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Chapter Text

Baking Cookies

There is perhaps nothing more comforting than the smell of warm cookies sitting in the kitchen while the wind whirls snow through the trees outside. The unmistakable scent of chocolate chips wafts through the air, filling the entire room with delicious, mouth watering temptation. Cookie dough drifts through the nostrils, right up to the brain where it creates memories of childhood you thought you’d lost years ago. It’s like a wrapped present sitting under the tree; it’s like a mug of hot cocoa with a few marshmallows thrown in; it’s like…

“Shit!”

Clara yanked the oven door open with a gloved hand, coughing as smoke filtered out uncontrollably. She wafted her reindeer-decorated mitten in front of her face and made out the bent and crooked cookie tray. On it sat her masterpieces: twelve balls that looked perfect to put in the bottom of a naughty kid’s stocking.

“Coal. That’s the best I can do is turn butter and eggs into coal.”

Just as she threw her mittens forcefully onto the counter, a whirring, groaning noise came from her bedroom. Clara shut her eyes.

“Come on, not now.”

A moment later, the door burst open. The Doctor bumbled into the cramped kitchen, wide eyes taking in the scene. The air was littered with smoke, which was now blowing out into the living room.

“Clara! Are you alright? What happened?”

The Doctor bent to her level, a hand on either side of her face as he stared into her eyes. His were filled with concern.

“Are you hurt? Come on, let’s get out of this smoke.”

He led her out of the room and onto her couch, where he practically compelled her to sit down. She’d be touched if she weren’t so embarrassed.

When the Doctor forced a glass of water into her hand, she finally had enough of his misplaced caretaking.

“Doctor, really,” she set the glass on the table. “I’m fine. I just burned some cookies. Very badly.”

“Oh,” the Doctor sat in a chair opposite her, twiddling his thumbs. His cheeks were blushing pink. “I thought…the TARDIS said there was smoke in your flat. I thought you were in trouble.”

Clara’s lips twitched into a smile. “Are you always keeping an eye on me?”

The Doctor met her eyes, but darted his away quickly. “Well it seems I have to, if you’re going to start fires baking cookies.”

Clara’s mouth fell open, but she closed it in a smirk without a reply. The smell of burning was taking over her flat, and the smoke was drifting far too close to the fire alarm.

“Now that you’re here, can you help me clean up? I think there’s some ash still in the oven.”

The Doctor jumped up and led the way into the kitchen. The scene was only slightly better than they’d left it. Now the smoke was clearing, the black cookies sitting in the oven were even easier to see. One of them was melting into the tray.

The Doctor put on Clara’s reindeer oven mitt and plopped the cookie tray into the sink. Clara ran turned the tap on and they watched the coal-like messes slide down into the pipes.

“Guess I’ll have to clean that later.”

The Doctor set the mitt back on the counter. “Wha happened?”

Clara threw her hands up. “I followed a recipe from online. It said to set the oven to 300° and bake them for ten minutes. I even checked them at eight minutes, but they were already burned.”

Clara pulled up her laptop and showed him with frustrated assurance that she was telling the truth. The Doctor inspected the website with the intense eye of someone inspecting something a sophisticated experiment or a page-turning book. Clara busied herself wiping down the counter as he scrolled down the page.

“What website is this?”

“Taste of home. My mum always bought those books when I was little.”

The Doctor straightened. “Taste of home. That’s an American company, yes?”

“Yeah,” Clara smiled. “We always had to pay a little extra for shipping, but she didn’t care.”

The Doctor blinked at her. “But...early twenty first century...what temperature system do they use? Is it still-”

“I’m an idiot!”

Clara covered her face with her hands. “Oh my God. What’s 300° fahrenheit in celsius?”

“About 149°.”

Clara dropped her hands to her sides. “It’s a miracle I didn’t set the whole bloody building on fire. I was just trying to make these stupid cookies for a Christmas party we have at school every year. Bollocked that up.”

The Doctor’s eyes lit up. “Clara, follow me.”

Clara sighed as the Doctor darted out of the kitchen. “Doctor, I’m not really in the mood right now…ugh; fine.”

She trailed after him, unable to suppress her curiosity. The Doctor had the TARDIS doors open already, half of his lanky body hidden behind the doorway. “When do you need those cookies?”

“Tomorrow morning. Is that doable?”

The Doctor froze halfway toward the Console, pivoted on one foot, and gave Clara an incredulous look. “Clara. Time machine.”

She shut her eyes and smiled. When she opened them again, he was hurrying down the steps to the underside of the TARDIS. “Have the kids been good this year?”

Clara followed him down the staircase. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?” the Doctor questioned, going to the TARDIS oven they’d cooked a turkey in one year.

Clara tilted her head. “Well, we’ve had a few pranks. Nothing like the popcorn fiasco of 2014, though.” She chuckled to herself. “You know, Danny kept finding kernels in his pockets for two months after that.”

Clara’s smile faded, and her eyes became slightly distant. The Doctor paused in his work, still holding open the TARDIS oven door, and swallowed heavily. “You must miss him.”

Clara nodded, and the allowed a watery smile to lift her features. “Only for five minutes a day, like I promised.”

The Doctor met her eyes and somehow she knew he perfectly understood her situation. She saw the same sadness in his eyes, though perhaps even deeper. How lonely he must be.

The Doctor cast his eyes back to the counter, where sat a perfectly cut batch of cookie dough balls on a tray. He glanced up at the ship above. “Thank you, dear. Now,” he put on his own oven mitt, this one decorated with stars and planets. “Let’s make this wonderful teacher a batch of cookies.”

Clara smiled, and watched the Doctor carefully place the tray in the oven. He set the timer and tossed down the mitt in one swift motion, then turned back to her.

“Ten minutes and they should be perfect.”

“Thank you so much, Doctor.”

He swatted away her thanks. “Is there anything else I can do for you? I can send up a robot to clean that kitchen of yours.”

Clara shook her head. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Maybe it’s the Christmas spirit. Took all of the grumpy Timelord-ness out for the season.”

Without warning, Clara wrapped her arms around his middle, resting her face on his shoulder. The Doctor hesitantly put his hands on her back with a furrowed brow.

“What’s all this?”

Clara closed her eyes, breathing in the scent of his clothes blending with the warm cookies in the oven. “I’m really glad you’re here, Doctor.”

The Doctor returned the hug more sincerely now, noting Clara’s pensive and grief-touched mood like a sixth sense. “I’ll always be there when you need me, Clara.”

Clara smiled, just as the timer on the oven went off. She knew somehow, without looking, that the cookies would be absolutely perfect.

Chapter Text

I’ll be home for Christmas

He’d promised. He’d sworn to her that he wouldn’t run off or join a boy band or whatever the hell he did when he wasn’t with her. He’d looked her in the eye and said that he was ‘definitely’ going to be at her house Christmas morning. ‘Before Santa Claus’, he’d said.

Clara punched in his number and listened to the endless ringing on the other side; that same doll tone she’d been listening to all morning. At first she had been ready to forgive him. But now that he still wasn’t even answering her calls, the fury of the five foot school teacher was beginning to surface.

“I don’t know if you’re on Mars or Jupiter or playing with Buddy Holly, but it’s Christmas, Doctor. Remember? Call me back as soon as you can.”

She exited the call and looked around the room. Her pretty, lit-up tree glowed a rainbow of colors onto her white slippers and nightgown. Beneath it sat the Doctor’s present, wrapped in blue with a white bow on top. It looked like a tiny TARDIS.

She smiled, but then remembered how furious she was with him and hurried to the kitchen to make herself another cup of tea. There, she forced herself not to call him for a sixth. If she were honest, she was getting just a little bit worried.

She cast this worry aside, however, as the kettle whistled and she poured a wonderful cup of tea for herself in her favorite mug. No Doctor or lack of a Doctor was going to mess up her Christmas morning.

…

The Doctor heard his phone go off for the fifth time and tried to make eye contact with the guard shoving him along the hallway.

“Would you mind if I get that? It’s probably important.”

The guard tightened his white-knuckle grip on the Doctor’s handcuffed arms. The Doctor grimaced. “This isn’t a very hospitable prison. I’ve seen much better. What do you have? 2 stars?”

The guard nodded to one of his cronies, who unlocked a cold metal door in front of them. The Doctor was dragged inside, scraping his boots across the floor the whole way. When they were a few feet inside the door, the lights suddenly switched on. The only things in the room were a chair and another guard. This one had a few lengthy pieces of rope.

The Doctor gulped, and felt his hearts skip a beat each. But externally, he smirked. “Now you’re just being boring.”

…

Just before supper time, Clara actually began to be worried. She paced back and forth, waiting, trying to somehow connect to the TARDIS. “Come on. Just tell me if he’s alright.”

She shut her eyes and imagined herself in the TARDIS. Walking around the Console. Running up the steps to grab a book from the Doctor’s library. For a second, she thought she heard the familiar groan. But when she opened her eyes, she realized it was just the wind.

Again, she pulled out her phone. Again she listened to the ringing.

…

As soon as the guards left, the Doctor began fidgeting in his chair. With his wrists and ankles bound to the stupid, unmovable object, it was difficult to move at all. Eventually he was able to squirm just enough to knock his sunglasses from inside his jacket pocket and onto his lap. The he shut his eyes and connected to them telepathically.

A ringing filled his ears. His eyebrows furrowed as he let the call come in.

On the other side of the phone, Clara’s jaw dropped in anticipation. “Doctor?”

“Hello.”

Clara let out a breath. “Doctor, where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you all morning.”

The Doctor looked around himself with a laugh. “Well, I guess I’m a bit tied up today.”

Clara steeled. “Next time, at least tell me when you’re not actually going to come.”

“Clara?”

“No, Doctor, don’t ‘Clara’ me. I cancelled all my other plans to spend the holiday with you, and now you’re too busy to even visit?”

“I’ll try to make it over later, but-”

“You’ve got a bloody time machine. Or what? Did Bogons steal it again?”

She wasn’t sure how angry she was with the Doctor about this exact situation, but suddenly all of her previous annoyances with him were rising up.

“I’ll see you after the holiday.”

Clara exited the call and tossed her phone on the couch. A second later, it started ringing again. She took a deep breath and then read the name ‘UNIT’ on the screen.

“Hello?”

“Clara, it’s the Doctor. He’s locked in a high security prison and we have to get him out. His life may be in danger.”

Clara shut her eyes. “I’ll meet you at the Tower.”

…

At eight O’clock on Christmas night, UNIT stormed the prison.

At nine O’clock, Kate located where the Doctor was being held on the prison computer system.

At nine-fifteen, Clara turned the clicking lock on the door, and entered the space with a mixture of bad feelings mostly composed of guilt.

The Doctor sat, tied up in a chair, with that same stupid smirk he wore when he was losing or, in rare circumstances, scared. His left cheek was covered in a purple bruise. Added to that was a trail of red running from his hairline to his right cheekbone, just next to his eye.

“Told you I was tied up.”

Clara rushed a step forward, and then stopped, unsure of how to respond, or what to do. “Doctor…”

Her voice was hardly above a whisper, but it stirred her forward until she was knelt in front of him, brushing a shaking thumb beside his bruised face. “Doctor, I’m so sorry.”

The Doctor smiled softly at her wide eyes. “Can you help me get out of these ropes?”

Clara stifled in a sob and got to work undoing the knots that held the Doctor to the chair. She could barely see the fibers through her teary eyes. Narrowly, she avoided the Doctor’s gaze. Her face was a bright shade of crimson, she was sure of it.

When his arms were free and Clara felt a little more in control of her voice, she spoke again. “God, Doctor, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize to either of us,” the Doctor slurred.

Clara threw him a quick, watery smile and moved to untying his ankles. Kate finally entered then, and dropped her usual objective manner as she hurried over to them.

“Doctor! We have a few medics, and a place at UNIT if you need it.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Kate looked him over carefully. “You should at least be looked at. Hell of a shined you have there.”

The Doctor raised a hand to his face, hissing as it made contact. Clara instantly touched his arm, but awkwardly drew back almost as suddenly. She cleared her throat and glanced back at the door.

“We should, er,” she shook her head. “We should get going. Celebrate Christmas while it lasts.”

She and Kate helped the Doctor to his feet and then out of the complex, sharing anxious glances as they went.

…

Just before midnight, Clara and the Doctor were sat on her sofa, the tree still lit up beautifully and Bing Crosby’s voice crooning into the room just loud enough to hear. Her head was leaned on his shoulder, her feet curled up beside her. A bag of frozen carrots hid half of his brooding expression.

Clara noticed, though. She always noticed, even without looking.

“I’m sorry, Doctor.”

He shook his head. “You have nothing to-”

“Shut up. Yes I do.” She turned up to him, her eyes glancing over the sutures on his forehead. “I shouldn’t have gotten so angry. I knew you had to have a good reason for not being here.”

The Doctor lowered the carrots to the table beside him. “I shouldn’t have tried to stop anything on my own. I was trying to protect you, but...I almost made it worse.”

“What do you mean?”

The Doctor bit his lip. In the pale Christmas lights it was hard to tell, but Clara could swear he had turned pinker.

“They, er, questioned me. They were trying to use me to get to you.”

“Me?”

The Doctor looked her over with heavy lids. “I don’t know who they are, but they knew you. I was bait. It was lucky that UNIT found out. If you’d come alone…”

He brushed her hair back with a tender thumb and forefinger. “I managed to make them pretty angry. Hence the bruises.”

Clara sighed. “What am I gonna do with you, Doctor?”

He quirked his lip into a smile. “I could ask you the same question, Clara Oswald.”

She smiled back, and then poked his arm. “Tell you what. Next year, no solving the world’s problems on Christmas. Just you and me and a dozen cookies.”

“Got it, boss.”