honest, I'm not totally sure how it works either…" The Doctor handed the sack of presents to Jamie and watched with a grin on his face as the little boy peered excitedly inside.
"I don't understand. You seem really smart and really silly at the same time. How does that work?" Jamie asked, looking up.
The Doctor chuckled. "Years of practice."
"Yeah, but you're not that old- not as old as my mum and dad anyway, and they're old. You can't have had that many years of practice."
"Nine hundred and twenty seven years old- I've had a fair few."
Jamie's head snapped up from his place on the floor by his presents, eyes wide in awe. "You can't be nine hundred and twenty seven! People don't live that long."
"They certainly don't, but I'm not people."
"Are you magic, like Santa?"
"Santa's not magic! What on earth would make you think-" The Doctor stopped himself as his eyes fell across the quickly saddening little boy. "-Yeah… I suppose I am."
It was Christmas- the Doctor didn't want to be responsible for creating another cynical, sorry excuse for a human being. If that meant telling a little white lie in order to keep a little boy happy, then that's what he'd do.
"Right then, I best be off! Plenty more houses to visit and all," the Doctor chirped, clapping his hands together and spinning across the room towards the hall.
"Wait!" Jamie called after him, racing to the mantelpiece. "These were for Santa, but seeing how he isn't here I suppose it's ok that you have them."
The little boy walked back over to the Doctor, balancing the plate of cookies in one hand and a large glass of milk in the other. The Doctor smiled gently as the boy held them out for him to take.
"Ah, brilliant! I can give them to the reindeers- they love cookies!"
"I'm not sure reindeers are supposed to eat cookies," Jamie replied, watching as the Doctor slipped the entire plate into his pocket, followed by the glass of milk.
"Neither am I, but they seem to like them!"
"Hang on," Jamie frowned, looking up at the strange man in front of him. "You arrived in the blue box thing. Where are the reindeers?"
"In the blue box thing! They told me that, just for one year, they'd like to travel without the reins. Thought it'd give them a nice break," the Doctor replied, leading the confused little boy back out into the snow again.
"How can they have told you that?"
"Because I speak reindeer," the Doctor said casually, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.
"Don't be silly, nobody speaks reindeer!"
"Well I do. And, funnily enough, so do reindeer."
They both looked up at the Tardis sat quite snugly on the roof of Jamie's house.
"Erm… right… Not quite sure how I'm going to get back up there to be honest. I don't think I thought this whole thing out properly before I started," the Doctor muttered, scratching the back of his head whilst trying to think of a plan. "You don't have a ladder, do you?"
"No," Jamie shook his head. "But you could try and climb through my bedroom window. I used to do it all the time-"
"-Brilliant!"
"-Before I fell and broke my leg."
"Oh… Well, what're the chances of my falling twice? Alright, quite high, but that doesn't really matter. I'm sure breaking your leg can't hurt that much… Come on!" the Doctor cried, pulling Jamie by the hand back into the house again.
The eight year old led the Doctor up the stairs and silently across the landing, before opening a door clearly labelled "Jamie". Inside was a child's (or in the Doctor's case, a man-child's) paradise. The room was covered in toys- model aeroplanes, action figures, storybooks and drawings everywhere.
"Wow!" the Doctor exclaimed, racing over to pick up a model replica of a Spitfire. "Do you know, I had a friend called Danny Boy who used one of these against a Dalek battle ship, and-"
"Be quiet!" Jamie hissed, walking to his window and sliding it open. "My mum and dad don't like it when I wake them up early on Christmas."
"Yeah, parents are rubbish like that, aren't they?" the Doctor whispered as he joined the little boy by the window and stuck his head out to see how easy it would be to shimmy up the drain pipe. "Alright, I think I could probably maybe climb up there without breaking my leg. Probably."
He pulled himself, face first, out to sit on the window ledge and reached towards the drainpipe to begin climbing.
"Doctor?"
"Yes, Jamie?" he asked, peering back to look at the boy staring at him through the window.
"What did you ask for this Christmas?"
The Doctor paused for a moment. "Well Jamie, when you're as old as me there's not really a lot that you could need."
"But you must have asked your family to get you something? My Nana says everybody has to have a present at Christmas."
"Erm… I'm sort of in the middle of hanging out of your window, Jamie. Why don't I come back next year and we can continue this conversation then?" the Doctor suggested, dodging the little boy's question wholeheartedly.
"You promise?" Jamie asked, eyes wide with excitement again. The Doctor nodded, becoming quickly out of breath from holding himself on the edge of the boy's window. "Ok. Just wait there for a minute."
"What?" the Doctor asked as the little boy backed away from his window. "Where are you going?"
"Here," Jamie said, walking back into sight a few moments later with the model Spitfire in his hand. "Everybody deserves a present at Christmas. Even Santa fakers."
The Doctor couldn't help but chuckle as the eight year old held his plane out of the window. He took it and quickly slipped it into his pocket.
"Thank you, Jamie. Merry Christmas," he said, beginning to climb up the drainpipe and back towards the Tardis.
"Merry Christmas, Doctor," the little boy called out into the night in reply.