**Notes: Sorry, I meant to put this up earlier, but stuff came up. There's one more chapter to this little story before I do some tidying up of loose ends. I hope you like it... I'm really happy with how it all came out. Thank you everyone for the reviews and a HUGE thank you to my beta, Elensari who is just amazing for putting up with me because I have no patience whatsoever. **
Chapter Twenty-Four – Last Christmas: Part Three
Alex awoke slowly, in a warm embrace and a soft bed. Looking down, he saw Rose wrapped around him, deeply asleep. Why did she look like her first incarnation? No matter, this was lovely. They were in the spare bedroom at the Tyler mansion, where they often slept when they stayed over for special occasions. He hummed contentedly and rubbed his wife's back.
Suddenly, the door burst open and a bright eyed Tony Tyler raced into the room to jump onto the bed.
"Doctor! Rosie! Father Christmas has been here! There's lots and lots of prezzies downstairs and you just hafta come and see!" Tony shouted excitedly while bouncing on the end of the bed.
Rose opened bleary eyes towards her brother and smiled. "We'll be down in a few minutes, sweetheart. Could you go see if there's tea ready for us?" Rose asked, dismissing the preschooler while she woke up. She turned to look into the loving eyes of her husband and gave him a sweet kiss. "Merry Christmas, love."
Alex made a happy noise in the back of his throat and smiled. "Merry Christmas. This is perfect," he said as he fell back on his pillow and basked.
"We'd best get downstairs before Tony comes and jumps on us again," Rose said as she got out of bed and put on her dressing gown.
Alex turned on his side and leaned his head against his hand as he took in the gorgeous sight of a wonderfully pregnant Rose Tyler, grinning at him with her tongue sticking through her teeth at the corner of her mouth. He had missed that grin... wait, why would he have missed it? He shook that thought away and hopped out of bed himself to don his own dressing gown.
Hand in hand, they made their way down the sweeping staircase towards breakfast and presents. He heard Rose's voice calling to him and turned to look at her, "What was that, love?"
"I didn't say anything," she said and rushed ahead of him down the stairs.
He paused for a moment on the staircase as he heard the voice again. He was sure that it was Rose, but not THIS Rose. What? Why would there be another Rose? Looking back toward the landing he had just passed, there was a large, incongruous chalkboard against the wall. In large, capital letters were the words, "WAKE UP!"
Suddenly, he was furious with the idea that he needed to leave this place. He picked up the eraser on the ledge of the chalkboard and wiped the words away, only to see them instantly replaced by, "YOU." Wiping again and again, he saw "ARE" followed by "DYING!" He stepped back from the sight as fury raged with panic. He was then surrounded by chalkboards on all of the walls. They were covered with the words "WAKE UP!" and he crouched down on the floor, hugging his knees as he denied the potential truth of the message.
"Doctor?" Rose called up the staircase. "Come on, love. Tea's ready and banana pancakes!"
At the sound of his wife's voice, the Doctor slammed his eyes shut, wishing for his surroundings to return to the lovely normalcy of only a few minutes before. Peeking one eye open, he saw his wish had come true. He got up from the floor and looked around. All the chalkboards were gone. Alex took a deep breath and released all the tension that had been building in his shoulders. Placing his hands in the pockets of his dressing gown, he smiled and continued down the stairs to join his family, whistling happily to himself.
"Wake up!" Rose shouted desperately into Alex's ear as he lay on the floor with a Dream Crab wrapped around his head. "Please! Doctor! Please wake up!"
"We did try to waken the others. No stimulus worked," Ashley said sadly as she stood nearby.
"Ok, we kill it. We find a way to kill it and we get it off him. How do we kill it?" Evander said angrily.
"There's no way to kill it without killing your friend too. And as a scientist, may I just say, I don't like the way you're talking," Ashley argued.
"You don't have to like it! What you all fail to understand is that if he dies; we die. The three of us are telepathically connected to the point that if one of us dies, we all die. So you will excuse me if I care more about the lives of my spouses than that of the creature that is currently trying to dissolve my husband's brain!" He shouted, then stormed away while biting on the side of his fist.
Rose suddenly appeared at his side and touched his shoulder gently. "There has to be a way. Aren't we already dreaming, Doctor?" she asked quietly so as not to alarm the others more than they already were from his outburst.
Grasping her shoulders, Evander placed his forehead against hers and took a few calming breaths. "Yes, but we all need to wake up together and if he is in a deeper dream than we are, there won't be a way to pull him back out again. I need to get into his dream somehow and bring him back with me," he reasoned.
"Can you let one of them attack you and get yourself back out again?" Rose asked. "We're already in, how bad would it be to go further in if you are trying to fight your way back out again with him?"
"You are brilliant, darling," he said as her idea took root in his mind. He gave her a sweet kiss in reward. Then he spun away towards the others. "Santa! In the infirmary, you told the sleepers to go to bed, and they obeyed you."
"Sorry, doesn't mean I can get that creature off him," Santa replied, shaking his head sadly.
"But you can get back in there unharmed, huh?" the Doctor asked.
"What?! You're asking Santa for help? He doesn't exist!" Shona shouted incredulously.
"And how would you know that? How did you become an expert on what does and doesn't exist?" Evander asks her as he moves back to Alex's side to take his hand and check his pulses.
"I can commit several million housebreaks in one night, dressed in a red suit with jingle bells. So of course I can get back into the infirmary," the man in red replied.
"Good. Because there's only one way that I can communicate with Alex," the Doctor said as he looked at Rose and she nodded her agreement with the plan.
The doorbell to the Tyler mansion rang just as Alex was running past the front hallway, chasing Tony with water pistols firing between them.
"I'll get it!" Alex called.
Opening the front door, Evander was standing outside, looking nervous.
"Finally! Blimey, you were supposed to be here hours ago. You know you can't avoid Jackie forever, she's your mother-in-law too," Alex said over his shoulder as he headed back towards the front room, expecting him to follow.
"Alex!" Evander called before the other man could leave the hall.
Alex stopped mid-step, but didn't turn back around.
"It's not real. You KNOW that, Alex," he told him quietly.
"Merry Christmas," he said curtly and continued walking.
Evander followed him into the domestic scene. Jackie and Pete were sitting on the couch near a large, lavishly decorated tree. Tony, whom he had only seen in their memories, was playing on the floor in front of them with some toy dinosaurs. Finally, he looked over to where Alex had gone and saw their wife. Rose looked just as she had before the meta-crisis happened, with the small exception that she looked to be about eight months pregnant.
"Look who's finally made it!" Alex called to the room.
"Oh! There you are, sweetheart. We were expecting you last night," Jackie called as she approached Evander and tried to grab him for a hug and kiss. His hands were up in defence immediately and he was cringing as he ran to hide behind Alex and Rose.
"Goodness, why in the world is Jackie Tyler a part of your fantasy world?" Evander asked as Jackie waved her hand at him dismissively and went back to watch Tony play.
"You know perfectly well, why. Because Rose wants her here. Rose wants her family and I'm going to give it to her. Right, my love?" Alex said as he kissed her sweetly.
"It's NOT REAL, Alex. If we don't get out of here and you die, you KNOW that she will die too. So will I, is that what you want?" Evander asked angrily.
"Of course not," Alex said in shocked desperation as he clutched Rose closer to him and began to cry.
"I won't tell her that you want her back this way or that you wish she were pregnant," Evander whispered in sympathy before continuing in his usual, somewhat caustic tone. "The insecurity she would feel at that would be unbearable, but you've got to wake up, Alex," Evander demanded.
"Have we just killed him? Have we just made it worse?" Ashley asked worriedly.
"He thinks he can join the dream, get him out. Have a little faith," Santa replied.
"He WILL get him out. If there's one thing that I have faith in, it's that the Doctor can solve anything. With two of them, they are unstoppable," Rose said as she held the hands of both Doctors and tried to reach for them telepathically. They were buried too far in the dream for her to reach them and worried tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Alex, you know what is happening. You can feel that pain in your head that means the Dream Crabs are winning," Evander said, desperately wanting to get out of this dream.
"How long has it all been a dream? You said you saw Father Christmas before we even came back on the TARDIS. What if we don't find you in time in the real world? What if I'm still an unstable meta-crisis and I end up dying and dragging Rose down with me before we can fix any of it?" Alex cried with tears streaming down his face. "What if a dream of her being happy is the best way?"
"Best way for who, Alex? For you to have your brain dissolved and hers as well? If you die here, then all three of us die," Evander said, trying to talk some sense into him.
"You probably won't. There can't be a real bond formed if it was all in a dream. You probably don't even believe that we're real. If it all started before we came back, maybe you think we're just some fantasy that your own mind created as part of the dream," Alex argued as he turned to face Evander head on.
"You are forgetting one very important fact, Doctor," Evander said sharply as his icy, blue eyes stared into burning, brown ones.
"And what's that?" he asked with building determination as the Oncoming Storm raged in both men.
"If there is one thing that I believe in, I believe in HER," Evander replied.
On the floor of a science lab at the North Pole, Alex and Evander gasped and coughed violently as the large, blue Dream Crabs fell from their heads and began to writhe on the floor and collapsed into a pile of ashes beside each of them.
"Alex! Evander! Oh my god! Breathe! Please be alright!" Rose cried in panic and tried to comfort them both.
After a minute or two of wheezing and coughing, both Doctors managed to calm their racing hearts enough to turn and embrace Rose together as they enjoyed this small victory. They all knew there was more to come, but they were together and they were confident that they would fix this.
The scientists used some sort of scanner on the remains of the creature as they swept them off the floor and into a container to dispose of it.
"So these creatures, when their feeding goes wrong, they die?" Bellows asked.
"The carnivore's hazard. Food has teeth too," Evander replied. "Now, this is where I have to point out something very important. Alex? How's your head?"
"It's getting worse," he replied from his place wrapped in Rose's arms.
"Is it the ice cream pain? Just here? Cos I've got that," Shona said as she pointed to her right temple.
"It's the cold I think," Bellows said. "Some sort of reaction."
"But only on one side, just that spot there. Doesn't that strike you as odd?" Rose questioned her assurance.
Albert added, "Well, we've all got it."
"Ok, so why do we all have that pain?" Clara asked, tired of feeling left out.
"Theorize," Evander insisted. They would never believe him if he just told them what the problem was, they needed to see all of the clues come together for themselves. As much as he wanted to get Alex, Rose and Clara out of the dream as quickly as possible, he needed them all to believe that they were dreaming before they could wake themselves from it.
"It was there in my dream," Alex added to give them a start on figuring this out.
"Fine, but we weren't dreaming," Clara argued.
"Are you sure, Clara? Are you absolutely certain?" Rose asked calmly.
"I don't know about anybody else, but I'm pretty certain I'm awake right now," Bellows commented as she crossed her arms.
"Which is odd, when you think about it," Evander said, ready to point them to at least one moment where they must have entered one level of dreaming.
"Odd?" Ashley asked.
"Impossible, in fact. How can any of us be awake?" he challenged.
"I don't understand," Shona said worriedly.
"Remember how we all first met? In the infirmary?" Evander reminded them.
"Do you remember those creatures coming down from the ceiling and attacking us just before Father Christmas blew up the wall?" Alex added.
"We never stood a chance against that," Rose finished.
"Well, w... we were rescued," Shona said, nervously trying to deny that she could be dying at this very second.
"Yeah, we were rescued. And who was it that rescued us?" Evander asked with eyebrows raised.